Sequenced Thoughts from C/S

I just noticed that a month ago, my defensive publication was officially published. It describes two main ideas for improving virtual keyboards that I talked about previously. The first idea is that languages that use abugida scripts should use their phonemes as the keys to make an efficient and intuitive keyboard. The second idea is a higher level idea, saying that agglutinative languages should use infix/suffix morpheme suggestions in the autocomplete list.

Defensive publications establish prior art that inherently protects future implementations, in open source or otherwise, because the prior art nullifies potential future patents, including by patent trolls. So anyone interested is free to try implementing.

I’ve updated my grammar lessons for learning Tamil at https://www.learntamil.com . It should have a cleaner look, easier to view on mobile devices, and you can listen to the audio files because they’ve finally been converted from RealAudio format to a modern common format, MP3.

For people who are interested in internationalization (i18n), they are likely writing software using ICU, the gold standard library for internationalization functionality and performance. Of course, ICU is available only in C++/C (“ICU4C”) and Java (“ICU4J”), and is quite the behemoth. In order to support other programming languages directly and to support more resource-constrained computing environments (ex: mobile), we have the ICU4X the project.

The first preliminary release, v 0.1, is now official, and the current code has been published in Rust crates.io.

To received future project announcements and to stay connected, sign up for the icu4x-announce@unicode.org mailing list.

I was talking with my friend about how Tamil names differ from Western names. During the conversation, we reminisced about how he was interviewed by a local radio show on how his name is “long”. I remembered feeling unimpressed by the radio segment with my friend, and it helped explain more about Tamil names.

I just woke up from a dream where people were looking at a newly published book in English, and on one of the introductory dedication pages of the book was the translation of a Tamil poem. Both the book and the poem were as imaginary as the dream itself, but the first verse caught my attention and filled my senses:

Most people have daily stresses during this time of Coronavirus. Working from home is lucky compared to the impact on livelihoods and health. Social distancing is necessary but does have its own little impact. For the moments where you have time to connect with friends online and recharge by taking your minds off of the state of the world, here are some options:

Now that people are sheltering in place and cooking, it’s good to record some more recipes. It’s even better when they are the kind that can easily scale up (can be made in pots of any sort).

Here are some recipes for Tamil food using the Instant Pot. They represent the way I’ve been making these dishes recently for myself.