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• About Schmidt

• “The cowards never started. The weak died on the way. Only the strong survived. They were the pioneers.” (About Schmidt)

• at night, Sunday 1 February 2009
  Books/music/films, Mini-Post, Quotes | About Schmidt (Comment!)

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• Theming Tx’s hgweb

• Themed Transifex’s code/hg web interface to blend in with the rest of the site. It needs some more work, maybe another Sunday.

• at night, Sunday 1 February 2009
  Mini-Post, Transifex | Theming Tx’s hgweb (Comment!)

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• Tab Control

• Newest favourite Firefox addon: Tab Control. Open new tabs next to current tab instead of the end.

• at night, Thursday 29 January 2009
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Tab Control (Comment!)

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• Transifex 0.3.2 released

• I realized today how good it feels right before a release. It’s something like the moment you fasten your seatbelt on the aeroplane before a trip. You know, after everything has been pack(ag)ed and transferred, you made it to your deadline (or changed flights), passed the security/QA. Just waiting for the take off. Satisfaction, planning newer, greater things.

  The smallest suspicion of weight is maybe whether your forgot something behind, but OK — you have this for the whole period until your next minor update.

  Today we released Transifex 0.3.2.

  Codenamed “As good as it gets”, this release includes a large number of bugfixes and improvements from more than 20 people. The diffstat weighs in at 76 files changed, 36245 insertions(+), 16465 deletions(-). For a full list of features take a look at the Release Notes for 0.3.2.

  Tarballs and packages are available at the files section of transifex.org and on the Python Cheese Shop.

  Fedora’s Transifex instance will be upgraded once we test the new version a bit. Bugs should be reported on Trac.

  Thanks to everyone who made this possible.

• at night, Thursday 29 January 2009
  Tech/web, Transifex | Transifex 0.3.2 released (Comment!)

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• Twitter-mania

• Ωραία τα είπε ο Γιάννης. Μου θυμίζει με το greek blogosphere boom που το κάθε τι γινόταν θέμα. Τις μάχες των followers. Τσκ τσκ. :-)

• at night, Thursday 29 January 2009
  Humor, Mini-Post | Twitter-mania (Comment!)

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• “title” HTML tag to avoid #156

• <title>Patra 2008, Patrinorama.com, Patras City Portal, Patras Magazine,
  Info Patra, News Patra, Patra Theatre, Patra Cinema, Patra Music, Patras Live,
  Patras Gossip, Patras Video, Patra Video, patra live, patra music,
  patra cinema, patra theatre, patra 2008</title>
  

  Too much SEO or what?

  Authors should use the TITLE element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context-rich titles. Thus, instead of a title such as “Introduction”, which doesn’t provide much contextual background, authors should supply a title such as “Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping” instead.

  W3 reference

  Also:

  A good TITLE should be short and specific to the document’s content so that it can be used as a title for a user’s bookmark, a title for the display window, and a link from a search engine. A suggested limit for the number of characters in a TITLE is 60.

  WDG reference

• at night, Wednesday 28 January 2009
  Tech/web | “title” HTML tag to avoid #156 (Comment!)

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• The Zen of Python

• Αρκετοί φίλοι (και πελάτες πια) με ρωτούν την Μεγάλη Ερώτηση Ανάπτυξης Λογισμικού: “Γιατί τη γλώσσα Χ;”. Στην περίπτωση μου είναι συνήθως “Γιατί Python;”.

  Είναι από εκείνες τις ερωτήσεις που οτιδήποτε απαντήσεις, εκτός τις απαντήσεις αποφυγής “Απλά μου αρέσει!” και “Εξαρτάται”, θα γεννηθούν στον ερωτώντα περισσότερες ερωτήσεις. Μια περίληψη των λόγων που σε αρκετούς Python developers δεν τους αρέσουν τα πολλά ακρωνύμια ή τα ρουμπίνια είναι το Zen of Python (aka PEP 20), το οποίο έχει επηρεάσει το σχεδιασμό της γλώσσας και του λογισμικού που γράφεται σε αυτή και υπάρχει και σαν top-level easter-egg στο ίδιο το Python prompt.

  >>> import this
  The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
   
  Beautiful is better than ugly.
  Explicit is better than implicit.
  Simple is better than complex.
  Complex is better than complicated.
  Flat is better than nested.
  Sparse is better than dense.
  Readability counts.
  Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
  Although practicality beats purity.
  Errors should never pass silently.
  Unless explicitly silenced.
  In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
  There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
  Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
  Now is better than never.
  Although never is often better than *right* now.
  If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
  If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
  Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
  

• at night, Tuesday 27 January 2009
  Random | The Zen of Python (Comment!)

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• Sunday Turkish Coffee

• 

  Enjoying a cup of good Turkish coffee.

• at night, Sunday 25 January 2009
  Personal | Sunday Turkish Coffee (Comment!)

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• Transifex accepting donations

• I’ve been asked a few times in the past the question ‘How can I support the development of Transifex?’. Like most open source projects, the best way to give support is by contributing your time with actual bits of the software like code, documentation, translations, or spread the word about its cool features (an excellent example of the latter is spreadfirefox.com).

  Quite often though, the best contribution one can make is monetary. And since some people have asked for it, Transifex is now accepting donations via the marvels of PayPal with me as the “accountant”. I hope we can collect an amount to cover the hosting costs of transifex.org, and if possible, organize a developer sprint soon where we can buy the pizzas or a beer to the transifex-devel hackers who’d like to participate.

  Thanks in advance for your support! :-)

• at night, Saturday 24 January 2009
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | Transifex accepting donations (Comment!)

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• Fedora Board decisions in the open

• I’m so glad folks on the Fedora Board are insisting on taking discussions that could be discussed in the open to our public advisory board list.

• at night, Thursday 22 January 2009
  Fedora, Mini-Post, Thoughts | Fedora Board decisions in the open (Comment!)

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• Bouncing balls

• I love Sony Bravia’s ad with the bouncing balls in HD. Choice of Jose Gonzalez in the background was excellent.

• at night, Wednesday 21 January 2009
  Books/music/films, Mini-Post | Bouncing balls (Comment!)

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• Alex Panagopoulos

• Ι just love Alex’s drawings. Emotional and engaging, dreamy and bittersweet.

  

  “The exchange of flowers”
  Alex Panagopoulos

  Alex and I did quite a few crazy things together during University and later. I remember endless nights talking about God and chess before hitting breakfast to do some more talking. I remember freaking out on our first day in rock climbing and breaking Alex’s leg on a fall. Hitting on girls with the size of our camera lenses. Driving California State Route 1 and trying to dodge bears in Yosemite Park in the night.

  Such an amazing guy.

• at night, Monday 19 January 2009
  Personal | Alex Panagopoulos (Comment!)

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• Wrapping up Open Breakfast Patras I

• Wrapping up Open Breakfast Patras. 20 people present, including CEO of Patras Science Park (Incubation center) Petros Groumpos. Talked about entrepreneurship, fundings, and also a bit about Indifex and its vision. Overall an experience to be repeated.

• at night, Sunday 18 January 2009
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Wrapping up Open Breakfast Patras I (Comment!)

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• A seat on the Fedora Board

• Either due to ignorance or simply blunt encouragement for my evil plans for World Domination ™ (wicked music played in the background), I was appointed by Red Hat to take a seat on the Fedora Board.

  I’ll start off by saying a big ‘Thank you’ to all who supported my candidacy and this decision. Fedora has evolved into one of the most influential and vibrant Linux distributions today and it’s a great honour to serve on its Board and represent the community on the issues the Board is accountable for.

  I joined Fedora as a contributor much later than a lot of other folks. I still remember the enthusiasm when my Fedora account was approved. Since then I got a lot of similar enthusiasms: first patch accepted, first influencial changeset accepted, email from the Leader, first conference… they’re so many. Now I’m yet again thrilled for having an opportunity to experience new things and serve the community in a different way.

  The first thing on my agenda is take some time and grasp the new responsibilities and the areas I’d like to be accountable for. I’ve written quite a few big goals on my mission statement and I’d like to start talking with people right away about them.

  This is one of the reasons I just booked myself a ticket to FOSDEM. I’ll mostly hang around the Fedora booth and the Python devroom, in case you’d like to find me and have some more TODOs added on my agenda. Or just fire up your email client and get in contact with any issues you’d like to discuss as part of my new role.

  Off for some satanic thoughts now with my hot chocolate before going to bed.

• at night, Saturday 10 January 2009
  Fedora, Personal, Thoughts, Transifex | A seat on the Fedora Board (Comment!)

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• Diego joining Indifex

• Long-time Transifex hacker Diego Búrigo Zacarão will be joining Indifex.

• at night, Monday 22 December 2008
  Indifex, Mini-Post | Diego joining Indifex (Comment!)

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• Testing nginx

• Trying out nginx performance for transifex.net. Impressive results.

• at night, Monday 22 December 2008
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Testing nginx (Comment!)

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• Results of Fedora Board Elections

• Came out 3rd on the recent Elections for the Fedora Board. I’m extremely happy with the result, as Bill and Matt are two fantastic guys who have tons to offer. I’m also humbled from the number of votes I received — I’ll take it as a sign to keep working hard. Now, go eat some turkey and let’s get our butts back to work and ship yet another great release.

• at night, Sunday 21 December 2008
  Fedora, Mini-Post | Results of Fedora Board Elections (Comment!)

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• import –help

• Of course import --help takes a screenshot and saves it to a file named --help, what did you expect?

• at night, Sunday 21 December 2008
  Foss, Linux, Humor, Mini-Post | import –help (Comment!)

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• Υποψηφιότητα Αθήνας για Ευρω-FUDCon 2009

• Μόλις ανέβασα μερικές πληροφορίες για την υποψηφιότητα της Αθήνας για το FUDCon EMEA 2009.

• at night, Thursday 18 December 2008
  Fedora, Mini-Post | Υποψηφιότητα Αθήνας για Ευρω-FUDCon 2009 (Comment!)

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• Chasing a dream

• I was always enthusiastic about starting new projects, but it was only in the past couple of years that I got psyched to start my own company.

  Projects like software, communities, even politics sounded fun. While I had the entrepreneur bug for non-profit stuff, it was hidden for business. I’ve been fortunate to have really good jobs involving interesting projects and some fine hackers and managers around me. When I was in need for a change, I’d happily freelance or take some time off enjoying building stuff in my house, painting or maybe rock climbing for a while.

  The bug

  For the past months I’ve been spending quite some time on Transifex. It started as a hack to integrate Fedora’s versioning systems, then we turned it into a translation submission web service, and translators started using it as a compliment to their workflow. You know you’re doing something useful when smart guys like Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard and rock-star software projects like the default packaging frontend and sound server for Linux distros find it ultra-useful.

  You don’t often get the chance to change a core bit in an established technology like open source software localization. But when you actually do get the chance, it’s amazing how many paths open up. Hackers from GNOME and Debian and OLPC and Maemo and Wikipedia did not only like the idea behind upstream-friendly translation submissions, but they started thinking how it could fit into their infrastructure and workflow and how to extend it with new functionality. Folks around the world generously invited us to conferences to talk about our technology and plans, and guys from open source media like the popular LWN published interviews with us. Discussions with friends of the entrepreneur breed often went “wow” with the potential of the technology and were impressed that Tx was past the prototype stage and already into production.

  The turning point

  It’s a win-win situation. I’ve been very impressed with Transifex so far, it makes translations pretty trivial.

  Richard Hughes, PackageKit maintainer

  At some point, it became clear that we had the chance to make a big difference to a lot of people with Transifex. Translations are hard, and I’d bet anything that we can make them easier. Or, for a more modest approach, “make them suck less”.

  For a long time the following question was spinning in my mind: “How can we build an open translation platform for software?” Starting from the assumption that translators are not tied into a specific project but are shared across them, how would the ultimate translation platform look like? I’d discuss it with people in conferences and startup meetings, drawing endless sketches of the architecture. We’d even talk it over in interviews with Google and Red Hat.

  The goal is to build an efficient platform where producers of software, documents or web services can reach out to established localization communities to receive high-quality translations, which are then stored directly on the source repository of the product.

  By far the best way to know if your idea is going to work is to try it out and see. Get a group of code hackers together and give it a try. And what better way to experiment this than creating a startup and hack your way through the challenges?

  The project and the startup

  Transifex.net is the materialization of our vision. We’re developing a hosted version of Transifex, a common place where content providers can get their resources localized and translators can get together and find the tools they need to receive and submit back translatable content. To get there, we’ve re-written Transifex from scratch in the past months. We’ve re-engineering most of the concepts in it with one goal: create a solid base to accommodate the needs of most software projects.

  Transifex will remain open source and continue being openly developed by our community at transifex.org. If you’re in doubt about the open source development model, take a look at how great WordPress is doing.

  Transifex.net is what WordPress.com is for WordPress. It’s a hosted version providing a hassle-free, social-enabled, batteries-included service. The open source version is still available for anyone wanting to host his own instance and we’re here to help him support it if needed.

  Indifex is the company we founded to make this vision a reality. Indifex’s name, like Transifex, origins from latin and refers to something like ‘information craftsmen’ — it’s catchy and we dig it. And besides, we had to give it a name. =)

  We’re a handful of passionate coders and open source geeks. We get high by fixing stuff and our office is lit up by technology flamewars almost every day. If you’re into these kind of kinky stuff too (modern web app frameworks, versioning systems, extreme programming, fast-paced work, pizza-only diet), take a look at the job openings we’ve got.

  Indifex has received a fair amount of seed money to get us up and going for a while. If you’re into early-stage investments and would like to help us change the world, drop me an email at glezos@indifex.com.

  Our roadmap

  So what are we planning for the next months?

  We’re currently focusing on Transifex’s features which are most useful for translators. Soon we’ll roll out transifex.net in private beta to a few folks, in order to receive valuable feedback from the people who will likely make an extensive use of the service. At this time we’ll focus on bug squashing and product stabilization.

  We’ll then gradually give out more invitations, re-iterating the process until we have something ready for public availability. Following the “release early, release often”, we hope to get there sooner than later.

  That’s it from me. Now you can go and subscribe to our beta program, follow us on our blog and Twitter, or take a look at the job openings we have.

  Wrapping up with a quote from one of the first folks who believed in the dream.

  Because of how well Transifex is integrated as a technical and social solution, it has the chance to start a mini revolution in translation of libre/free and open source software.

  Karsten Wade, Fedora Documentation Project

• at night, Wednesday 17 December 2008
  Foss, Linux, Indifex, Tech/web, Transifex | Chasing a dream (Comment!)

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