Ben Lisbakken writes an faq for usinggoogle gears +greasemonkey to make anysite available offline by describing Wikipedia as an example.
Greasemonkey script for offline wikipedia is here

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) got widespread support from malayalam mainstream print media for the 2 day (14th & 15th september) software freedom day celebration & the release of 7 software packages developed during last year. It is the time to look at our history.

SMC is reactivated from a dead state, as a result of personal discussions with praveen, hiran & vimaljoseph in the sidelines of GPLv3 Conference in bangalore. The new team is setup at last year SFD celebrations in Thrissur. Suresh, Baiju(the founder of SMC), Hussain KH (rachana), Anwar, Students in GEC etc also joined in the team at that time. Now we have more than 30 developers+localizers. The astounding progress within the short span of time is described below

• December 2006: Debian Installer is Fully Translated into Malayalam ( The Work of Debian malayalam, a sub team of Swathanthra malayalam computing)
• January 2007: Santhosh Thottingal of SMC done a complete architectural rewrite of Dhvani, the Indian language text to speech system by Ramesh hariharan & added Malayalam support to It.
• March 2007 : participated & Conducted workshops in FOSS Meet@NITC, Kozhikkode
• March 2007: Swathanthra Malayalam Computing selected as a participating Organisation ( and only Indian Organisation) in Google Summer of Code Project. 5 projects were allotted.
• April 2007: GNU aspell supported Malayalam (major issues are resolved)
• May 2007: Swanalekha: a Phonetic Input scheme for malayalam using SCIM
• June 2007: Lalitha, Bolnagiri based xkb keyboard for malayalam by Jinesh
• July 2007: Added pango support to Tuxtype by Mobin M as part of GSoC work. Now Tuxtype is usable for all Indian languages
• August 2007: Malayalam Matrix screen saver Release, & First Public Release of Aspell- malayalam spellchecker with More than 137000 words list (It is the largest Indian Language Aspell wordlist. Second is hindi with 25000 words).
• September 2007: Gnome Officially supports malayalam in Gnome 2.20 with More than 80% translations
• September 2007: Sarika : The first Free Indian language speech recognition engine is developed by Shyam K (as a part of GsoC). It Currently identifies more than 50 malayalam words
• September 2007: Tuxtype malayalam is Released by Mobin.M & friends (Vimal, Shreyas, Sreeranj, Prince)
• Meera , a Malayalam Traditional opentype font with more than 900 glyphs is released under GNU GPL by Hussain K.H and Suresh P . It is developed for Suruma renderering scheme (not compatible with Uniscribe scheme for windows) . Authors are working on a Uniscribe compatible (windows) version now

Pramode Sir wrote:

A society and a culture is identified by its language - once the language is dead, the society starts losing its identity. A good way to keep a language alive is to take it to the digital world - the world of the PC/Communication devices and the Internet. This is one context in which developing regional language computing environments and popularising them has great significance.

The theme for the 2 day event was “Swathantra Software and Malayalam computing” . Free software is touching the lives of common man now !!

The new Joke from the buggy Orkut- The most ugly product from google. It says Iceweasel, a rebranding of firefox as a not supported browser

They are recommending the use of Firefox 1.5 or IE6.0 while using Iceweasel 2.0.0.6 . It seems their check depending only on useragents

Shame on you google.

(Iceweasel is a rebranding of Firefox by Debian to make it compatible with Debain Free software guidelines.)

Dr. Nagarjuna Writes in FSF-Friends List

India votes against ooxml unanimously. the decision of the committee was to disapprove ooxml with comments. The final meeting took place today after 3pm for about an hour and half, and no voting took place.

Venkitesh Hariharan also reports it.
Todays Economic Times & business standard picked up the story.
ET report says

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

Some quick links on Background of this campaign:

Update:
Brazil also Decided No to OOXML yesterday:-)

Yesterday Indian Republic marked its 60th anniversary (an average Indian’s life time) of its independence. yet another Independence Day for the people of India to openly talk of secession.

About the secession of the Indian state from the citizens it is supposed to serve.

The secession of Indian politicians from the people they are supposed to represent.

The secession of the Indian rich from the fate of their fellow Indians.

The secession of India’s educated from the basic values of their own education (with values replaced by the price of their souls)

The secession of the idea of development from the real needs of the Indian people leaving only a trail of destruction and displacement.

As Independent India approaches the age of sixty- that magical sum of five cycles of 12 years each - it is time to tell the truth about our country.

Bob Sutor’s Open Blog Points to Ben Langhinrichs‘ s Post on some interesting stats via Google on the relative number of ODF vs. OOXML documents on the web. His numbers show that there are 162,700 ODF documents vs. 1993 OOXML documents, and 26% of the OOXML documents are on microsoft.com

As a tribute to Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish peer-to-peer activists who created the Pirate Bay (a Bittorrent tracker web site) have set up a tracker site called Bergman Bits to help people download Bergman’s films via Bittorrent:

Bergman Bits says

With the death of Ingmar Bergman, one of the last great film creators, an era has passed away. An era where cinema was the supreme medium, dominating the cultural landscape and powerful men could direct and dictate our inner most feelings and desires with mass media.

For good or worse, we now live in the time of the great distributed networks where all of us have the powers of communication and creation at our hands. Despite Bergman, lets not wish the time of mass media back, but let it silently pass away with a final gasp.

As big fans of Bergmans work, we decided to make a tribute site to the films he created and we all love. We want to help people share these works and hope that even though Ingmar is no longer with us more people will experience the films and enjoy them as much as we have.

His 54 Films are available to download (Hets Frenzy/Torment (1944) to Saraband (2003)) in Bittorrent format from

GNU/Hurd aka Complete GNU system is a futuristic project. It was started by the end of 80’s . But was stagnant due to the architectural problems and lack of contributers after the arrival of Linux Kernel & GNU/LInux system. It is way forward from the monolithic kernel Linux to Micro kernel based systems. The Hurd is a set of servers running on top of the GNU Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux). Together they build the basefor the GNU operating system. Debian have a GNU/Hurd distribution on Development for a long time (It reached K14 now) . Some students from MES college of Engineering Kuttippuram under the leadership of C.K raju decided to created a new installer (installation is the biggest problem for people to use GNU/Hurd.) . Kiranchand and Team Created a wonderful Installer for Debian GNU/hurd. It is named as Debian GNU/Hurd LX installer as the successor of K series that boot Directly into X. wonderful development Kiran & team. Kiran also participated in in Our discussion on “Smart city & changing Kerala society” in Eranakulam on may and presented his experience as a case study on on how one can take part in Software Dev elopement project without and Exclusive smart cities or Technoparks.

When the manuscript of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”– the seventh and final novel in the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling–was carried by hand from London to New York, the attorney for Scholastic, the book’s American publisher, sat on it throughout the flight. When it was bound and printed, the factory workers who oversaw its production were reportedly forced to work in near-darkness to prevent them from reading it. And when it was shipped to retailers, the vehicles carrying it were tracked by satellite to ensure that they did not deviate from their intended route.So what next?
Just after the book is released It appeared on Torrent servers. The versions include Photographed pages, Properly Compiled PDF, audio book etc. Thousands of people are sharing it See the below Picture for the number of seeds for The Torrent. A Simple search on Torrentz.com will be helpful to find the torrents.