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Tag archive: Tech/web

• Today’s “beautiful”

• $ gup -a 99 stats3.png 
  Uploading pictures to "Glezography/Weblog images"...
  Uploading "stats3.png" (1/1)...
  $
  

  Thanks to Julio Biason for gup. Next project: Package this as a nautilus extension/action.

• at night, Thursday 5 February 2009
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Today’s “beautiful” (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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• “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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Facebook’s engineering: Memcached

• Scaling memcached to handle 200,000 UDP req/s (latency 173 μs) and 300K with higher latency, from 50K of Linux’s memcached. Amazing feat.

• at night, Monday 15 December 2008
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Facebook’s engineering: Memcached (Comment!)

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• Athens Digital Week

• (English summary: See original ambassadors-list email. Athens Digital Week is a huge technology event in the Greek capital, targetted for the masses. Fedora will be present with a keynote from Max Spevack and a talk from me on Friday afternoon, which we’ll try to record, and lots of locally-produced swag. Machine-powered translation to English.)

  

  Αυτήν τη βδομάδα διοργανώνεται στην Αθήνα το Athens Digital Week, ένα event που υπόσχεται δράση, μπόλικο κόσμο και ωραία happenings. Φαίνεται ότι οι διοργανωτές έχουν φροντίσει να είναι αρκετά φεστιβαλ-ικό το event, και προβλέπεται οι συμμετέχοντες να περάσουν πολύ καλά. Good stuff.

  

  Το πιο ωραίο μέρος του event, φυσικά, είναι η ιδέα του να υπάρχει ένα ξεχωριστό track αφιερωμένο στο open source. Όταν πριν 2 μήνες συναντηθήκαμε με το Βασίλη Βλάχο και τον Νίκο Ρούσσο για να στήσουμε το track, φύγαμε από τη συνάντηση όλοι λίγο-πολύ ενθουσιασμένοι για το event. :-)

  Ο keynote ομιλιτής που επιλέξαμε είναι ο Max Spevack. Πολλοί γνωρίζουν τον Max ως Fedora Project Leader για δύο χρόνια (06-07) αλλά και ως νυν Fedora Community Architecture team manager. Προβλέπω ότι η ομιλία θα έχει πολύ μεγάλο ενδιαφέρον, αφού θα είναι σχετικά με τη μελέτη των ανοιχτών μοντέλων ανάπτυξης έργου, τραβώντας παραδείγματα από τη μεγάλη εμπειρία του Max, τόσο σε επίπεδο Κοινότητας όσο και επιχειρήσεων. Η ομιλία θα γίνει την Παρασκευή 8μμ, στο “Talk Zone”.

  Ειδικά για το Fedora τώρα, θα έχω μια παρουσίαση στις 4:30μμ, στο track “Ψηφιακές κοινότητες εν δράσει”. Στη μικρή παρουσίαση θα δούμε τη δράση της ομάδας Fedora, τον κώδικα και τα hackfest μας, τα release parties και τα επόμενα events που οργανώνουμε. Αν καταφέρω και πείσω τα παρόντα άτομα της ομάδας, θα τους φωνάξω στη σκηνή. :-)

  “Είναι η δουλειά μου να μετακινώ τα εμπόδια για να μπορείς να κάνεις τη δουλειά σου ελεύθερα.”

  Max Spevack

  Ο Πιέρρος Παπαδέας και οι ευγενικοί χορηγοί μας φρόντισαν να έχουμε Fedora swag να μοιράσουμε στο κοινό όπως εισαγωγικά φυλλάδια, LiveCDs και αυτοκόλλητα. Πολλά αυτοκόλλητα. Επίσης, θα προσπαθήσουμε να έχουμε καμιά 20αριά polo μπλουζάκια διαθέσιμα για όποιον θα ήθελε.

  Μέλη της ομάδας Fedora θα είναι στο event όλη την Παρασκευή και το Σάββατο. Θα έχουμε ένα μικρό booth με laptops και OLPC το οποίο τρέχει Fedora, και προβλέπεται να κάνουμε αρκετό hacking το διήμερο. Join us!

  Άλλες σχετικές παρουσιάσεις περιλαμβάνουν το track “Το λειτουργικό του μέλλοντος” με την ομιλία του Παναγιώτη Κρανιδιώτη και την αντιπαράθεση του Νίκου Ρούσσου με τους non-Linux αντιπροσώπους. Γενικώς όλο το απόγευμα-βράδυ της Παρασκευής προβλέπεται άκρως ενδιαφέρον! Δείτε το πλήρες πρόγραμμα του event (pdf).

  See you there. Happy hacking.

• at night, Wednesday 15 October 2008
  Foss, Linux, Tech/web | Athens Digital Week (Comment!)

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• Fedora on OLPC

• Ναι! Εκκίνησε το Fedora στο OLPC μου! Yeehaa!!

• at night, Wednesday 15 October 2008
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Fedora on OLPC (Comment!)

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• Λαμπρινίδης, διαφάνεια και ελεύθερο λογισμικό

• Φαίνεται ότι ο Ευρωβουλευτής του ΠΑΣΟΚ κ. Λαμπρινίδης κάνει μια σοβαρή και αξιόλογη δουλειά υπέρ της διαφάνειας και του ελεύθερου λογισμικού στο Ευρωκοινοβούλιο, συνοδευμένη με δημοσιότητα των ενεργειών του και αλληλεπίδραση με την Κοινότητα. Ας φροντίσουμε να έχει όλη τη βοήθεια που θα χρειαστεί (και φυσικά, την κριτική όταν οι ενέργειες του δεν είναι οι καλύτερες δυνατές).

• at night, Tuesday 14 October 2008
  Mini-Post, Software Patents, Tech/web | Λαμπρινίδης, διαφάνεια και ελεύθερο λογισμικό (Comment!)

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• Python 2.6

• Can’t seem to be able to stop reading the Python 2.6 release notes and go to the damn bed.

• at night, Friday 3 October 2008
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Python 2.6 (Comment!)

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• Experimenting with Django

• Lately I’ve been experimenting more and more with Django. With its recent 1.0 release, I feel more comfortable investing in it, since the project folks plan for long-term backwards compatibility, an issue that was a very sore point for the Transifex development team.

  Some of the things I like about Django include:

  • Since all components are developed by Django itself, the designers were able to structure them in a way to interoperate best, and compliment each other nicely. The pieces fit perfectly with each other and you can’t feel the glue like you do with Turbogears. This gives you the feeling that there’s one way to do a particular thing, following the Zen of Python.
  • In addition, Django ships with “batteries included”, so you get to have a bunch of additional stuff like feeds, testing, internationalization, caching. Pretty handy, given the fact that I like good integration where it makes sense, and when people who are smarter than me pick the best ideas, so that I don’t have to.
  • The fact tha Django follows the UNIX philosophy of “do one thing and do it right” allows us developers to work that way ‘by default’. Your service consists of a bunch of different applications each of which does a particular task: adds tagging support to other applications, user registration, OpenID, notifications, twitter, geotagging. All kinds of cool stuff, encapsulated and reusable.
  • Django seems very much influenced by the rules that govern Python development. You feel there’s a particular way to do each thing. Readability counts. Beautiful counts. No magic (aka explicit is better than implicit). Oh, and Guido seems to like Django too.
  • Django’s documentation is stellar.
  • I think I already mentioned the fantastic community around it. There are a dozen websites we use to learn all kinds of things, and people are writing blog posts all the time about the cool stuff they did today. And there are a gazillion of those.
  • In my eyes, it’s like Django striked perfect spot between having a hacker-centered community (amazing features, but you miss being slick, stylish and well-documented… think git, perl) and a user-centered community (more feature requests than patches, less plugins, more use of ’should do’ than ‘am doing’ but more documentation, blogs, etc.. think apple).
  • Django’s maintainers are smart. Very smart. And friendly and fun too.

  But probably most importantly, and probably as a result of the above and some other ones, it makes writing web applications fun. Not that TurboGears, Rails or CakePHP don’t. But for a lot of things, it feels like “it’s already been thought for you. Just go now, and get creative. Get stuff done”.

  About Transifex now. I admit that a number of times I have thought about how Transifex could be if it could leverage the benefits Django would provide. Also had some discussions with a few smart folks about the benefits and costs of a possible migration (rewrite?). I’m starting to think that a few things will improve a lot, like the out-of-the-box feature set, the development pace, the overall code quality and the maintenance cost. And these improvements will most likely be worth the cost.

  Hmm.

  

• at night, Sunday 21 September 2008
  Tech/web, Transifex | Experimenting with Django (Comment!)

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• On community support

• I’m in love with the Django community. It’s so vibrant it’s scary. There’s a solution out there for every problem I face. Amazing.

• at night, Saturday 16 August 2008
  Foss, Linux, Mini-Post, Tech/web, Transifex | On community support (Comment!)

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• Workrave: Protecting my health

• The one best thing I’ve done today: yum install workrave. Awesome. Thank you.

• at night, Thursday 14 August 2008
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Workrave: Protecting my health (Comment!)

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• Πώς να χάνεις πελάτες συμβουλή #24

• Κρατήσεις εισιτηρίων Blue Star Ferries: “Πρέπει να έχετε IE 5.5 για να δείτε αυτήν την ιστοσελίδα”. Μπορεί, αλλά μόλις αποφάσισα να μην τη δω.

• at night, Wednesday 6 August 2008
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Πώς να χάνεις πελάτες συμβουλή #24 (Comment!)

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• hg changeset ID locality

• Sudden realization: There is a possibility of an hg repo closely following another one to lose sync of changeset IDs (contrary to changeset hashes which are unique). Committing in both, pulling to each other and merging creates different intermediate IDs. I need to remember looking at the chanset ID in the upstream Tx repo before linking to the changeset when closing tickets.

• at night, Saturday 2 August 2008
  Mini-Post, Tech/web, Transifex | hg changeset ID locality (Comment!)

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• Απαντώντας σε spam

• Έχει κανείς κανένα έτοιμο απαντητικό email για ελληνικά spam; Ψάχνω για κάτι σοβαρό και με αναφορές στο νόμο.

• at night, Saturday 26 July 2008
  Mini-Post, Tech/web | Απαντώντας σε spam (Comment!)

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• Arrows

• 

  I sometimes lose myself for a few moments in this Unicode block.

  So… beautiful?

• at night, Saturday 28 June 2008
  Tech/web, Thoughts | Arrows (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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