Install *this* font before reading!

Recently I was going through the online version of the teachers' guides from the National Institute of Education Sri Lanka (NIE). The major issue I noticed in those documents was, they have been written using non-unicode fonts (Sinhala - DL-Manel-bold and Tamil - Bamini). It should be noted that converting them to unicode is not very difficult given the UCSC converters. However the practical difficulty of using non-unicode fonts to the shared documents is, the other users are expected to have that particular font in their system. Copy-pasting into a plain text editor becomes impossible. Still I have seen many web sites asking to download the particular font to view their site correct. Some sites even ask the users to use Internet Explorer or some other specific browser. I would rather request them to change their site to unicode than asking each user to install their not-so-sexy font.

Here is a sample of the above mentioned issue.
mEka Odjlh - Written using DL-Manel-bold, which appears as garbage text here.
පෑන් ධාවකය - After converting to Unicode using the UCSC Font converter.

Similarly for Tamil
Ngid nrYj;jp - Bamini
பேனை செலுத்தி - After converting to Unicode using the UCSC Font converter.

I could also notice during the recent series of IT seminars in Jaffna peninsula, that the students who mentioned that they can type in Tamil were actually referring to their ability of typing using Bamini font. I guess we have created an awareness of Unicode among them. Unicode is much essential, if we really want to go beyond mere typing in local languages.

CSE - IT Awareness Seminar Series

The CSE IT Awareness program by the Computer Science & Engineering Department of University of Moratuwa went quite successful, with 11 seminars all over the island in Tamil and Sinhala media. Final year undergraduates of the department along with a staff member visited the destinations and carried out the seminars. The seminars held at the 11 schools went quite well. I joined the team which went to the Jaffna peninsula, where we conducted the seminars in Tamil medium in 6 schools - Putthur Somaskandha College, Kopay Christian College, Kokuvil Hindu College, St. Charles M.V, Urumpurai Siva Tamil M.V, and Chullipuram Victoria College. I did my talk on இணையம் (The Internet). A handout was also distributed among the participants as a supportive learning material.

It was really nice to see the students showing a great interest in learning new technologies. It is our responsibility to make the country an IT hub through similar workshops and seminars. Information Communication Technology (ICT) is offered as an optional subject for Ordinary Level Students where they  also have the option of doing Agriculture or some other subjects instead. What I could notice it, the number of students doing ICT is much lower than the students choosing other modules. The reasons may be the score - They may feel ICT as a difficult subject, or there may be some limitations due to the limited resources. Obviously not all the schools are ready to have ICT as a compulsory module. More resources are needed. It should also be noted that GIT is yet another module provided for the Advanced Level students.

A seminar of three hours can never cover all the necessary stuff as a basic course. But it can provide a flavor to the students and make them more interested towards learning computer science and IT. I am pretty sure we have reached this goal. The interest  was shown very clearly by the students. Now we have to go forward carefully with the success of this initial attempt.

Given below is a short video capture of a drama practice of the students of Chullipuram Victoria College, which we were able to witness during our visit. :)