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Weekly Notes 48 – 2024

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
5 December 2024 at 03:18

Christmas Lighting at Niagara

Few weeks ago, Niagara had its Christmas lighting started. Went there with friends. We went there in the evening. Niagara is one of the greatest natural beauty, which we can see a million times. Visited the Casino there. Got 10$ free card and played with few slot machines. Won 3$ and lost all 13$. Though it was a free money, it was tough to stop the game.

Then, visited the wonderful lighting. It was a very long walk, in dark roads, along with glittering lights on the road sides. Kids enjoyed much to see them all.

Few photos are here – https://shrini-clicks.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/#/collections/albums/2024-niagara-chrismas-lighting

Winter Celebration at Heart Comonos

Last Saturday, we had a grand event to celebrate the winter, organized by HeartComonos team. I volunteered a little amount for the event. We had nearly 2 months of preparation. All the volunteers made the event a memorable one. We had around 300 participants. The Bollywood dance team won all the attention. I had a makeover as ELF and was giving candy to all the kids there.

Few pics of the events are here – https://shrini-clicks.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/#/collections/albums/2024-welcoming-winter-2024

Daily IRC meetings for open source project mentoring

We are having daily meeting for open source project mentoring. Around 10 people are doing different projects. We are discussing many things like linux, Emacs, productivity, book reviews etc. Read the logs here – https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/kaniyam

2025 planning for kaniyam

Started a thread to plan the 2025 activities for Kaniyam Foundation. Write there what do you think on what we can do next year.

https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/topic/2723/2

Revamping FreeTamilEbooks.com

FreeTamilEbooks.com is with a very old theme for past 10+ years. We need the below changes.

  • Check for new theme
  • improve its SEO for search results.
  • Fix the send2kindle links
  • Fix the categories
  • Merge duplicate author names, categories
  • Fix the download stats
  • Get the detailed download report for all the books
  • have author page
  • have contributor page
  • remove email address on the book’s pages
  • add intro content to all books

Created an project idea issue for this here. https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/237

Ravishankar is the founding member of FreeTamilEbooks.com and a mentor for kaniyam. He started to work on these tasks. He gave a new theme and improved the SEO. Need more volunteers to work on other items. Let me know if you can spend few hours for FreeTamilEbooks.com

Winter / Snow started

Today, we got the very first snow fall of the year. It is mesmerizing to see all the green lands are turning into white. For 4 months, we will be in hibernate state. Have to plan many indoor events. I have tons of books to read, tasks to complete.

LLM dataset part 3 released

We are collecting large amount of Tamil text with shareable, open licensed content, for LLM and other research works. So far, collected 1.6 GB of text, from Tamil Wikipedia, FreeTamilEbooks, project madurai, tamilmunn publishers books, etc. Get the data from here – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

Read the blog posts on these here

part 1 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

part 2 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

part 3 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/11/23/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-3-thamizh_mann-books-project-madurai-wikisource/

Planning for scratch / python training for kids

Around Dec 25 to Jan 5, we will get winter break for schools. I am thinking of teaching python or scratch for kids in this break. Learning scratch for that. The graphics, the colors, drag/drop may be easy for kids. But it is tough for me as a terminal dweller. Yet to think and plan more on the training for kids. At least, I should teach the basics of programming and show a taste of making computers to obey our orders.

Weekly chess hours for kids

Started to teach chess for our condo kids. we conduct a weekly chess hour, to teach and play with other kids. Good to see that many kids know chess already and they all enjoy the game hours.

Moana 2

Watched Moana 2 yesterday. Viyan loved it. It is very difficult to being a part 2 movie as good as part 1. Moana team did a great job on this. Stunning graphics, good story line, nice music, heart melting songs make the move as a wonder. Don’t miss to watch it in theaters.

Books

completed – பேசத் தெரிந்த நிழல்கள் – sramakrishnan. Took it from a local library. It is a book full of review of world movies. Happy to read a physical tamil book apart from 1000s of miles.

In progress – Drupal, LLM, Digital Museums

100% savings on Thanksgiving Day

As usual, got 100% savings on Thanksgiving Day sales. Bought nothing. As we are following minimalism as much as possible, we feel that we have all the things required. I was thinking, if the name of the day is like “Genocide Memorial Day”, we won’t be rushing for shops to get offers and sales. They should rename the day to show the history.

Self-hosted social media – gotosocial

I am running a social media platform on my desktop, and interacting with the world using that. It is a software called ‘Gotosocial’. It is like twitter, but we can install on our own servers. The Fediverse activitypub protocol connects with other millions of such servers around the world.

Hosted it here https://social.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

Happy to see many Emacs, FOSS, Linux, Self hosting lovers are there to interact. Getting replies for all the questions I am asking there. It gives much happiness, to be with like-minded people, around the globe.

Weekly Notes 48 – 2024

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
5 December 2024 at 03:18

Christmas Lighting at Niagara

Few weeks ago, Niagara had its Christmas lighting started. Went there with friends. We went there in the evening. Niagara is one of the greatest natural beauty, which we can see a million times. Visited the Casino there. Got 10$ free card and played with few slot machines. Won 3$ and lost all 13$. Though it was a free money, it was tough to stop the game.

Then, visited the wonderful lighting. It was a very long walk, in dark roads, along with glittering lights on the road sides. Kids enjoyed much to see them all.

Few photos are here – https://shrini-clicks.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/#/collections/albums/2024-niagara-chrismas-lighting

Winter Celebration at Heart Comonos

Last Saturday, we had a grand event to celebrate the winter, organized by HeartComonos team. I volunteered a little amount for the event. We had nearly 2 months of preparation. All the volunteers made the event a memorable one. We had around 300 participants. The Bollywood dance team won all the attention. I had a makeover as ELF and was giving candy to all the kids there.

Few pics of the events are here – https://shrini-clicks.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/#/collections/albums/2024-welcoming-winter-2024

Daily IRC meetings for open source project mentoring

We are having daily meeting for open source project mentoring. Around 10 people are doing different projects. We are discussing many things like linux, Emacs, productivity, book reviews etc. Read the logs here – https://ircbot.comm-central.org:8080/kaniyam

2025 planning for kaniyam

Started a thread to plan the 2025 activities for Kaniyam Foundation. Write there what do you think on what we can do next year.

https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/topic/2723/2

Revamping FreeTamilEbooks.com

FreeTamilEbooks.com is with a very old theme for past 10+ years. We need the below changes.

  • Check for new theme
  • improve its SEO for search results.
  • Fix the send2kindle links
  • Fix the categories
  • Merge duplicate author names, categories
  • Fix the download stats
  • Get the detailed download report for all the books
  • have author page
  • have contributor page
  • remove email address on the book’s pages
  • add intro content to all books

Created an project idea issue for this here. https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/237

Ravishankar is the founding member of FreeTamilEbooks.com and a mentor for kaniyam. He started to work on these tasks. He gave a new theme and improved the SEO. Need more volunteers to work on other items. Let me know if you can spend few hours for FreeTamilEbooks.com

Winter / Snow started

Today, we got the very first snow fall of the year. It is mesmerizing to see all the green lands are turning into white. For 4 months, we will be in hibernate state. Have to plan many indoor events. I have tons of books to read, tasks to complete.

LLM dataset part 3 released

We are collecting large amount of Tamil text with shareable, open licensed content, for LLM and other research works. So far, collected 1.6 GB of text, from Tamil Wikipedia, FreeTamilEbooks, project madurai, tamilmunn publishers books, etc. Get the data from here – https://kaniyam.cloudns.nz/tamil_datasets/

Read the blog posts on these here

part 1 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

part 2 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

part 3 – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/11/23/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-3-thamizh_mann-books-project-madurai-wikisource/

Planning for scratch / python training for kids

Around Dec 25 to Jan 5, we will get winter break for schools. I am thinking of teaching python or scratch for kids in this break. Learning scratch for that. The graphics, the colors, drag/drop may be easy for kids. But it is tough for me as a terminal dweller. Yet to think and plan more on the training for kids. At least, I should teach the basics of programming and show a taste of making computers to obey our orders.

Weekly chess hours for kids

Started to teach chess for our condo kids. we conduct a weekly chess hour, to teach and play with other kids. Good to see that many kids know chess already and they all enjoy the game hours.

Moana 2

Watched Moana 2 yesterday. Viyan loved it. It is very difficult to being a part 2 movie as good as part 1. Moana team did a great job on this. Stunning graphics, good story line, nice music, heart melting songs make the move as a wonder. Don’t miss to watch it in theaters.

Books

completed – பேசத் தெரிந்த நிழல்கள் – sramakrishnan. Took it from a local library. It is a book full of review of world movies. Happy to read a physical tamil book apart from 1000s of miles.

In progress – Drupal, LLM, Digital Museums

100% savings on Thanksgiving Day

As usual, got 100% savings on Thanksgiving Day sales. Bought nothing. As we are following minimalism as much as possible, we feel that we have all the things required. I was thinking, if the name of the day is like “Genocide Memorial Day”, we won’t be rushing for shops to get offers and sales. They should rename the day to show the history.

Self-hosted social media – gotosocial

I am running a social media platform on my desktop, and interacting with the world using that. It is a software called ‘Gotosocial’. It is like twitter, but we can install on our own servers. The Fediverse activitypub protocol connects with other millions of such servers around the world.

Hosted it here https://social.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

Happy to see many Emacs, FOSS, Linux, Self hosting lovers are there to interact. Getting replies for all the questions I am asking there. It gives much happiness, to be with like-minded people, around the globe.

Weekly Notes 44 – 2024

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
5 November 2024 at 04:20

  • For the past few months, I was preparing for an English Exam called CELPIP. It is an exam to check the Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. Though we know English, preparing for an exam is an exhausting one. We took online training from “Galaxy Training Academy“. https://galaxytraining.in The coach “Jay Kumar” gave nice intro about exam pattern. He gave many mock tests and gave good feedback on how to improve, on each test. Last month, Nithya and I cleared the exam. It is a good feel to released from exam fear. Postponed many activities because of the exam preparation. Will roll out them all soon. If you are preparing for any English Exam, I suggest taking training and mock tests with “Galaxy Training Academy”.

    ——

  • In Canada, Daylight saving ended yesterday. This happens every year in fall season and referred as “Fallback”. The clocks are moved one hour back. This is to adjust the dark winter season. It seems like all in a sudden, we got one hour extra to sleep in morning. 🙂

    ——

  • On Oct 31, we had Deepavali, Halloween and our Marriage day. Deepavali day went with great remembering our childhood memories. The evening was filled with fun, as we went to neighbourhood houses, with friends and kids, to play “Trick or Treat”. Saw many weird, spooky decorated houses and people. Kids collected a bag full of chocolates. Last year, it was too cold. This year, the same day had a nice weather, to roam around in the evening.

    ——

  • On Nov 1, we celebrated Deepavali with firing crackers. Bought a few crackers, which emit light. Here, we don’t get loud-full crackers like atom bombs, 1000 piece fireworks shots etc. With limited available crackers, kids enjoyed firing them, with all their friends together.

    ——

  • On Nov 8, we are planning for a mega Deepavali event with around 250 people here. I am contributing on the planning/photography. Nithya and kids are practicing dance with their friends. Hope it will be a fun-filled evening.


    ——

  • On Nov 2, gave a talk on tolkappiyam Canada monthly meeting, about our efforts on writing python code for tamil grammar rules in Tolkappiyam book. It was a good meeting. Few of the participants accepted to collaborate. You can read our progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214


    ——

  • Few weeks ago, gave a talk on open-tamil python library, at Kanchi Linux Users Group ( KanchiLUG) meet. Video is here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtIrbvw2V-w


    ——

  • Kids started going to tamil school on every Saturday morning. This week, they received books. Viyan is good at Tamil and English. Iyal started to read Tamil and English. Paari is trying to learn writing.

    ——

  • We conduct daily meetings in a text based chat system called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). daily, 7-8 pm IST. Good to see many people are joining and discussing many things about open source software and mentoring to contribute to open source software. More details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/open-source-projects-mentoring-via-irc/

    ——

  • Practicing Manual mode in photography for few weeks. Feeling like learning linux and Emacs. It gives the most flexible options and results are stunning. It is better to learn it in early days, so that we can do more magics with lighting.


    ——


    The one thing I follow in photography is – shoot a lot, share a little. I keep and share only 10%. All others are deleted. Though it is hard to select the best photos, sharing only 10% is easy for viewers and brings a Wow from them.


    ——
  • Completed reading books in last week.
  • currently reading these books.

Weekly Notes 44 – 2024

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
5 November 2024 at 04:20

  • For the past few months, I was preparing for an English Exam called CELPIP. It is an exam to check the Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking. Though we know English, preparing for an exam is an exhausting one. We took online training from “Galaxy Training Academy“. https://galaxytraining.in The coach “Jay Kumar” gave nice intro about exam pattern. He gave many mock tests and gave good feedback on how to improve, on each test. Last month, Nithya and I cleared the exam. It is a good feel to released from exam fear. Postponed many activities because of the exam preparation. Will roll out them all soon. If you are preparing for any English Exam, I suggest taking training and mock tests with “Galaxy Training Academy”.

    ——

  • In Canada, Daylight saving ended yesterday. This happens every year in fall season and referred as “Fallback”. The clocks are moved one hour back. This is to adjust the dark winter season. It seems like all in a sudden, we got one hour extra to sleep in morning. 🙂

    ——

  • On Oct 31, we had Deepavali, Halloween and our Marriage day. Deepavali day went with great remembering our childhood memories. The evening was filled with fun, as we went to neighbourhood houses, with friends and kids, to play “Trick or Treat”. Saw many weird, spooky decorated houses and people. Kids collected a bag full of chocolates. Last year, it was too cold. This year, the same day had a nice weather, to roam around in the evening.

    ——

  • On Nov 1, we celebrated Deepavali with firing crackers. Bought a few crackers, which emit light. Here, we don’t get loud-full crackers like atom bombs, 1000 piece fireworks shots etc. With limited available crackers, kids enjoyed firing them, with all their friends together.

    ——

  • On Nov 8, we are planning for a mega Deepavali event with around 250 people here. I am contributing on the planning/photography. Nithya and kids are practicing dance with their friends. Hope it will be a fun-filled evening.


    ——

  • On Nov 2, gave a talk on tolkappiyam Canada monthly meeting, about our efforts on writing python code for tamil grammar rules in Tolkappiyam book. It was a good meeting. Few of the participants accepted to collaborate. You can read our progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214


    ——

  • Few weeks ago, gave a talk on open-tamil python library, at Kanchi Linux Users Group ( KanchiLUG) meet. Video is here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtIrbvw2V-w


    ——

  • Kids started going to tamil school on every Saturday morning. This week, they received books. Viyan is good at Tamil and English. Iyal started to read Tamil and English. Paari is trying to learn writing.

    ——

  • We conduct daily meetings in a text based chat system called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). daily, 7-8 pm IST. Good to see many people are joining and discussing many things about open source software and mentoring to contribute to open source software. More details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/open-source-projects-mentoring-via-irc/

    ——

  • Practicing Manual mode in photography for few weeks. Feeling like learning linux and Emacs. It gives the most flexible options and results are stunning. It is better to learn it in early days, so that we can do more magics with lighting.


    ——


    The one thing I follow in photography is – shoot a lot, share a little. I keep and share only 10%. All others are deleted. Though it is hard to select the best photos, sharing only 10% is easy for viewers and brings a Wow from them.


    ——
  • Completed reading books in last week.
  • currently reading these books.

Weekly Notes 38 – 2024

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
16 September 2024 at 02:33

Busy Summer

I missed writing weekly notes for last few months. Just capturing few memorable activities in past few months.

We had a super busy summer in Canada. All the weekends were filled with some event/gathering/viewing places etc. High Park, Harbour Front, Toronto Zoo, Wonderland, Royal Ontario Museum, Canada Exhibition at Toronto, Central Island, few libraries, few book release events, literature meetups are the key places we visited. There were tons of fun events for kids and adults. Mississauga government conducted free play based activities for entire summer. We sent our kids there on all weekdays. It helped a lot to make the kids busy in summer.

Finally, school started for kids last week. Kids are going to new school, this year, as we moved to a new house. Here, schools are allocated based on the living address. We moved to the next street, just some 800m away. Still have to goto another school. Slowly, kids started to go along with the new school.

Tolkappiyam Conference

Tolkappiyam is one of the oldest grammar rule book for Tamil language. it was from several centuries ago. The beauty of the Tamil language is still those old rules are followed mostly. This book is being read, interpreted, understood, explained, practised generations by generations, in all the countries where Tamil people live.

In Canada, we have a conference on Tolkappiyam, next weekend. https://www.tolkappiyam.ca/

I am volunteering on the conference days. Along with Prof. Sathyaraj, presenting a research paper too.

Writing python code for Tolkappiyam grammar rules

Prof. Sathyaraj, Boopalan, kamalakannan, Parameswar, myself and few more people meet every Saturday. We discuss the rules and write them as python code. In a year or so, we hope that we can build a better open source grammar rule engine for tamil in Python.

Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214

Code – https://gitlab.com/boopalan-dev/tamilrulepy

A Tamil professor (Sathyaraj), A math student (Boopalan), An Instrumentation Engineer ( hehe. its me ), A mechanical Engineer(Parameswar) are contributing to Tamil grammar rules in Python is the awesome moments in my life.

After our recent python classes, Tamil professor Sathyaraj writes good code and validates our code quickly.

New website – Kalaignar.freetamilebooks.com

Recently, Tamilnadu government release all the works of former CM Kalaignar Karunanithi, in Public Domain License. It was a long time ask for many readers. Thanks to Tamilnadu government for such great decision. On this year death anniversary, 7 August 2024, we collected few of his books in PDF format and published as a separate website for quick access. Check here https://kalaignar.freetamilebooks.com Completed converting them all to text using automated google OCR ( Thanks to python ).

Sent few books in text format to a publisher for proofreading. Soon, we will get them as print and free ebook in epub, mobi formats too.

Python course completion

We conducted a 2-month online free python course in Tamil. My friend Syed Jafer handled the classes. It was a weekly 3-hour training. Python is a crowd puller. We got some 3500 members in 3 whatsapp groups. 1000+ joined for initial classes. Around 50 people completed the course successfully. Many participants wrote good blogs. We can read all their blogs here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

Thanks to Syed for the good classes, Asokan and TalentSprint.com for donating Zoom, and all participants for great enthusiasm. Read my closing notes here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/closing-notes-on-2-months-online-python-course/

Contributions from python class students

Many students started doing good projects. Scrapping, Tamil NLP, and more. We have good project ideas to contribute here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues

Happy to see the students pick some real projects and start contributing to them.

Explore ML – mini crash course

At the Python course, many asked questions on ML. Wanted to give some intro about ML. My friend Dr.Tamilarasan came forward to give some quick intro on ML. It was a 3 day ( 5 hours ) discussion exploring the basics of ML.

Thanks to Dr.Tamilarasan and participants for the nice discussions.

Docker course started

Syed started his next free course. This time the topic is Docker. Get more details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/09/15/free-online-training-on-docker-in-tamil/

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at Chennai

Many FOSS communities jointly celebrate Software Freedom Day in Chennai on Sep 21 2024. If you are in Chennai, buy a ticket here – https://fossunited.org/events/sfd Don’t miss meeting awesome people in Chennai.

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at Karaikudi

Kaniyam Foundation team is celebrating software freedom day in Karaikudi. Will share more details soon.

With all friends from free software communities, I always feel like having 100 heads and 200 hands. We all are dreaming same thing at same time and implement all our dreams together. Thanks to all free/open source contributors. You all make the world a better place to live.

Heartcomonos planning meet

HeartComonons is a Non Profit Social organization in my area in Mississauga, Canada. We attend/volunteer for their events as family. Last week, we had a planning meet for next 3 year goals. The brainstorming session was good. Learned many things on how to think as an organization.

Manual Mode in Photography

I was hesitant to learn Linux for many years. Postponed learning Emacs for around 15 years. But, living with Linux for past 20 years and with Emacs for past 3 years. Similarly, I was too lazy to learn Manual Mode in Camera for many years. I just Don’t wanted to miss any good moments, while changing the options in Camera. But, recently, started to play with it. Oh, Man!. It can do magics with the lighting. We can get better outputs, if we can control what goes into the camera with all the manual mode options. I have a huge pile of photos, waiting to upload in Wikimedia commons, so that anyone can use them freely. Keeping this for winter days.

My podcast with MalaiKannan

Recenly, I had a detailed discussion with MalaiKannan, CTO, Saama Technologies, on Free/Open Source Software, Tamil, NLP, Linux Users Groups etc. If you have time to kill for around 2 hours, see it here on “Malai Talks” youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw So happy to revisit my life and share with all. Thanks to Malai for the nice questions and patience on asking.

PhD in Family

My brother Arulalan, completed his PhD IIT Delhi. It was a very long path for him with tons of sacrifices. All the efforts are worth as he is the first PhD in our family. I think he is first in our street, in our generation. May many get inspired from his works and get more PhD researchers.

He works for India Meteorological Department 

Hoping to see him on TV shows and news explaining weather situations soon. Please give more leaves.

TNPSC Group 2A in Family

My another brother Suresh, got selected in TNPSC group 2A. Already he is a group 4 employee. On his efforts to get into good roles, he puts tons of efforts on exams. Hoping to see him even great roles soon and to train many people to get into govt jobs.

Weekly Notes 38 – 2024

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
16 September 2024 at 02:33

Busy Summer

I missed writing weekly notes for last few months. Just capturing few memorable activities in past few months.

We had a super busy summer in Canada. All the weekends were filled with some event/gathering/viewing places etc. High Park, Harbour Front, Toronto Zoo, Wonderland, Royal Ontario Museum, Canada Exhibition at Toronto, Central Island, few libraries, few book release events, literature meetups are the key places we visited. There were tons of fun events for kids and adults. Mississauga government conducted free play based activities for entire summer. We sent our kids there on all weekdays. It helped a lot to make the kids busy in summer.

Finally, school started for kids last week. Kids are going to new school, this year, as we moved to a new house. Here, schools are allocated based on the living address. We moved to the next street, just some 800m away. Still have to goto another school. Slowly, kids started to go along with the new school.

Tolkappiyam Conference

Tolkappiyam is one of the oldest grammar rule book for Tamil language. it was from several centuries ago. The beauty of the Tamil language is still those old rules are followed mostly. This book is being read, interpreted, understood, explained, practised generations by generations, in all the countries where Tamil people live.

In Canada, we have a conference on Tolkappiyam, next weekend. https://www.tolkappiyam.ca/

I am volunteering on the conference days. Along with Prof. Sathyaraj, presenting a research paper too.

Writing python code for Tolkappiyam grammar rules

Prof. Sathyaraj, Boopalan, kamalakannan, Parameswar, myself and few more people meet every Saturday. We discuss the rules and write them as python code. In a year or so, we hope that we can build a better open source grammar rule engine for tamil in Python.

Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214

Code – https://gitlab.com/boopalan-dev/tamilrulepy

A Tamil professor (Sathyaraj), A math student (Boopalan), An Instrumentation Engineer ( hehe. its me ), A mechanical Engineer(Parameswar) are contributing to Tamil grammar rules in Python is the awesome moments in my life.

After our recent python classes, Tamil professor Sathyaraj writes good code and validates our code quickly.

New website – Kalaignar.freetamilebooks.com

Recently, Tamilnadu government release all the works of former CM Kalaignar Karunanithi, in Public Domain License. It was a long time ask for many readers. Thanks to Tamilnadu government for such great decision. On this year death anniversary, 7 August 2024, we collected few of his books in PDF format and published as a separate website for quick access. Check here https://kalaignar.freetamilebooks.com Completed converting them all to text using automated google OCR ( Thanks to python ).

Sent few books in text format to a publisher for proofreading. Soon, we will get them as print and free ebook in epub, mobi formats too.

Python course completion

We conducted a 2-month online free python course in Tamil. My friend Syed Jafer handled the classes. It was a weekly 3-hour training. Python is a crowd puller. We got some 3500 members in 3 whatsapp groups. 1000+ joined for initial classes. Around 50 people completed the course successfully. Many participants wrote good blogs. We can read all their blogs here – https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/

Thanks to Syed for the good classes, Asokan and TalentSprint.com for donating Zoom, and all participants for great enthusiasm. Read my closing notes here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/closing-notes-on-2-months-online-python-course/

Contributions from python class students

Many students started doing good projects. Scrapping, Tamil NLP, and more. We have good project ideas to contribute here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues

Happy to see the students pick some real projects and start contributing to them.

Explore ML – mini crash course

At the Python course, many asked questions on ML. Wanted to give some intro about ML. My friend Dr.Tamilarasan came forward to give some quick intro on ML. It was a 3 day ( 5 hours ) discussion exploring the basics of ML.

Thanks to Dr.Tamilarasan and participants for the nice discussions.

Docker course started

Syed started his next free course. This time the topic is Docker. Get more details here – https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/09/15/free-online-training-on-docker-in-tamil/

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at Chennai

Many FOSS communities jointly celebrate Software Freedom Day in Chennai on Sep 21 2024. If you are in Chennai, buy a ticket here – https://fossunited.org/events/sfd Don’t miss meeting awesome people in Chennai.

Software Freedom Day Celebrations at Karaikudi

Kaniyam Foundation team is celebrating software freedom day in Karaikudi. Will share more details soon.

With all friends from free software communities, I always feel like having 100 heads and 200 hands. We all are dreaming same thing at same time and implement all our dreams together. Thanks to all free/open source contributors. You all make the world a better place to live.

Heartcomonos planning meet

HeartComonons is a Non Profit Social organization in my area in Mississauga, Canada. We attend/volunteer for their events as family. Last week, we had a planning meet for next 3 year goals. The brainstorming session was good. Learned many things on how to think as an organization.

Manual Mode in Photography

I was hesitant to learn Linux for many years. Postponed learning Emacs for around 15 years. But, living with Linux for past 20 years and with Emacs for past 3 years. Similarly, I was too lazy to learn Manual Mode in Camera for many years. I just Don’t wanted to miss any good moments, while changing the options in Camera. But, recently, started to play with it. Oh, Man!. It can do magics with the lighting. We can get better outputs, if we can control what goes into the camera with all the manual mode options. I have a huge pile of photos, waiting to upload in Wikimedia commons, so that anyone can use them freely. Keeping this for winter days.

My podcast with MalaiKannan

Recenly, I had a detailed discussion with MalaiKannan, CTO, Saama Technologies, on Free/Open Source Software, Tamil, NLP, Linux Users Groups etc. If you have time to kill for around 2 hours, see it here on “Malai Talks” youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw So happy to revisit my life and share with all. Thanks to Malai for the nice questions and patience on asking.

PhD in Family

My brother Arulalan, completed his PhD IIT Delhi. It was a very long path for him with tons of sacrifices. All the efforts are worth as he is the first PhD in our family. I think he is first in our street, in our generation. May many get inspired from his works and get more PhD researchers.

He works for India Meteorological Department 

Hoping to see him on TV shows and news explaining weather situations soon. Please give more leaves.

TNPSC Group 2A in Family

My another brother Suresh, got selected in TNPSC group 2A. Already he is a group 4 employee. On his efforts to get into good roles, he puts tons of efforts on exams. Hoping to see him even great roles soon and to train many people to get into govt jobs.

Weekly Notes 28 2024

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
11 July 2024 at 20:40

Hello Reader,

Last week went with a grant beginning of online Python Training, Salsa Dance event and a visit to Toronto Zoo.

  • We announced a free python course in Tamil at https://kaniyam.com/python-course-2024/ It went viral somehow. Created a whatsapp group for participants. within a day 1024 members joined and its limit was reached. Went with second and third whatsapp group. Thanks for Writer NChokkan and other who shared the news about the class.
  • We explored on what online platform to use to hold 1000+ participants. Meet.jit.is is my favorite as it is Free/OpenSource. But, we need huge infra to self host. There was no time to experiment on that. MS Teams is cheapest. But, Wanted to be away from it. Explored Google Meet. Finally Zoom wins with its Webinar mode, which can hold 1000+ people.
  • Mr. Asokan from TalentSprint.com, the one who introduced Python in ilugc meets around 2005, donated the zoom service for the training.
  • On the first day, we got 550+ participants. So happy to address to such huge audience.
  • Thanks to the trainer Syed Jafer, TalentSprint.com and the participants for making a massive event.
  • On the whatsapp groups, people started to post “hi, hello, good morning, I am ABC from XYZ” etc. Muted the group and made them as announcement only groups.
  • Asked all the participants to create a blog account at https://dev.to and started to aggregate all their blogs at my FreshRSS running on my desktop in my home. Read ll their writings at https://blogs.kaniyam.cloudns.nz/ Reading their blogs is really interesting. 76 students provided their blogs so far. Will continue asking them to write blogs daily.
  • Its a mixed crowd. Electrical/Mechanical/Home making/Baking/PhD Scholars/Designers/Students are attending. Hope ‘A byte of python’ will change their life.
  • Asokan explained to me and syed on how to train beginners. Got many insights on the training side.
  • Last week, had a discussion with MalaiKannan on Linux, Linux Users Groups, Kaniyam, Tamil Computing, Ebooks, ML/AI etc. Today he published the talk on his youtube channel “Malai Talks” . See it here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLzQTdMK2mw Shhh. It is a 2 hrs talk. Get prepared to hear long stories.
  • Sivaprabu, a friend from ilugc, shared a small clip of him seeing the talk on big TV. So happy 🙂
  • Last Saturday was fun with Salsa Dance Festival 2024 at Toronto. Visited a local library there, as went earlier. Then, danced with Nithya and kids along with 1000s of people. See here for a glimpses of the festival – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTIuHji1qYU&t=1582s ( Got it online )

See you all in next weekly notes. if you are writing blogs, reply here. Will follow and read them. Blogs and RSS feeds are best alternate to the social media platforms filled with advertisements and random paid contents.

Weekly Notes 27 2024

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
4 July 2024 at 01:16

Last week was an event full week.

  • Last Thursday, at Heartcomonos,we had a potluck and drumming Jam. Went with friends, Nithya and kids. Good to see around 40 people. Few people came from Ukraine and other countries. Happy to see that heartcomonos is connecting local people, provides a friendly environment for all who miss the back home friends and relatives. The Drumming Jam was mesmerizing. Imagine 40 people are hitting hand drum with same rhythm. It induced the interesting learning drum. But, I remembered all the pending planned activities and a sleeping keyboard. In few months, I have to complete all the planned works and then only can explore the musical keyboard at home.
  • Took few photos and videos of the event. With Darktable, I can mass edit, apply filters to all the photos. But video editing was always a nightmare for me. After exploring OpenShot, ShotCut, found that KDEnlive is an excellent tool for video editing. Though it asks efforts to learn it, the time and efforts are worth. we can all the video magics with it. Edited few event videos with kdenlive.
  • Found good tamil video tutorials – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQ_RnSTkSg&list=PLhPOYM1ZXzOFPb-tvIGxpykG4jicBnitI

    Thanks to Prasanna for making wonderful tutorial. Thanks for your beautiful cover images for FreeTamilEbooks.com too.

    With good tools and methods, we can really do things quickly. Started to like Kdenlive after Emacs. Feeling like Emacs is for text and Kdenlive is for Videos.

  • Visited BAPS Swami narayana temple in Etobicoke. It has stunning architecture. Kids are seeing many gods for the first time. We discussed about various religions, faiths and rituals. They more they ask questions, the more I say as they are just stories.
  • When Nithya went to the show, Myself and kids watched his show “Alex in Wonderland” in Amazon Prime. Don’t miss the show if you like Tamil movies and songs. Many songs and singers were spoken in the show. Watched those songs along with the kids. Kids wondered on Karnan Sivaji, Muthu Rajini etc. Demonstrated how ARR started new wave in tamil music, with different songs. We placed a water bottle on top of the woofer. As the songs go, the bottle started to move and fell down. Discussed few basic science behind it.
  • Last Monday, celebrated Canada day with a day out and fireworks at night.
  • Yesterday, Spoke at a podcast about kaniyam, LUGs, Saama and other activities. It will be released after editing soon.
  • Wrote code to find the unused kubernetes deployments by the loadbalancer’s request count and mapping with the Route53 entries. Programming is the best drug to be immersed, next to reading books.
  • Playing with airflow on kubernetes for its performance fine tuning.

Interesting weeks are ahead. Will share more news as they happen. Do you write blogs? Reply here with your blog URL. I will follow them.

I feel like reading blogs are more peaceful than any other social media.

Weekly Notes – after long time

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
26 June 2024 at 13:52

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss to document them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are few notes from my daily journal.

  • Gave an online talk on “Daily life at a IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

    See the video in Tamil here – https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

  • Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science collge, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Reent trends on IT”.
  • Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
  • I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
  • Visited High park, toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
  • Summer is here finally. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
  • Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become athests naturally.
  • Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
  • with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
  • Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen the politicians and local issues here.

  • Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

    https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/ https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

  • Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
  • Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
  • Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to wikipedia commons.
  • Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurrassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
  • Last weekend with with kids to a indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
  • From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at library mostly.

Weekly Notes – after a long time

✇Shrini
By: tshrinivasan
26 June 2024 at 13:52

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading this blog and encouraging me to write more. It has been a while since my last weekly notes. Sometimes, life so eventful that I miss documenting them.

For past few months, I am super busy with work, reading, summer and more.

Here are a few notes from my daily journal.

  • Gave an online talk on “Daily life at an IT company” in Tamil. Spoke about various departments, their activities, the problems they all solve. Check the slides here – https://archive.org/details/look-inside-it-company

    See the video in Tamil here –

    https://youtu.be/gyT11vOKEEg

  • Nithya gave a talk at an online seminar arranged by the college she studied “Sri Sankara arts & science college, kanchipuram” along with her friend Brinda, on “Recent trends on IT”.
  • Completed reading the Tamil Translation of the book “The Origin” by Don Brown. It was a 800+ pages book. Translation was very good. Never felt like reading a translation book. Don’s writings show a magical world in front of our eyes, all with plain text. In this novel, he questions on religions, god, power, greed and shows the possibilities of AI bots ruling the future of human. Dont miss to read this, if you like to spend few days to weeks on a new world.
  • I use WordPress to host few websites for friends. When the hosting company moved their servers to another vendors, lost those sites. Learnt the necessary of backups of the websites in a hard way. The cloud team of annaitech.in helped to restore few sites from their backup. They recreated few websites as fresh. Started to use https://managewp.com/ to have backups for all wordpress sites.
  • Visited High park, Toronto with family. Kids enjoyed a lot. Saw the animal Llama for the first time.
  • Summer is finally here. Spending good times with children on weekends. Dining at park benches are awesome.
  • Viyan is grown. I am playing shuttle with him. Talking with him on various subjects like women rights, religion , science, history, castes, reservations, why Tamilnadu is against hindi imposition etc. His questions are good. We both do research, read books, watch videos and learn together. If we answer the questions of kids on god honestly, we will become atheists naturally.
  • Tamil school for kids had a good annual day with cultural dances and songs. The efforts of people here to make the language alive are awesome.
  • with KanchiLUG friends, we are writing python code for Tolkappym rules. We meet every saturday and discuss. Minutes are here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/214
  • Mississauga city had an election for Mayor. Attended a meeting with a debate of 3 candidates with HeartComonos Team. Good to listen to the politicians and local issues here.
  • Started to collect sharable Tamil plain text data for LLM researches. Documenting the progress here – https://github.com/KaniyamFoundation/ProjectIdeas/issues/198

    https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/11/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-1-tamil-wikipedia-content/

    https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2024/06/16/collecting-content-for-llm-dataset-part-2-freetamilebooks/

  • Announced an online course on machine learning in Tamil – https://kaniyam.com/ml-training-2024/ We are not getting enough participants. Will wait for two more weeks and then will decide to go for it or cancel it.
  • Happy to read weekly notes from Parathan, Stilanka – Read them here – https://weekly-notes.parathan.com/ His blog and a talk with Dinesh Parasakthi inspired me to resume the weekly notes here. Thanks for all who are motivating me in all the ways.
  • Taking many photographs of people, nature and streets. But no time to process them all. Have to process them and upload to Wikipedia commons.
  • Watched few movies. When Viyan discussed about DNA, Cloning etc, watched the movie “Jurassic Park”. Then, “Termininator 2”. Hope we will watch “The Matrix” soon. Enjoyed watching “Aavesham”, “Laapataa Ladies” , Jawaan, HotSpot, Manjummel Boys, Vasool Raja MBBS.
  • Last weekend with with kids to an indoor Arcade game center. They enjoyed playing games with Arcade centers.
  • From next week, kids get two month summer holidays. We will be living and working at the library mostly.

❌
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