So far Fedora Hosted has been nothing but great as a hosting platform. The folks from Fedora Infrastructure really get it: as open source developers, we value a 100% open development platform, and with some support for the admin bits, we love being able to focus on development. My experience with FH has been great, and I’d recommend it to anyone wanting a free development platform for a small project.

Now, with me spending more time on Tranisfex lately and in the future, I feel more confident to start helping other projects have Trasifex on their infrastructure, produce releases more often, have it packaged in many formats etc. So I feel Transifex is mature enough to move on to the next level and grow as much as needed to be useful to other communities, projects (and why not companies) as well.

While moving to a hosted environment means a bit more work on administration, the benefits are many: more projects (users) on board, better control over the tools (eg. tweak Trac as needed), more hg repositories for branched development, more authenticated users on Trac, confident contributors and users, etc.

So, without further adieu, I’m happy to say Transifex development now has its own upstream space:

• http://transifex.org/ (home)
• http://code.transifex.org/ (repositories)

We now have a Trac instance and a Mercurial repo to play with (thanks Christos for some of the admin bits). Please do take a look at the pages and fire away suggestions or corrections. We haven’t setup Trac registration yet, so any contributor wanting a trac account, let me know with a password and I’ll manually add you right away. The GSoC students (blog post) will probably need these to create wiki pages and file tickets to track their progress.

The older Trac instance can be used to handle Fedora-specific bits and issues. As far as migrating the existing Trac data (tickets, mainly), instead of moving, I’m thinking of starting fresh and quickly hammering the older tickets in-place.

In addition to the move, we created the discussion group/mailing list transifex-devel for development discussions and patches. We also started hanging out at the IRC channel #transifex on Freenode — drop by if you’d like some more information on setting up Transifex to serve your translation community.

GSoC is approaching, and we’re so ready for it.

In other news, Fedora 9 is out and it feels very snappy and well polished. Awesome.

Photo by Amy.Ng (cc)

Webfaction

glezos@webfaction:~$ uptime
09:25:19 up 255 days, 20:45,  6 users,  load average: 0.20, 0.28, 0.37

Dreamhost

glezos@dreamhost:~$ uptime
07:25:44 up 79 days, 19:50,  3 users,  load average: 28.69, 43.53, 42.93

Heh. Sometimes uptimeis worth a thousand words. I couldn’t be happier.

If you’d sign up, feel free to use this link, which will give a few bucks to a couple of open source chaps.

Photo by kazze (cc)

Short fact sheet:

• Σάββατο, 17 Μαΐου, στις 6μμ
• Cinema café, Πεζόδρομος Γεροκωστοπούλου, στο κέντρο της Πάτρας (χάρτης)
• 15-20 geeks
• Fedora talks, swag, …
• URL: http://fedoraproject.gr/fedora-9/release-party

Μπορείτε να υπολογίζετε ότι θα είναι παρόντες οι κλασικοί εν Πάτραις Linux-άδες. Μετά το παρτάκι πιθανό να υπάρξει έξοδος για ωραίο φαγητό σε μεζεδοπωλείο κάπου στην Πάτρα (οδό Τριών Ναυάρχων, κλπ). Οι φίλτατοι επισκέπτες από Αθήνα και λοιπά περίχωρα, έχουν την επιλογή να διαμείνουν σε κάποιο fellow Λινουξά ή μπορούν να την κάνουν κατά τις 8 για να επιστρέψουν στα σπιτάκια τους.

Θυμίζω ότι την αμέσως προηγούμενη ημέρα διοργανώνουμε επίσης το πρώτο OpenCoffee (more info) στην Πάτρα, στο οποίο θα μαζευτούμε να μιλήσουμε για ενδιαφέρουσες νέες τεχνολογίες (Web 2.0 κι άλλα bubbles) αλλά και για επιχειρείν και επενδύσεις. Ελάτε να τα πούμε και στα δύο events.

Με μεγάλη μας χαρά, ανακοινώνουμε το πρώτο Open Coffee στην Πάτρα στις 16 Μαΐου. Ελάτε να τα πούμε και να μιλήσουμε για νέες ιδέες, εταιρίες start-up και γενικώς entrepreneurship!

Από την ανακοίνωση στο opencoffee.gr:

Η συνάντηση ευελπιστούμε να συγκεντρώσει, μεταξύ άλλων, geeks και marketers, bloggers και δημοσιογράφους, venture capitalists και developers, νέους επιχειρηματίες και πεποιραμένους PRs, εν’ ολίγοις τα πιο ανοικτά και δραστήρια μυαλά της πόλης, σε ένα πολύσύνθετο σύνολο με σημείο τομής το ενδιαφέρον περί start-ups και το επιχειρείν.

Κατά συνέπεια, θα φύγεις από τη συνάντηση κατά πάσα πιθανότητα έχοντας γνωρίσει διψήφιο αριθμό ανθρώπων, έχοντας έρθει σε επαφή με νέες ιδέες και τα πρόσωπα πίσω από αυτές, επίσης έχοντας δυνητικά αποκομίσει τη γνώση, τα μέσα και τα κίνητρα για να κάνεις τη δική σου start-up!

• Παρασκευή, 16 Μαΐου, στις 7μμ
• Μεζεδοπωλείο “Μαρκάτο Οίνου Μέλαθρον”
• Πεζόδρομος Γεροκωστοπούλου, στο κέντρο της Πάτρας

Κι ένας χάρτης για τους επισκέπτες μας, με καμιά 10-αριά χρήσιμες τοποθεσίες στην Πάτρα (click για μεγέθυνση!):

Περισσότερες λεπτομέρειες στην ανακοίνωση μας στο opencoffee.gr.

Fedora 9 release party

Επιπλέον, ότι την αμέσως επόμενη ημέρα, Σάββατο απόγευμα, διοργανώνουμε ένα φανταστικό Fedora 9 release party. Έτσι, όσοι θα περάσουν το διήμερο Παρασκευή-Σάββατο στην Πάτρα, θα μπορούν να παρευρεθούν και στα δύο events. Κάντε την από την Αθήνα ή την πόλη σας την Παρασκευή μετά τη δουλειά κατά τις 4-5 μμ και επιστρέψτε το Σαββατόβραδο μετά το F9 release party ή και την Κυριακή. Για φιλοξενία το βράδυ της Παρασκευής μπορείτε να αράξετε σε ένα από τα πολλά ξενοδοχεία της Πάτρας με wifi ή να στείλετε ένα email στο Patras LUG και όλο και κάποιος θα μπορεί να σας φιλοξενήσει. :-)

Spread the word, πάρτε αγκαζέ τους techy/geek φίλους σας, και κοπιάστε!

Για περισσότερες πληροφορίες ή κάποια βοήθεια, ρίχτε μου ένα email.

Here they are.

• Christos Trochalakis is a Python hacker, git addict, and Django contributor. He’ll be working on supercharging the submission layer of Transifex, in order to allow us to serve translations to a broader audience. Some of the goals include allowing translations also via bugzilla and email, making it possible to run a “headless” Transifex instance for upstream projects and ones behind firewalls, and creating more backends in a fashion similar to PackageKit’s.

• Our own Diego Búrigo Zacarão is a well-known Brazilian Fedora L10n hacker (currently running for FLSCo). He has worked in the past in i18n-izing translate.fedoraproject.org and regularly pokes me to fix various stuff on our Localization infrastructure. He’ll be working on polishing a bunch of Tx stuff like adding full i18n support, AJAXifying time-consuming requests, and providing greater control over registered projects to help translators, developers and administrators work more efficiently.

• Vasilis Kalintiris is an undergraduate at a school known in Greece for its respected code hackers. He’s going to work on missing pieces from a full translation workflow for open source projects. Fine-grained control over permissions means maintainers feeling more comfortable with who’s committing to their repo and upstream projects’ language teams working closer to individual downstream ones. OpenID means any person logging in and do stuff (like, provide translations!). Translation workflow management means better collaboration and communication, and less confusion and wasted time in translations not being shipped.

Thanks to the GSoC organizers for the great project and Fedora for believing in the technology and the people. With these projects on track, I’ll personally try hard to hammer Transifex in shape to be used by other open source projects in need for an upstream-friendly translation solution as well. Translation management, and content workflow in general, are sore points in distributed environments and opensource-powered ecosystems. We have a good base to build solutions on, and the excitement to go for it. :-)

I’m psyched to be mentoring Christos and Vasilis and working closely with Diego. We’ve already started discussing the ideas and the project planning, and a few days ago we got a transifex-devel discussion group created.

It seems everything is 3 times bigger this year.

Photo by Celeste (cc/by-nc)

So I’m packing to drive to my favorite Nafplion (greek: Ναύπλιο) for a couple of days. To pin-point it on the map, it will sufficve to say it’s quite close to SPARTAAA.

Checklist:

• Awesome weather: Best time of the year baby! Check.
• Playlists ready with Travis, James, etc. Check.
• Cworth’s Icehouse and Zendo pieces packed. Check.
• Let folks know I’ll be mostly offline. Check.
• Mobile Internet connectivity for mails etc. Hmph.

There are a number of good café in the city with good connectivity, but we’ll be staying at our camper most of the time. I’m on volume-charged mobile GPRS connectivity, however, code development won’t be much of a problem (thank you Mercurial and ssh). But, the scenario breaks when it comes to Gmail.

I’m using Google apps, and both the browsers of my Thinkpad and maemo are recognized as full (non-mobile) browsers by Gmail. Reading your email with the normal Gmail interface on a slow mobile connection could be a bit painful, both in terms of usability and cost. I don’t think mutt over IMAP will help me in saving bandwidth. I hear Google provides mobile phones with a java app to “supercharge” the browse-your-emails experience, however I’m not very keen for it, and besides, it’s not provided for Maemo.

So, I need a way to access the mail component of my app-for-your-domain with a normal browser, but see the mobile version of it. Light, low-bandwidth, and slick for 4″ screens. Albeit, no luck in finding a link/URL for it. This service just doesn’t exist in docs. For normal Gmail, m.gmail.com and an appended /m does work, it doesn’t work for custom domains. I tried various URL/variable combinations using a normal browser, and I always got redirected to the normal version or plain Gmail (no apps). Maybe the Google folks are still testing mobile versions for custom apps, or I might have really missed something in my search.

After a while searching the Web and trying various stuff (/m/, m.google.com/a/..., ?ui=mobile, …) I saw at a point a /x appended in the URL of mobile Gmail on normal apps. Hey, that might work on Google apps as well. And yes, it does, and it’s ridiculously simple.

http://mail.google.com/a/your_domain/x/

Victorious.

Off to find my shades, prepare a freddo espresso, and hit the road.

Spread the word.

<a href="http://fedoraproject.gr/fedora-9/" title="Fedora 9!">
  <img src="http://fedoraproject.gr/countdown/banner.png" alt="F9 release banner"
       title="Καίει..." />
</a>