Annual Review – What I did on 2017?


2017 was a great year for me, as all the years. Sharing here on how it went. Yes. It is too late to write this now. It is because of the few lifestyle changes I am following. Its is OK to do many things slowly and drop few things. Am I right?

Health :

I was trying to reduce my ongrowing tummy for years. in 2017, took some serious, series of efforts.

  • Joined Zumba Dance class on Sep 2017. It is a thrice in a week class. I attend 2 classes, atleast.
  • Bought a cycle on October 2017 and went to office in cycle. It was around 40 km per round trip. Cycled for 2 months, twice in a week.
  • Exercised for 10-15 min every day, mostly.

With all these efforts, my hip size came to 34 from 39. It is a great improvement. Thanks to “Dude Academy” and Master Kannadasan for inspiring.

Got fever 4 times. Those bad days reminded how bad my health is. It is time to eat good food, and siddha medicines which gave enormous immunity in my school/college days. started to have the medicines prepared by my dad.

Stopped drinking cool drinks, fried items like pizza, burger etc.

Family:

  • Viyan got into a nearby school. He is in LKG now.
  • He sent hand drawn Deepavali Wishes post cards to all our friends.
  • Nithya learnt karagam, Poikal Kuthirai dances. She is performing in various event. She wrote a ebook on Javascript. Released a video on Bigdata and Elasticsearch
  • Brother Arulalan joined at meteorology department as scientist in Noida.
  • Brother Suresh got a government job.

Office:

Office works made me keep on learning new things. Elasticsearch, Spark, Druid, Python3, AWS api are some great things I explored. Completed reading one book fully on the technology I start to work.

Travel:

  • Went to Vienna, Austria for a wikipedia hackathon. Met many interesting people and blogged the event happenings of Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.
  • Went to Yelagiri for Nithya’s karagam dance on a government function.
  • Went to Kothagiri for marriage of Nithya’s friend’s sister.
  • Went to Kerala with Office friends and their Family.
  • Went to Pondicherry and visited science center, bharathiyar house etc.
  • Went to Melmalaiyanur with family.
  • Went to Beaches few times in the early morning. Those are really great times.
  • Went to DakshanChitra many times for Nithya’s dance practises.
  • Went to Sriperumbuthur as Nithya danced for Sri Ramanujar’s 1000th birthday celebrations.
  • Went to Kumbakonam and nearby places with office friends.
  • Went to few resorts with office friends.

Foss Contributions:

  • IITM and SSN College of Engineering, released a good Tamil Text-to-Speech system. Met IITM team and learnt how to install in linux. Automated and released it here.
  • In Vienna wikipedia hackathon, enabled LinguaLibre to upload voice files to wikipedia commons.
  • Helped to released a telegram bot to translate strings collaboratively for the english strings in openstreetmaps to tamil.
  • Helped to released a “Send to kindle” option for the ebooks in FreeTamilEbooks.com
  • Got some interest on adding interesting places to OSM. Used cycle to roam around tambaram and added many places with the maps.me app.
  • Conducted 2 hackathons for ilugc. one for tamil computing and one for wikipedia.
  • Conducted 1 event for ebook making training.

Society:

  • Found a social team “Agaththi” in Tambaram. Participating on their market for organic formers.
  • Filed few RTI in YouRTI.in for the issues in Tambaram and got few resolved.

Writing:

Wrote 57 blog post in this blog and 6 posts in Tamil in my tamil blog. This is low. Will try to increase next year. Writing a book on Python in Tamil. Hope will release by next year. But I have read plenty of books this year. I love reading than writing. Lazy me.

Books Read:

Thanks to PacktPub’s One free ebook per day, Kindle Unlimited Plan and All authors of FreeTamilEbooks.com for providing tons of great books to read.

With the Kindle device, I enjoyed plenty of hours in continuous reading.

Award :

Got an award for the contributions on Tamil computing on 2016 from The Tamil Literary Garden, Canada. Received Rs. 50,000 as prize money. Working on creating an organization with this money to do more contributions with more volunteers. Will ask for donations soon.

LifeStyle:

Was living a simple, minimalistic lifestyle.
Quited TV, Facebook and smartphone two years ago. Still able to live without them. Prioritized the life in the order of Health, Family, Office, Personal growth, FOSS Contributions.

Thus, the year 2017 was so great. It gave me great lessons via bad experiences too. Those are opportunities for me to learn about people and world.

Hope you too had a great year. Hoping that 2018 will be even more exciting for all of us.

 

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Happy 4th birthday for FreeTamilEbooks.com


Happy Birthday

source : http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=172102&picture=happy-birthday

Today, our FreeTamilEbooks.com completes 4 years and enters into 5th year.

303 ebooks, 48 lakh downloads, thousands of readers, hundreds of writers, more new contributors are the wonders of the projects.

We are planning for 5th year, to bring more new ebooks, competition,prizes for writers, contributors, and new action plans etc.

Stay tuned for the announcements.

Thanks for being with us.

Share your thoughts in our discussion forum.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/freetamilebooksforum

 

 

 

 

Released 300 Ebooks at FreeTamilEbooks.com


Happy to release our 300th Ebook in Tamil Language at FreeTamilEbooks.com

For new readers, this is a portal to release DRM free Tamil Ebooks with Creative Commons license.

Read more about the project here – http://freetamilebooks.com/about-us/

It is around 4 years journey with the ebooks. Yes. We are completing 4 years next month. All these years gave great happy moments.

Tons of thanks for all writers, contributors and readers. With all your support only, we are going forward to provide even better services for Tamil Language.

Nothing is happier than to see the dreams come true. Thanks for seeing a big dream together and making it real.

 

Looking for a social media manager for FreeTamilEbooks.com


We are looking for a social media manager for FreeTamilEbooks.com

It is a voluntary task.

The roles are as below

  1. Publish the new ebook arrivals at mailing lists, facebook, google plus, whatsup, telegram groups
  2. Update the XML file https://github.com/kishorek/Free-Tamil-Ebooks/blob/master/booksdb.xml for new ebooks
  3. Monitor Social media and response to queries from readers
  4. Contact bloggers and writers to get new contents

If you are interested in volunteering for this, send an email to FreeTamilEbooksTeam@gmail.com

Join in our forum
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/freetamilebooksforum

and post your interest.

 

Celebrate 42 lakhs downloads of Free Tamil Ebooks with Us


4milliondownloads

On July 26, 2013, we started the FreeTamilEbooks.com Project, to create and share Tamil Ebooks in Creative Commons license. We release the ebooks in 4 formats, ePub, Mobi, A4 PDF and 6 inch PDF, so that we can read the books on any device like kindle, boko, nook, android, iOS, Desktop, Laptops etc.

Read more about he project here – http://freetamilebooks.com/about-us/

We added the download counters for each book. But wanted a full report on downloads count. Waited for three years. My wife, Nithya was learning Python programming. Gave this as assignment to get the report of all the books download count. She wrote a script, which crawls all the book pages, get the contents, search for the download counts, add in a report.

Here is the report –
http://freetamilebooks.com/htmlbooks/download-report.html

Here is the source code-
https://github.com/nithyadurai87/fte-ebooks-download-counter

With this report, we can see the most downloaded books on file type wise,and total wise.

Good. Found that there is a number for total download count too.

It says as  4228868 now. This is 42,28,868 i.e 42 lakhs, 4.2 million.

Wow. 🙂

Never thought that we will reach so many readers. This means there are good Tamil readers are there around the world, who are ready to read the good contents.

Tons of thanks for all the contributors, writers and readers for making this project as a useful one for the Tamil readers.

kindle-woman-reading

Thanks to the following communities, who are behind this project.

With all the technical and content support from all around the world, the project is growing well.

If you are interested in contributing to the project, join our forum and share your interest.

Join our forum here-
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/freetamilebooksforum

Image source-
https://theeventscalendar.com/celebrate-4-million-downloads-with-us/
http://cbdsports.com/

Minutes – ILUGC Feb 2017 meet


Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai community is meeting every month second saturday at Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras.

Yesterday, we had out feb 2017 meeting.

Ajay started with Various open source licenses available and explored their pros and cons. Explained how the Open Core business model is helping many companies to do their business by open sourcing the core of their software with releasing the other components as proprietary software.

See the slides here

http://slides.com/danatic/licensing#/

 

Then, Viswaprasath from Mozilla Tamilnadu community explained about Firefox’s new web extensions api. Now we can build cross browser extensions using simple HTML/JavaScript/CSS stack. No need to play around with XUL. He explained the architecture of a simple plugin he developed.

Few links to explore on this

http://thehackernews.com/2015/08/mozilla-firefox-web-extensions.html

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/09/lets_write_a_webextension/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Your_first_WebExtension

 

Then, Karthik from Mozilla Tamilnadu, explored webVR. Virtual reality using browser. Now with Three.js we can create 3d worlds that can be viewed on browser itself.

A-frame is a Javascript framework on top of threejs.

Few links

https://aframe.io/

https://aframe.io/docs/0.5.0/introduction/

https://aframe.io/aframe-presentation-kit/

Then, he explained how the mozilla Tamilnadu community is working to spread Free/Open Software on colleges and organizations.

Join the awesome community to learn and contribute for free software.

https://mozillatn.github.io/

https://www.facebook.com/MozillaTN

https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@mozillatnc

 

Then, I gave a lightning talk on few projects ideas to do. A firefox plugin to help proofreading tamil wikisource, flipboard alternate in tamil, epub cleaning for FreeTamilEbooks.com, Download report for wikisource ebooks, web application for OCR4WikiSource, Translating city/street names in Tamil for building maps in Tamil. Will write a new post with all the details of these project ideas.

Asked for contributors and ideas. Students from S.Joseph Institute of Tech accepted to help on these projects. We can have a hackathon to do these projects.

Reply here if you know any place to conduct a one day hackathon.

Finally, asked all to join in ILUGC mailing list at https://www.freelists.org/list/ilugc

Our meetings will end on the cafe nearby. old mohan, new mohan, yogesh, myself and other one(sorry dude, still trying to get your name) had great discussions at cafe on building Tamil Text to Speech engine, Advantages of go over python and a lot.

Returned to home by bus with Mohan, discussing various tech, social, academic, industry trends. Interacting with energetic young people makes me feel encouraged to learn new things always.

Thanks for all the speakers and participants for building a wonderful community for GNU/Linux. Let us hope to have more events like hackathon, FossConf etc, this year.

Few photos

https://goo.gl/photos/T3TSFw6vfcMFfwyN8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ebooks Making Workshop for FreeTamilEbooks.com – Notes


Today, we conducted a workshop on Ebooks making for FreeTamilEbooks.com

at Organic Sandhai, Kurinji Book House, 27/49, Chitlapakkam 2nd main road, tambaram sanitorium, Chennai 47

We sent out the invites via google groups and facebook event.

Registration count is 11. Lakshmi, Durai. Manikandan, Dhanasekar, Innamburan, Nandhagopal are the 5 participants turned out.

In the morning session, discussed about the following.
  • FreeTamilEbooks.com – Introduction
  • Creative Commons License – Introduction
  • Devices, Apps, Software to read ebooks
  • Epub, mobi, PDF, 6 inch PDF – File Formats
  • Using Pressbooks.com to create ebooks online
  • Using LibreOffice, Calibre, Sigil to create ebooks Offline
  • Creating Cover Images
  • Publishing Ebooks

 

In Afternoon session, create ebooks using LibreOffice, Calibre and Sigil.

Thanks for all the participants. Special Thanks to Venue, Lunch, Tea sponsor Saravanan Thyagarajan.

Few Snaps –
https://goo.gl/photos/hYmN2jwFX4Y5RXFE8

How to create Ebooks using LibreOffice, Calibre, Sigil  – Demo video in Tamil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CGGtgoiH-0

We invite you join help FreeTamilEbooks.com by  volunteering to create ebooks.

Contact Us at
FreeTamilEbooksTeam@gmail.com

Need help – HTML to PDF with Custom Fonts


We are looking for a solution to convert html pages to A4 pdf and B7 pdf for FreeTamilEbooks.com project.

Training authors to create ebooks themself using Pressbooks.com

They can export epub, mobi, xhtml from pressbooks.

Now, few volunteers are converting xhtml to PDF by printing from Firefox.

by changing the margin and printer settings in Firefox.

Many authors find that this is difficult.

Looking for a solution to automate the process of converting XHTML to A4 and B7 size PDFs so that we add a web interface, host in server, ask authors to upload epub or xhtml file to get PDF files as outputs.

We want to use custom TTF fonts for Tamil.
Ila Sundaram-10.TTF is the font we want to use.
Get this font from http://www.kaniyam.com/ila-sundaram-unicode-tamil-fonts/
Tried to set this font via CSS using @font-face.

But the PDFs are not using this font.

Explored wkhtmltopdf

It is not rendering B7 size properly and can not set custom font.

Looking for volunteers to explore the PhantomJS or wkhtmltopdf to generate PDF files from HTML with custom font.

reply here or contact me if you are interested to volunteer.

Thanks.

Few Ebooks on Free Software, GNU/Linux, MySQL, HTML5 in Tamil


“Nithya, Please stop seeing TV Serials. I can not tolerate them.”

I requested my wife.

“Hmm. OK. I will stop it. But, I have to do something useful on the saved time”. Nithya said.

“Good. Can you share your knowledge in Tamil? Can you write few articles for the e-magazine Kaniyam“?

“Will give a try”.

This is how she started to write on Tamil about the technologies, she is strong and the new stuff she is learning. Her articles are published in Kaniyam site in 3 years. Compiled them and released as Free Ebooks.

Here is the list of Ebooks written by Nithya.

Nithya

MySQL – Part 1

MySQL – part 2

GNU/Linux Part 1

GNU/Linux Part 2

HTML

 My friend Amachu a.k.a Ramadhas wrote a book on Free Software. It came as print edition 7 years ago.
Released it as a free Ebook.

Ramadhas

 

Free Software

All these books are released in Creative Commons License.
You can download, read and share with all.

Nithya completed a book on GNU/Linux administration. Now writing on CSS.
My friend Priya wrote on Ruby.
Mr. Kuppan wrote on OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

These books are under spell checking and proof reading.

Kathirvel is writing on PHP
Tamil on WordPress.
I am writing on Python

We will release them soon.

Thanks for Kaniyam.com team and FreeTamilEbooks.com team for bringing these ebooks and the awesome service for the Tamil readers.
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