Kanagram is a game to play anagram or solve jumbled words. Kanagram features several built-in word lists, hints, and a cheat feature which reveals the original word. Kanagram also has a vocabulary editor, so you can make your own vocabularies, and distribute them through Kanagram’s KNewStuff download service.

Here is a tutorial that actually will help you out to add more words/categories in different languages as well. Please put up your comments and suggestions

The LAMP of Freed.in 2008 was lit with huge round ofapplause & cheers vibrating around the breadth of Gyaan hall a.k.a., the auditorium of School of Information & Technology of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Some formal registration typo thing was going in the reception stall of the event. So in the very beginning ‘was gifted with some goodies like free media, some freed stickers, gnome badges etc. After all this fresh beginnings, the event finally kicked off with quick intros from core ilugd members like Kishore Bhargava, Andrew Lynn, Raj Mathur, Gora Mohanty followed by the first talk of the day ‘Community is an oft mis-used word’ by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay. He basically described some of the deep-rooted fundamentals that decides the direction of a community so to say, what it is, how it should be, what are the mindsets you ought to carry to be a part of it. After another session by Samiah regarding educational softwares, we pulled off for lunch (muft from sponsers). It was some real fun around there apart from good food. Had chit-chats with people whom i knew only online like Sankarshan da, Pradeepto da, Mishti di, Niyam bhusan, Rene and unending others. After that, I spent the second half of the day mostly at the conclave where rounds of discussions went on regarding defining knowledge and some possible areas to work on for better sharing of information. In this context, we did mention the Bijra school project @ durgapur which actually created a better computer-aided learning environment. The day ended with Mane’s talk regarding accessibility & dev areas of orca. It was pretty late, so signing off we (me & subhodip) went back to my brothers’ place at uttam nagar, west delhi where we actually stayed.

The second day was full of talks and more talks…I enjoyed all of them. Typically, the OSM talk of Mikel & Schuyler, Rene’s talk regarding mesh network, Runa didi’s talk regarding translation communities were very interesting. Also between all these, I also fond myself in the group which Mikel was explaining about collecting GPS data, integrate & edit them in JOSM etc. This actually took me on because it was something rather new in India particularly the GPS devices. Its’ exciting!! That evening, Anand actually proposed us “why don’t you map your way back to Kolkata (train route)”. This was really cool and we two talked with OSM guys and they seemed to like it at that point of time. Since dinner was ready, we decided to discuss about that the following day. Now, what a dinner!! Above everything, it was really charmed by freed.beers & cool starters. And I definitely remember those ‘happy birthday’ gift & wishes to Gora. Overall it was lot more fun at there. As it was pretty late we stayed back at the JNU guest house thanks to Andrews.

The next morning i woke up early. Anyways, packing sacks ’strolled down to to halls which was rather only few hundred metres from the guest house. This day filled with really cool talks like, AanjhanR’s nice talk on FOSS for Electronic enthusiasts (which is an angle i am sure can increase FOSS enthusiasm in different colleges like ours, because some people think it’s for CSE/IT guys only which is not true), this was followed by a great lunch and then more excitement post-lunch, two talks on Independent Music and Radio by Shreyas, Friji and Raj. I typically liked the Radioverve spirit. After these were the talks on OLPC by Sayamindu da & KDE educational softwares & games by Pradeepto da. The evolving Step app (kde-edu) rocked there & also i must mention i checked my g(e)mails on the olpc. I liked sugar very much and installed on my desktop back home. After this was another interesting thing, Mikel came to me & beton and handed over a gps reciever as he told the other day so as to map the train route from New Delhi to Kolkata. That was something cute takeaway at the end of the event. So above everything it was loads of fun out there…!!!

Here are the loads of photos: freedin2008

After burning some midnight oil yesterday, I finally completed the first cut of my presentation regarding “lets add a country word list in khangman”… you will definitely find this interesting. Download it from here. Also please post the much needed comments & suggestions for improvement.

Update: Just to give an insight of what’s happening inside KHangman is that, to integrate a word list or a category into it, we need to create a kvtml file. A snapshot of a sample kvtml file is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE kvtml SYSTEM “kvoctrain.dtd”>
<kvtml>


<e>

<o>india</o>
<t>the land of gods</t>

</e>
<e>

<o>japan</o>
<t>the land of rising sun</t>

</e>
.....
.....

</kvtml>

Have fun!!

See you at freed.in 2008, New Delhi.

I finally finished up the bangla version of my kgeography presentation “চলো আমরা ভারতবর্ষের ম্যাপ এ্যাড করি…”. Download it from here.

Please put up any comments or suggestions for improvement (including বানান ভূল/spelling mistakes also)

Crosslink: The english version “Add maps into kgeography”

Folks mark this date ” The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.” Read more…

Take the visual guide:

As a follow-up of my last post Insight into KGeography, I would like to publish the completed release of my presentation regarding “lets’ add the map of India in kgeography”. Download it from here. Also, do post any comments or suggestions for improvements.

Have fun!! And HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008

Update: Here’s the first cut of the bangla (বাংলা) version of this presentation. Though its’ still half-complete, have a look. Will post the completed version soon. Download it from here. Also, post much needed comments & scope of improvements.

Btw, had some rough times with openoffice. The theme which i used in the original presentation won’t render bangla fonts. So, i had to recreate lot of thing all over.

KGeography is a geography learning tool integrated with KDE-Edu. It helps a student to learn geography in a playful way. But it still doesn’t has all the maps as yet. How to add them? For adding a new map in KGeography, we need two things. One, the map (say in a file called mapname.png) and secondly, a kgm file (whose name should be mapname.kgm) to integrate the map with kgeography. Once we have them we can easily add them in its’ home directory (default: /usr/share/apps/kgeography). Now, what kgeography does is an image-processing. It distinguishes a division of the map by its’ RGB values. Then it identifies the division by Name, Capital, Flag etc parameters given in the kgm file for that division.

So, for adding a map we need to do following things:

1. First, create the map using GIMP, Kolourpaint or any other picture editors. Getting a political outline will be the best idea. I couldn’t get one atleast for India. So a good idea will be superimpose a blank outline map over a descriptive political map (in two layers to be precise). Assign separate colours for every division. Care should be taken that no two regions should have same colours. Ofcourse, handdrawn & scanned political outline maps may be an option and there is no real restriction on the scale of the maps.

2. Next, comes the integration part or the kgm file. So lemme show the basic structure of the .kgm file:

<map>

<mapFile>mapname.png</mapFile>
<name>MapName</name>
<division>

<name>DivisionName</name>
<flag>flagname.png</flag>
<capital>CapitalName</capital>
<color>

<red>255</red>
<green>255</green>
<blue>255</blue>

</color>

</division>
………………………….
//Other divisions
………………………….

</map>

A kgm file begins with <map> and ends with </map>. Inside of those tags there are:

• <mapFile> and </mapFile>: the name of the file (without any path) containing the map image, e.g. “india.png”.
• <name> and </name>: the name of map, e.g. “India”.
• A <division> and </division> for each division in the map.

Now, each division has these tags:

• <name> and </name>: the name of the division, e.g. “West Bengal”.
• <capital> and </capital>: the name of the capital of the division, e.g. “Kolkata”.
• <ignore> and </ignore>: can be set to yes, allowClickMode and no. If this tag is set to yes then the division will be ignored when asking for divisions in that map. It is then as if this division does not exist in KGeography quiz modes. If this tag is set to allowClickMode then KGeography will ask for the division in the Click Division in Map… mode but not in other quiz modes. Setting this tag to no means the division will appear in all modes (browse and quizzes). This tag is optional and when there is no <ignore> tag that means as it is set to no. For example “Egypt” has this tag set to yes in the “Asia” map which means that “Egypt” will not be part of any quiz in the “Asia” map. Also this tag is set to yes for frontiers or oceans.

<division>

<name>Not a Nation</name>
<ignore>yes</ignore>
<color>

.........................................

</color>

</division>

• <flag> and </flag>: the file (without any path) containing the flag of the division, e.g. “india.png” in asia map. This tag is optional. Not needed for the divisions whose <ignore> tag is set to yes.
• <color> and </color>: the color the division has in the map.

The color is defined using three tags:

• <red> and </red>: red component of the color. Valid values are between 0 and 255.
• <green> and </green>: green component of the color. Valid values are between 0 and 255.
• <blue> and </blue>: blue component of the color. Valid values are between 0 and 255.

All names should be in english. But when number of divisions are too much it will be better to automate the task of creating kgm file with a bash script (will post lil’bit later). I checked out the helper tool in kgeography handbook which wasn’t effective enough even on the existing maps.

Update: Now, this post may not be enough to dive into this work. So, I created a sort of presentation concentrating on how to add the map of India. It’s still unfinished. But you can have the first cut from here: [http://makghosh.googlepages.com/addmaps.pdf]. The best way to see it is as a presentation in kpdf.

Well, I divided the task in 3 days:

1. Day 1: Create the political map of India (done)
2. Day 2: Color the divisions of the map (done)
3. Day 3: Create the .kgm file (not completed)

Have fun!! And do post any comments or improvements