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Tag archive: Linux

• Transifex 0.3.1 “A Clockwork Orange” released

• Transifex v0.3.1 “A Clockwork Orange” released today as a semi-minor release. Highlights: New theme, pypi packaging. Read all about it in the original announcement.

  

• at night, Saturday 2 August 2008
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | Transifex 0.3.1 “A Clockwork Orange” released (Comment!)

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• Transifex 0.3 released

• Yeehaa! I’m quite happy to say we Transifex v0.3 yesterday. For the folks that haven’t heard about this (fantastic) project, here’s a snippet from its homepage:

  Transifex is a highly scalable localization platform with a focus on integrating well with the existing workflow of both translators and developers. It aims in making it dead-simple for content providers to receive quality translations from big translation communities, no matter where the project is hosted.

  Transifex 0.3 is a major release, including a lot of under-the-hood changes. We’ve added full i18n support, and now in addition to the templates, per-module information stored in the database, such as names and descriptions, can be translated as well. As soon as possible we’ll switch to eating our own dogfood, and translations to Transifex will be served from Transifex. The biggest change in 0.3 is probably the change of the libraries used for our models, views and widgets. Now these componenets should be easier to develop on top of, and more ready for switching to TurboGears 2 when it stabilizes. To increase the quality of our code and releases, we’ve added unit test cases for most of the views and models, and more will come in 3.0.1.

  Here are the major changes, taken straight from the NEWS file.

  Transifex version 0.3 “Get smart”

  Released: 2008-07-20

  • New Features:
  • Full i18n support in both templates and database (Diego Búrigo Zacarão)
  • Support for editing repositories (Diego Búrigo Zacarão)
  • Switched model library from SQLObject to SQLAlchemy (Asgeir Frimannsson)
  • Switched templating language from Kid to Genshi (Diego Búrigo Zacarão)
  • Switched widget library to ToscaWidgets (Diego Búrigo Zacarão)
  • Code quality control, unit testing (Dimitris Glezos, Diego Búrigo Zacarão)
  • Development moved to transifex.org, references updated (Dimitris Glezos)
  • Translations:
  • German (Fabian Affolter)
  • Italian (Silvio Pierro, Francesco Tombolini)
  • Malay (Sharuzzaman Ahmat Raslan)
  • Hungarian (Sulyok Péter)
  • Brazilian Portuguese (Diego Búrigo Zararão)
  • Bugfixes:
  • Better support for multiple pages in tables (Dimitris Glezos)
  • Fixed GIT support for non-master branches (FH #17) (Christos Trochalakis)
  • Hide links to admin pages from homepage for non-admins (Dimitris Glezos)
  • Form validation in submit form (FH #51) (Diego Búrigo Zacarão)
  • Cleaner commit msg for decentralized VCS (Tx #3) (Dimitris Glezos)
  • Fixed redirect after submission to correct branch (Diego Búrigo Zacarão)

  Tarballs are available at http://transifex.org/wiki/Download.

  Thanks to all those who made this possible.

  Right. On to merge the next set of features now.

• at night, Tuesday 22 July 2008
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | Transifex 0.3 released (Comment!)

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• Presenting Transifex at TechCrunch Athens

• The highly popular among startups TechCrunch meets OpenCoffee in Athens next week, in an event that is anticipated to be big. Enterpreuners, investors, and geeks excited about technology get together to discuss cool ideas, present novel technologies, talk partnerships and a whole lot of other cool stuff.

  

  The event will feature a few speakers, and I’m pretty excited to be one of them. I’ll be presenting Transifex of course, discussing its technology and its potential to become a solid localization platform for a lot of projects on the Web. In my pitch I’ll explain the value Transifex adds not only to software projects and existing translation communities, but also to publishing platforms, blogs, and companies doing localization. I’ll also discuss the potential to gradually scale the platform to serve more and bigger projects, and how this momentum could bring back revenue.

  Since I like it quite, I’ll quote here the pitch abstract I prepared for the talk.

  Transifex is a platform that simplifies the translation of content accessible through the Internet. It helps producers of software, documents or web services to reach out to established localization communities to receive high-quality translations which are then stored directly on the source repository of the product. Professional and volunteer translators are provided with a distributed web service that accepts translation data and forwards it to the right projects. Transifex focuses on ease of use and scalability, and minimizes the maintenance overhead for the translators, the content providers as well as the system administrators. Transifex is already in production use. Red Hat, Inc. and the Fedora Project rely on it for the internationalization infrastructure of its software with its millions of users. In six months, Transifex served more than 2500 translations to 80 projects from 400 translators speaking 70 languages.

  The next steps of Transifex are to embrace more projects and localization communities and to continue working in making it the translation platform for the Web.

  So, if you happen to be in Athens on July 1st, do consider dropping by. Should be fun!

• at night, Friday 27 June 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web, Transifex | Presenting Transifex at TechCrunch Athens (Comment!)

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• Photos from LinuxTag

• I finally got around to uploading my photos from LinuxTag ’08.

  Highlight photo, the Fearless Leader and The Strawberry Vanilla:

  “Whoa!”

  The photos are also available as a zip package (12 MiB). There are some more taken in raw format (like the ones at the dinner) which will delay a bit until I figure out how to make NEF editing work properly again.

• at night, Monday 16 June 2008
  Foss, Linux | Photos from LinuxTag (Comment!)

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• Tip of the day: Virtual object properties

• Here’s a trick I learned today from Chris that’s worth sharing: creating “virtual” attributes for objects (in need for a better wording).

  Here’s a use-case: we have a person with a Name and a Surname — how could we access its full name in one string like person.full_name? You could do that with Python’s @property decorator:

  class Person(object):
   
      def __init__(self, name, surname):
          self.name = name
          self.surname = surname
   
      @property
      def full_name(self):
          return "%s %s" % (self.name, self.surname)
   
  p=Person('John', 'Doe')
  print (p.name, p.surname)
  ('John', 'Doe')
   
  print p.full_name
  John Doe
  

  Without the decorator we would need to access the string as person.full_name(), instead of the simpler and more intuitive person.full_name. Pretty neat.

• at night, Saturday 14 June 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Tip of the day: Virtual object properties (Comment!)

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• Meaningless framework statistics

• IRC Channel	Users
  #python	604
  #ruby	204
  #django	468
  #rubyonrails	349
  #turbogears	51

• at night, Thursday 5 June 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Meaningless framework statistics (Comment!)

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• LinuxTag Saturday update

• Reporting from beautiful Berlin.

  • Had the chance to discuss with a few code hackers like Harald Hoyer about features they need from Tx. Harald mentioned the need for more management interfaces for resource maintainers, like eg. administrating branches. I’m glad to say that Diego is already working on this as part of his GSoC project.
  • Folks from GNOME, openSUSE, Debian and Gentoo had also a bunch of good comments and constructive criticism. There is a clear need for an open localization platform right now in the whole established FOSS projects landscape. With some help, we could get a prototype out as soon as possible.
  • Thursday evening: LinuxNacht. Yup, that’s the night event where we go out and do two things: drink beer and drink beer. The reality was it also involved a lot of fun, good food and good music.
  • Being one of the last people to leave the place, it wasn’t easy to wake up at 8am in order to make it to the OLPC workshop.
  • Met with a couple of great folks from OLPC and discussed a couple of ideas of mine around content distribution, localization and the little laptop. I’m so happy they found them exciting enough to give me an XO to take home, hack on it and be a total showoff.
  • I managed to work a bit on code and attend a few presentations on Fedora land. Listening to Max‘s talk I realized how great it would be if every project’s leaders believed so deeply in transparency as the Fedora ones do.
  • One of the things I realized the past days is how much work has Novell done in the community space. There has been an amazing improvement on openness in every aspect of openSUSE lately. Respect.
  • I’m attending GUADEC next month at Istanbul. Until then I’ll work on bringing Tx to shape to be used by GNOME.

  I’m off to meet the CentOS folks to continue yesterday’s discussion to get them on board with Tx. It could be as simple as get their release notes reach out to more non-english users but also to consider localizing more stuff in their distro.

• at night, Saturday 31 May 2008
  Foss, Linux | LinuxTag Saturday update (Comment!)

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• LinuxTag baby!

• 

  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.

• at night, Thursday 29 May 2008
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | LinuxTag baby! (Comment!)

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• 3ο συνέδριο ΕΛΛΑΚ

• Τα λέμε εκεί σε 12 ώρες! Looking forward to it.

• at night, Monday 26 May 2008
  Foss, Linux, Mini-Post | 3ο συνέδριο ΕΛΛΑΚ (Comment!)

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• Open Coffee Patras I — Recap and photos

• Πάνε περίπου 2 μήνες όταν συνάντησα το Γιώργο Τζιραλή στην Αθήνα, στο fosscomm ’08. Συμπάθησα αμέσως τον ίδιο και τον τρόπο που βλέπει την επιχειρηματικότητα στην Ελλάδα, έτσι είπαμε χωρίς πολλά πολλά “γιατί δεν κάνουμε ένα Open Coffee στην Πάτρα”;

  Έχω ίσως ακουστεί να λέω πολλές φορές στο παρελθόν ότι δεν υπάρχει ανεργία στην Ελλάδα, με την έννοια της έλλειψης ευκαιριών καλής καριέρας, τουλάχιστον για άτομα με όρεξη. Τα Open Coffee είναι ένα τρανό παράδειγμα του πώς μπορούν να βρεθούν bottom-up αντίδοτα στις προκλήσεις αυτές. Εκεί συναντάς άτομα με ιδέες και όνειρα, και πάνω από όλα όρεξη να τα κάνουν πραγματικότητα, αλλά και άλλα άτομα που ήδη κατάφεραν να βρουν τρόπους να προσφέρουν αξία στην αγορά, και συνεπώς, να πάρουν χρήματα για αυτήν τους την προσφορά. Με άλλα λόγια: αν δε βρίσκεις τη δουλειά που θα ήθελες να κάνεις, γιατί δεν τη δημιουργείς ο ίδιος; :-)

  Όντας πια κάτοικος Πάτρας (η Αγγλία μου φάνηκε κάπως βαρετή, η Αθήνα κάπως μουντή) σκέφτηκα ότι θα ήταν ενδιαφέρον να οργανώσουμε ένα Open Coffee στην Πάτρα. Χαίρομαι πολύ που το ίδιο πίστεψαν και άλλα 50-60 άτομα, που την Παρασκευή μας συνάντησαν στο όμορφο εστιατοριάκι “Μαρκάτο” (πρώην Άρωμα) στον πεζόδρομο της Γεροκωστοπούλου. Όταν ξεκινήσαμε τις ομιλίες, το μέρος κατάφερε να είναι φίσκα στον κόσμο. Τέλεια! Φανταστικός τρόπος να ξεκινήσει ο κύκλος των Open Coffee και στην όμορφη πόλη των Πατρέων.

  Τελευταία με απασχολεί αρκετά κι εμένα τον ίδιο η πιθανότητα για μια δική μου startup, και συγκεκριμένα γύρω από το ελεύθερο λογισμικό. Θέλοντας να μάθω περισσότερα για αυτό το θέμα λοιπόν, ποιος καλύτερος τρόπος από το να ετοιμάσω μια παρουσίαση! Έτσι, πήρα το βήμα για ένα τεταρτάκι στο Open Coffee για μια μικρή ομιλία με τίτλο “Open source for fun and profit” και θέμα το πώς μπορεί μια επιχείρηση να βγάλει χρήματα από το ελεύθερο λογισμικό (διαφάνειες, ήχος).

  Το βραδάκι το περάσαμε παρέα με μεζέδες και το “λήξαμε” κατά τις 2. Ωραία μέρα! Ένα μεγάλο ευχαριστώ στην Αθανασία και τον Παναγιώτη του Μαρκάτο που έκαναν το event πραγματικότητα.

  Φωτογραφίες από το event στο:

  /photos/events/opencoffee-patras1/

  Περισσότερες φωτό από τον stylianosm.

  ‘Till next time (ας πούμε αρχές Ιούλη, όπως 4/7). Για ενημέρωση, εγγραφείτε στο ενημερωτική λίστα opencoffee-patras.

  Ενημέρωση 21/5: Χάρη στο Στέλιο Μυστακίδη, η παρουσίαση μου είναι τώρα διαθέσιμη και σε ακουστική μορφή (ogg vorbis, ~7 MiB).

• at night, Tuesday 20 May 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Open Coffee Patras I — Recap and photos (Comment!)

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• Fedora 9 release party

• Αποφασίσαμε να ρίξουμε ένα γλέντι για να γιορτάσουμε την κυκλοφορία του Fedora 9. Στην πραγματικότητα θα μαζευτούμε οι συνήθεις ύποπτοι στην πίσω αυλίτσα του Cinema café στον πεζόδρομο της Γεροκωστοπούλου στην Πάτρα να τα πούμε. Σας περιμένουμε με μπυροκαφέδες, μπλουζάκια Fedora, Fedora 9 Live CDs/USBs και όρεξη για flames.

  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.

  

• at night, Friday 9 May 2008
  Foss, Linux, Fedora | Fedora 9 release party (Comment!)

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• Summer ‘08 and Transifex

• I came to the conclusion that this summer (too) is bound to be an exciting one. Google Summer of Code has announced the successful student applications, and I’m thrilled to say we’ll have no less than three students hacking on Transifex.

  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)

• at night, Thursday 24 April 2008
  Foss, Linux, Transifex | Summer ‘08 and Transifex (Comment!)

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• Transifex + Pootle = Love (sooner than later!)

• Are you a geek student who’d like to have some thousands of open source contributors and a few millions of users thank you for making their lives a bit more beautiful? This summer you have the chance to do it by making Transifex and Pootle work together and giving the chance to translators to use an easy-to-use web interface to submit translations to their favourite projects. If you like Python, tools integration, and work with big impact, apply by the 7th of April.

• at night, Thursday 3 April 2008
  Foss, Linux, Mini-Post, Transifex | Transifex + Pootle = Love (sooner than later!) (Comment!)

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• Transifex Google Summer of Code ideas

• Better late than never, I’ve put together some ideas for Google Summer of Code projects on L10n engineering and Transifex. If you’re interested in any of them, please contact me directly for more information. I’d be happy to listen to your ideas as well! Get those applications in by March 31st! (potentially useful: Tx’07 application)

• at night, Thursday 27 March 2008
  Foss, Linux, Mini-Post, Transifex | Transifex Google Summer of Code ideas (Comment!)

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• FOSSComm ’08 recap

• 

  Πολύ το χάρηκα το FOSSComm (original post). Είναι εξάλλου κάπως προφανές ότι θα περάσεις γαμάτα άμα μαζευτείς μαζί με ένα μάτσο opensource-άδες στον ίδιο χώρο και αρχίσεις τις συζητήσεις και τα flames.

  Και το ότι μετά από μία ολόκληρη μέρα συνεδρίου συνεχίζαμε να τα λέμε σε κάποια ταβέρνα ή καφετέρια, λέει πολλά. ;-)

  Μερικά στιγμιότυπα που απαθανάτισα είναι όλα μαζί στη συλλογή Πρόσωπα του FOSSComm.

  

  Η παρουσίαση μου (όπως σχεδόν πάντα) δεν ήταν τελειωμένη μέχρι το προηγούμενο βράδυ. Όταν έστειλα τον τίτλο είχα σκεφτεί πως δεν ήθελα να διαλέξω “μία” κοινότητα που λαμβάνω μέρος, γιατί αυτό δεν έχει και πολύ νόημα. Γιατί να μιλήσω για το Fedora κι όχι για το Patras LUG; Έτσι ο τίτλος που έστειλα ήταν “Fedora, GNOME, Django, Patras LUG… λίγο από όλα”.

  Το βράδυ λοιπόν σκέφτηκα να μην παρουσίασω μόνο αυτό. Ναι, είναι πολύ ενδιαφέρον το τι κάνουμε σε αυτές τις κοινότητες και σε μερικές γίνεται πολύ ομαδική δουλειά. Όντας όμως ένα συνέδριο περί “Κοινοτήτων”, και με αρκετά καλό content, είπα να πω μερικές σκέψεις μου περί “Κοινοτήτων” γενικά, να δούμε λίγο το δάσος και να μελετήσουμε λίγο το context. (Εκ των υστέρων συνειδητοποιώ ότι ήταν από τις καλύτερες παρουσιάσεις που έχω κάνει ποτέ.)

  Μετονομασία σε “Community foo” λοιπόν.

  (OMG!!1!! Το πρώτο μου online video! I AMZ L33T. Thx Νίκο για την κινηματογράφηση. Το βίντεο μπορείτε επίσης να το κατεβάσετε ελεύθερα σε Ogg Theora μορφή.)

  Οι συναντήσεις μετά το συνέδριο ήταν απολαυστικές, ο ~keramida τα λέει καλύτερα. Γενικώς, μπορώ να πω ότι απόλαυσα το συνέδριο, και ότι ανυπομονώ για το επόμενο.

  ’till the next time, λοιπόν!

• at night, Wednesday 26 March 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | FOSSComm ’08 recap (Comment!)

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• Ο Linus για την “κοινότητα”

• Jim Zemlin

  Πώς ορίζεις την κοινότητα; Εννοώ, πώς βλέπεις αυτό το θέμα;

  Linus Torvalds

  Στην πραγματικότητα.. προσπαθώ να αποφεύγω να χρησιμοποιώ τη λέξη “κοινότητα” γιατί είναι παραπλανητική με τόσους πολλούς τρόπους. Είναι παραπλανητική με την έννοια του ότι δεν υπάρχει μία μοναδική κοινότητα — ο καθένας τείνει να έχει τα δικά του θέματα που νοιάζεται για αυτά και μπορεί να έχει να κάνει οτιδήποτε, ή να μην έχει τίποτα να κάνει με κάποιο άλλο άτομο που φαινομενικά ανήκει στην ίδια κοινότητα. Μια παραπλανητική σκέψη είναι ότι οι άνθρωποι σαν να μοιράζονται ιδανικά και στόχους, και αυτό δεν είναι αλήθεια. Συχνά συμβαίνει οι άνθρωποι να έχουν εντελώς διαφορετικούς στόχους — έχεις εμπορικούς πωλητές που έχουν δικούς τους πολύ ξεκάθαρους εμπορικούς στόχους και βρίσκεις άτομα μέσα στην ανοιχτού λογισμικού (λεγόμενη) κοινότητα, που δεν τους αρέσουν οι εμπορικές οντότητες, ειδικά οι μεγάλες. Ε, συχνά οι στόχοι είναι πολύ διαφορετικοί. Και το άλλο είναι, η κοινότητα τείνει να μην φαίνεται σαν μία οντότητα, αλλά επίσης βλέπεις ανθρώπους να είναι και μέσα και έξω από αυτήν.. Νομίζω ότι οι περισσότερες εταιρίες έχουν αρχίσει να μαθαίνουν σιγά σιγά, αλλά συνήθιζε να είναι ένα τεράστιο ζήτημα όπου οι εταιρίες μιλούσαν για το “Πώς αλληλεπιδρούμε με την κοινότητα;” Και εκεί η κοινότητα κατέληγε να είναι κάποια εξωτερική οντότητα, ενώ η πραγματική απάντηση πάντα κατέληγε να είναι πως δεν αλληλεπιδράς με την κοινότητα, απλά ενεργείς ως μέλος αυτής της μη-υπάρχουσας κοινότητας. Δεν αλληλεπιδράς με αυτήν, είσαι κομμάτι της.

  Συνέντευξη του Linus Torvalds στο Open Voices

  Photo by kazze (cc)

• at night, Thursday 28 February 2008
  Foss, Linux, Random | Ο Linus για την “κοινότητα” (Comment!)

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• FOSDEM recap

• Another February, another FOSDEM. And what a great experience it was. I can’t decide where to start from. From the joy of seeing familiar faces again and the networking with cool people full of ideas, or the beautiful Brussels and the delicious crêpes Suzette. What a great trip.

  I’ll try to document most of the interesting stuff that happened. This helps me track down TODOs for the next days and provides a nice report to see how stuff are progressing over time.

  Init, Mozilla BoF and beers

  Last year I was there with a couple of Greek friends. This time, the group was around 20 people. Not sure how that happened, maybe from a few of those encouraging emails to Greek mailing lists. It’s so fun travelling with friends, lots of laughs, especially with Themis from my local city’s LUG.

  

  The day before the event, the Mozilla folks organized a BoF to discuss with various people from the community L10n tools. Some cool projects were presented at the session, all revolving around tools used to translate stuff. A couple of presentations caught my attention, like Alexandru Szasz’s one about Narro and Friedel Wolff’s about Pootle.

  Like software development, translation engineering depends on the structure of the project being localized. Fedora’s challenges revolve around the fact that it’s a distribution of resources: we have many independent projects hosted around, each one with its own type, release schedule and quirks. Fedora is an aggregation of upstream stuff — even if some of them are built by Fedora engineers, and hosted locally. Under this light, we are called to cross quite a challenging river. With each tool we design and each process we adopt, we need to keep in mind characteristics that would make any combination of processes more complex: content diversity, hosting uniqueness, scheduling differences.

  
  Elevator in Atomium

  In this respect, I was more interested how these projects could fit in this distributed and upstream-friendly way of developing software and writing documentation, and the scalability that Transifex can ultimately achieve. Unfortunately, most of the tools don’t do well in this respect, and need some work to handle large numbers of projects (eg. 3+ branches of 80 projects for now, one of which has 6K strings in it). I invited people who are challenged by the existence of multiple systems and versioning systems in their ecosystem to find me at FOSDEM to discuss how their tools can use Transifex to overcome these difficulties, and it seems most of the tool developers were interested in such options (I wonder how difficult it is to have PHP and Python work together).

  Kwak Belgian beer

  At the evening, we hit the beer party. I have to admit, some Belgian beers are strong. Despite this fact, me and Yaakov of smolt fame managed to discuss a bit about server-to-server protocols and how we could achieve federating translation portals like fedora.transifex.org or india.transifex.org in separate servers, while retaining the benefits of a common configuration scheme. Challenging stuff, but with great potential of resource distribution and locality.

  Presentation and Mediawiki

  On Saturday the day started with a good breakfast at the hostel (no internet, no blogging) and the setup of the Fedora booth. I brought with me a 3m-tall Tux poster, which we hanged right behind our booth, along with Máirín’s new slick ones. Had some good discussions with Joerg about Fedora EMEA and spot about our L10n engineering progress.

  My presentation went really nice, despite some mic twists. I was happy to see a lot of people being interested in it enough to attend and listen to me for 40 minutes, but also to see that people from Debian, openSUSE, Ubuntu and Wikipedia were there. Some very interesting questions were asked, like if Transifex can be used to provide a common terminology or lexicon to translators, and whether Transifex can be used with Launchpad, Ubuntu’s main development (and translation) service. Unfortunately, Launchpad is closed-source software, so I can’t know how to make it use Transifex to solve its limitations with dealing with upstream.

  On the other hand, Launchpad hosts projects on a versioning system open to external contributions, so Transifex could be used to submit translations to projects hosted on Launchpad, just like any other upstream repo. Once our hooks are there and we can let any developer register his repo on Transifex, then any project hosted on bazaar.launchpad.net, code.google.com, sourceforge.net et al could use Fedora’s translation community for contributions.

  We also had a good chat with the Mediawiki folks that were there. They want to grow their community (and hence, their language coverage) and reminded me that one of the values Transifex has is bringing translation communities together. I also seem to have forgotten to mention in my talk that compared to the traditional direct access, we can now have pre- and post-commit hooks to validate, for example, PO files being uploaded in terms of syntax, encoding, etc, send commit notifications with high-level checks and messages, etc.

  Since we are thinking of using Mediawiki for Fedora’s wiki, I want to make sure that it has the i18n support we need, both in terms of the UI and the content. I am extremely happy to see upstream is so much helpful in this respect. I’ll investigate more on the extensions MW has to support i18n and try to report back sometime in the next weeks.

  Fedora L10n Meeting, openSUSE, and Pootle

  Since some of the most active European translators were present, we got together for a L10n meeting. We mainly covered topics around Tools, Community and European locality. I was very glad to hear the guys were feeling much more comfortable with the new tools. It seems despite the ups and downs we are having, the new way of things using a website to submit translations is much easier for newcomers (and for some experienced users as well) is more enjoyable. Always good to hear things are getting better. Got a lot of good suggestions too, and, after popular demand, it seems the possibility of getting Pootle setup on one of our publictest servers could arrive sooner than later.

  The openSUSE folks confirmed my belief that we have many common goals and point of views. They found Transifex a good idea that solves important issues, and worth of investigating and working together on it. In particular, they agreed that an authorization layer is needed for proper bridging between larger projects that have existing translation teams, like openSUSE and GNOME. It’s probably a good time to start working on it, and the separation of the commit mechanism from the web server. This way, a remote project could install the commit service on its own server, eliminating the need for creating SSH keys, etc.

  Finally, I had a good discussion with Friedel Wolff from Pootle about their future plans. They are planning for a bunch of exciting features, which put the project even higher in my scale. Pootle is undoubtly the most complete web-based translation management solution out there, and its developers are such a friendly bunch of good hackers. Which makes me want to download the source right away and start working on how to make it work with our environment and Transifex.

  

• at night, Wednesday 27 February 2008
  Fedora, Foss, Linux | FOSDEM recap (Comment!)

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• Ζυγίζοντας την ελευθερία

• paravoid

  Απορώ πως αντέχετε να κουβαλάτε 2 συσκευές. Όταν βάλουν gsm στο maemo, θα το πάρω, την επόμενη μέρα.

  glezos

  Dunno, βρίσκω λίγο βαρύ να έχω το n810 μου συνεχώς στην τσέπη σε σχέση με το 90g κινητό..

  paravoid

  Είναι πιο μεγάλο το βάρος του proprietary software

• at night, Sunday 17 February 2008
  Foss, Linux, Humor | Ζυγίζοντας την ελευθερία (Comment!)

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• L10n BoF at FOSDEM

• 

  The Mozilla folks are organizing a BoF on L10n tools at FOSDEM (thanks Sankarshan for the tip!). I’ll definitely try to make it there, since it’ll be interesting to see how Mozilla tries to solve their challenges and discuss our way of dealing with them.

  It seems that L10n is a pretty hot topic these days. Maybe it’s the realization of its importance — more than 5-6 out of 10 Fedora users probably have a desktop in their language, I’d guess this percentage is similar in other projects, or even higher. Or maybe it’s the emergence of the distributed development model, and the need to always work with upstream. One thing is definite though: the contributions from the community are simply invaluable — both for open source projects, but also for proprietary and enterprise ones. For software and also for documentation, websites, videos, everything.

  Every major project I’ve talked with seems to face challenges in this aspect — often similar, but each project’s goals have their own peculiarities. What I’m really happy about is that we’re well past the “problem” stage, and well into the “working solution” stage.

• at night, Friday 15 February 2008
  Fedora, Foss, Linux | L10n BoF at FOSDEM (Comment!)

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• Tip ημέρας: #ellak @ Freenode

• Μπορείτε να βρείτε αρκετούς Έλληνες open source developers στο Freenode, στο κανάλι #ellak. Α, και στα #ubuntu-gr, #fedora-el κλπ. Γιατί Freenode; Επειδή εκεί γίνεται όλο το open source development έτσι κι αλλιώς.

• at night, Friday 15 February 2008
  Foss, Linux, Mini-Post | Tip ημέρας: #ellak @ Freenode (Comment!)

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