Global Dimming - Averting our monsoons!

I happen to see a very interesting special program in BBC today, which has driven me to write the third blog post of this day.

For years, right from our school days, we have been very familiar with the term ‘Global Warming’. But today, I got to become acquainted with a new terminology known as ‘Global Dimming’. We knew global warming occurs as a result of extensive addition of particulate matter, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels all over the world. Though the developed nations put the blame on developing nations like India, for increasing the global warming further up the record. It has now been proved that for most of the natural calamities which happened in the last two decades are mainly due to the activities of the developed nations.

Explaining this further, right from the start of the industrialization we (mainly today’s’ industrialized nations) have dumped a massive amount of green house gases into our earth’s atmosphere. This has been causing an very interesting as well as unexpected happening which has never struck the brilliant brains’ of our scientists all over this brilliant planet. Now, it has developed into a very significant factor called global dimming.

As the term indicates, it has been causing a dimming effect all over the earth’s atmosphere, prevalent especially in the upper regions of atmosphere well above the cloud region. The greenhouse gases with a high level of particulate content got deposited in higher levels of atmosphere, where the cloud formation occurs. A further look into the gimmicks of what happens during the cloud formation and rainfall will help in understanding the dimming effect in the following paragraph. In the higher regions of atmosphere, the water droplets condense around the minute particulates. More and more water molecules condense over the same particulate, that the overall weight of the droplet increases. This especially happens in warmer regions of the sky and when the droplets weight goes above the threshold they fall down as rain.

Now taking the conditions which had been happening since 1950s due to massive industrialization and dumping of huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the average size of the particulate matter started increasing. As the weight of the particulates increase, the threshold value for the water droplet to cause rain also increases. Thus, the condition which lead to the rains became sparse. This resulted in reduced rainfall in equatorial and sub-equatorial regions of the earth and thereby leading to famines. The famine of Somalia actually alarmed the global environmentalists and scientists who later found this amazing reason.

Coming back to global dimming, when the high-particulate gases reach the atmosphere and participate in cloud formation, a different variant of normal clouds form - Clouds which have the propoerty of reflecting the solar radiation back into outer space rather than inside the earth. Though scientists initially considered this to be influential to tackle global warming, later discovered this to be as bad as greenhouse global warming. The peculiar phenomenon is, this dimming was actually causing the failure of rains in the above said equatorial and surrounding regions. For monsoon rains and summer rains to occur in Africa and South-Asia respectively, they need hotter conditions to exists. such a condition causes the movement of rain clouds from the southern hemisphere to the equatorial regions. When these clouds occur at warmer equatorial regions, they fall as rain.

But the dimming prevents such a hotter region to be developed and thereby there is no condition existing in these regions for rain to pour down. This has led to the sufferings due to poor rains and failure of monsoons for the past two decades.

The entire 2 hour featured programs was really an eye openers. The first part featured how the concept of global dimming got into existence, whole the later part was aimed at exploring a formidable solution to this problem. Hope, the entire world starts exploring ways to prevent from this wonderful planet moving towards a place not very much suitable for human existence.

Snaps from the Tamil Translation Workshop

Tamil Translation Workshop

15th July, 2006

at

National Resource Center for Free/Open Source Software

AU-KBC Center, MIT Campus (Anna University),

Chrompet, Chennai.

 

Current Team Members of ‘foss4mylang‘

• Hariram Athreya - NRCFOSS
• Obula Reddy - NRCFOSS
• Subathra - NRCFOSS
• Ashwin - NRCFOSS
• AKila - NRCFOSS
• Kavitha - NRCFOSS
• Parthan - NRCFOSS
• Sudhakar - CDAC
• Balavignesh - Lucas TVS
• Shrinivasan - Lucas TVS
• Natarajan.S.R.
• Rajagopal.N.
• Anant
• Sriramdas
• Vaikunt
• Vel Murugan
• Shiva Kumar

Here are a few snaps from the ‘Tamil Translation Workshop’ which was described in my previous blog. :

The Google-Group “foss4mylang” being created

The Briefing Session
At-last, we made things work…

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

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The Birth of ‘foss4mylang’ - Tamil Localization

When 10 people unite, the work done by a single person for a week finishes in a day! This became true when 14 people united to translate around 400 strings of software terms for ‘Django’ , a well known web interface, into equivalent thamizh strings.

This endeavor also led to the formation of a group or perhaps the birth of a community who will strive to translate every other Open Source Software in thamizh, that one day every OSS will be available in thamizh itself. This was also a show which proved that Open Source community has all the enthusiasm and determination to do things which are otherwise put in shelves for years.

The members of this group come from different domains and even geographical locations, and necessarily need not be software professionals. But all have the passion to involve themselves in the community efforts to make this world, at-least this ‘part’ of the world, OSS aware. We mainly had people from our own NRC-FOSS and CDAC, as well as many active volunteers from ilugc. We formed a google group, christened it as ‘foss4mylang’, perhaps in a democratic way of collecting names and voting for each name. Finally ‘foss4mylang’ was what everyone wanted our group to be called.

The day started with a brief introduction to Tamil Translation Endeavours that have been taken up in the past as well as the success stories of the same. We were lucky enough to have Vel Murugan who had been into one such effort and later joined by Shivakumar who had been indeed one of the initiators f such effort. We had a long session of setting up ’scim’ and ‘kbable’ in our Linux machines - Fedoras’ mostly with my Ubuntu and one Debian being an exception. I had some initial hitches in making scim actually work, though i had almost everything right.

The gimmick to make tamil translation is…

1. Turn on your tamil/indic language support in your linux boxes,

2. Download ’scim’ and all its additional modules for your language. Yum and apt may help you with this.

3. Make sure you have these modules for your scim:

scim-gtk2-immodule, scim-modules-socket, scim-modules-table, scim-tables-additional, scim-m17n and finally scim-uim.

These modules are very much important for you to get Indian languages running under scim.

4. Go to the ‘SCIM Setup’ and select the languages you wish to turn on and the keys for turning them on, off and to toggling between them.

5. Download and install kbable, which is the translation software. If you have a database of translated words as ‘po’ files, then upload them in kbable so that you wont be translating same words again and again, espeicially in your own way.

6. There is a small gimmick which you have additionally play to make thing work in the end. Make a symbolic link for the xinput.d folder to your home directory. This will give you the option to configure your own personal input settings, though you need not alter this file at this stage.

ln -s /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim ~/.xinput.d/en_US

Now, load the to-be-translated files in KBable and start translating. the words which you are not sure of proper tamil translation can be marked as fuzzy. And if you find some fuzzy and know how to spell it right, translate and remove the fuzzy mark.

I very well understand that my above description is too simple for the task, its only by practice we learn things. We learnt it yesterday and that’s why am writing this blog today. If you have any difficulty when trying your own hands at translation, then you are free to refer foss4mylang@googlegroups.com. You can also add this to your groups by joining the group and thereby join the team of tamil-loving translators.

Note: The group is named ‘foss4mylang’ rather than ‘foss4tamil’ because we are not restricted to ‘thamizh’ alone. As the people who were there yesterday were thamizh speaking souls, we did a tamil translation. We also help and support all other Indian languages, and we indeed welcome people from other languages to join our team and do translations in their own mother-tongue.

வாழ்க தமிழ் ! வளர்க தமிழர் பெருமை !

Dependencies! Where the tux stumbles down…

When a newbie tries his hand in a newly booted up distro, he quite enjoys using the GNU/Linux very much. He feels that it is not as bad as what he thought of the same, when he was a hardcore Microsoft’ie. He says, “hey dude, Linux is not bad man..”

I smile with complete satisfaction, another guy turned on to tux’s side.

I ask him to try the applications which has come out with the distro. He checks out a few things and returns the approval for satisfaction. I leave him to explore further on his own, with a promise to help him if he hits a road-block.

I meet him after a week, perhaps before his best pal, Mr.PC. And to my shock, he runs Windows again. I ask him the reason. He replies, “Dude, i tried to install some cool app man. I had the binary, butt when i tried out installing it, something called as ‘dependency error’ popped out! I tried my best dude, but i was pissed off..”

This is not something written out of imagination. This is reality. I have heard many people complain about ‘Dependecy Error’. Though people accept the reason behind such issues popping up and there is indeed some solution, yet people ask, “I haven’t seen one such thing with Windows, dude”. Righto! Me too! agreed!

This is one of the few issues that still deter Linux from occupying the ‘common-man’s PC use’. An ardent Linux aspirant doen’t mind dependency issues, as me did, and somehow manages to get through the initial but rather steep learning curve. But, whats’ the same with non-computer savvy end user, who wishes to enjoy the benefits of Linux and the Open Source but abhors such issues which turns him back to good old M$.

People give an immediate reply to this, “Use a packet manager like Synaptic, Yum or Apt which takes care of dependencies by itself”. This is a agreable solution as far as standard applications, which are present in a repos are concerned. But what with some 3rd party app, even some famous ones, which get into a lot of dependencies during installation time. A 20MB package might not get installed just because some 40KB dependency file wasn’t there. Doesn’t seem stupid and think of how much the user who downloaded 40MB file ( think in terms of Indian Network Connections, even our broadband provides 30KB transfer max* ). When he cannot install the app after so much patient download, he really gets pissed off.

So, where lies the solution ? Is it the headache of the application/software developer to make it work with commonly available libraries ? Or is it the headache of the distro developer to provide a load of libraries that dependencies are very rare to occur ? Or is the curse on the tux that it has to face for its never-going-to-end life ? Or is it a curse on open source people like us to face the odd and live with it ? People like me, who do a lot of FLOSS awareness creation work require an answer. Will tux be blessed to come out of this curse ??