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LinuxTag baby!
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It’s been 3 days now of constant running, and I’m soooo glad I managed to get a good rest last night. No feet dragging today, yay!
With super-charged batteries I hit the coffee shop next to the place I crash, grab a couple of croissants and head towards the venue. The last days we’ve had a ton of interesting technical discussions with Lennart Poettering and other folks. Besides learning a bunch of new stuff (filesystem internals, GTK+ v3 challenges, X.org plans & tricks) a bunch of ideas come out to use Transifex in creative ways.
For example, Lennart is working on sound theming, in order to have the ability to personalize the sounds your desktop does. This could prove very helpful for blind people, but others might also find it useful, interesting or just fun: listening to “You’ve got mail”, “You’re low on battery”, etc. Maniacs could even configure “click.. click.. click” and for multiple ones have a deep voice saying “You’re on clicking spree!!” and “Rampage!”. Kidding aside, this made me think we’ll need localization and we could have this done by Transifex. While it would work right away, it would be more fun to create a plugin that adds a set of small features like normalization check (all sound files are on the same sound level), multiple file upload, and on the ‘Preview Submission’ screen an embedded flash player that allows you to preview (pre-hear) the final file.
Yesterday we had the chance to discuss with other fellow GNOME folks how we could imporve the integration between our tools (Transifex, Vertimus, Damned Lies). Having to maintain three different tools and configurations is a pain for everyone and interoperability always is sub-optimal (or, in other words, ‘you can feel the glue’). It’s encouraging to see solutions being adapted by more projects and > 1 {people, projects} having the same feelings on where we should be heading, since this indicates that we’re probably on the right track. I’m looking forward to the integration, which could more easily produce a bunch of exciting features (like, getting translation statistics on the command line, etc).
One of the most interesting talks I attended was Dirk Hohndel’s one titled What do Major Corporations do for Open Source?. Dirk gave out many messages, but I particularly liked his suggestions on how open source developers can approach big companies to see if they’re interested in their project. He said something along the lines *”while you might think that sending an email to info@company.com would be a silly idea, it’s not. Go on and do it. Say how your project’s goals (roadmap, releases) could help the company achieve its goals or enhance their processes.” Brilliant approach.
I’ll go off now to help out at the Fedora booth and continue networking. Once I find some more time I’ll write some more happenings.
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late in the afternoon, Πέμπτη 29 Μαϊου 2008
[ FOSS, linux, Transifex ] |
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