Software for paleeograpy of Indic scripts

Those of you who know me a bit better will know that my now ex-{fiance,girlfriend} is studying indian philology and indian cultural history at Freie Universitaet Berlin. Now when you think about philology, you will probably think of old people wading through books and paper.

To the contrary. I've always been amazed how much software development they actually do (or have made) there. Some years back, I learned about Sanskritreader, an OCR (optical character recognition) software package for devanagari script.

Now their latest software is IndoSkript, a Palaeograpy software. It comes with a ~600MB database of scans of anciend Indic handwritings, where evey glyph in those scripts has been individually separated, and the scripts are annotated, etc.

Using that software (it's mainly a database software) you can for example check how a particular glyph was written in a certain timeframe in a specific dynasty in the Mysore area. Or you can draw [or import a scan?] a glyph and have it do pattern-matching, giving you a probabilistic analysis of which already-known glyphs match your new one the most.

As of now, it ships with a database of Brahmi, consisting more than 700 scriptures of more than 170,000 glyphs total.

It's great that they develop these tools, and it's even better that they are published as public domain software. What would be even better, is if they made their software Free Software and publicized the source code. This way other people could contribute and e.g. add a much-needed non-German localization, a precondition for any kind of international (e.g. Indian) use of it.

Maybe I can find a minute (and a minute of their time) to explain to them the marvels of Free Software.

Swades

I've had the chance to watch Swades at the home cinema of a friend. Swades is a quite impressive film, and definitely [for me] one of the best recent Bollywood films.

I think the most interesting aspect is the way how they display the transformation process of an initially extremely alienated NRI (officially "Non Resident Indian", in the movie jokingly referred-to as "Non Returning Indian") back ti a "true Indian".

Motorola launching opensource.motorola.com

Motorola seems to be making some progress internally. Today they've announced the availability of opensource.motorola.com, a web site dedicated to free and open source software used and developed in/by Motorola. This is apparently also the portal where they are starting to publicize the source code for their Linux based Smartphones.

While the source code there is not complete in any way [yet], it actually includes the kernel sources for the A1200 phone, too. After a quick read through it, it seems to be very similar to the A780 code (because of a very similar hardware architecture).

Some of the differences are:

• FOTA (Flash on-the-air)
Basically a function by which network operators can modify the flash memory of your phone, thereby forcing software updates onto you. Not something completely new in the GSM world, but something that always gives me the creeps as a security professional.
• Power Management
Apparently the power management capabilities were extended to provide better battery life time.
• Minor differences in boot loader / kernel handover
• SE Linux
Yes, they're actually using SE Linux features on a phone. I haven't yet tried to figure out for what, but usually you would assume that the mobile phone vendors/operators use it to lock their users out of the phone, rather than protecting the users from the evil outside world.