Tag archive: Transifex
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Greek Prime minister talks about Indifex
Yesterday both me and Indifex were unexpectedly honored to be mentioned by the Greek Prime Minister as one of the best examples of innovative companies in Greece.
The Prime Minister was giving a talk at the biggest exhibition/fair in Greece (and probably the Balkans) which was broadcasted live by TV media and was being watched by a few million people (wow). In his talk about development and innovation, he mentions:
For us, sustainability means investing in people, knowledge acquisition, technology assimilation, investing in our own products, knowledge, history, skills, and aesthetic quality.
And we can do it, yes, it can be done.
People around us prove it every day. They are the revolution of the evident.
People like Dimitris Glezos, based in Patras, who started Indifex and created an on-line platform used by thousands of translators from around the world to translate computer programs in multiple languages.
(OMG!!!1!)
This totally caught me by surprise, and it's still kind of hard to believe. It's such an honor and a proof that we should be bold and take the step, dare to try new things and insist in pursuing our dream.
At this point I feel more motivated and psyched than ever. But most importantly, I feel grateful for everyone who is following our progress and respects our work. Your support means so much, and it's translated to our work as pure motivation.
ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ hosts a transcript of the talk (in Greek) and following is the video of the talk (the mention happens at ~16m).
Update 14/9:
The following day, TA NEA, one of the most influential newspapers in Greece, published a whole-page article (eng) on Indifex and innovation. A number of news websites run articles (eng) on the topic, and I also had the opportunity to give a couple of interviews on the Greek Radio.
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in the morning, Sunday 12 September 2010
Indifex, Transifex
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Greek Prime minister talks about Indifex (Comment!)
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Big-picture release translation status
A lot of things are happening lately in Transifex-land. We’ve been working hard in bringing transifex.net live, developing Lotte, the Lightweight Online Translation Editor, recruiting two more developers for Indifex, opening up a new office and stuff.
Been experimenting with new things too. One of them was various mockups to improve the way we present information to release engineers who need an overview of how a release looks like from a localization perspective. Take the XFCE default branch πpage, for example. It gives a good overview of the release, and I was wondering if we could make it even more rich by breaking up the statistics in the ones comprising the total percentage.
I’ve been playing around with a mockup for this. This came up in Inkscape:
What do you think? Does it make sense? Is it useful?
Update: I neglected to mention that the numbers and colors are random, but the idea is that they are completion percentages and red = low ones, green = high ones.
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at night, Saturday 6 June 2009
Foss, Linux, Transifex
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Big-picture release translation status (Comment!)
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jespern / django-piston / wiki / Home — bitbucket.org
Giving a good look at django-piston. Looks hawt!
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at night, Wednesday 3 June 2009
Django, Mini-Post, Transifex
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jespern / django-piston / wiki / Home — bitbucket.org (Comment!)
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FOSSComm recap
So, FOSSComm is now over and everyone has returned to their base after a really fun weekend. Kudos to the Linux Team of TEI Larisas for the excellent organization, and a big thanks to the TEI itself for sponsoring some great swag and coffee/food!
Day 1 ended with the side-effects from tsipouro and other poisonous liquides quite visible on a couple of hackers. A person had to sleep in our room, since even a few blocks’ walk was pretty much out of the question. Definitely out of the question.
- Drunk
- Wow.. the world is spinning…
- X
- I swear I just saw a Ferrari pass (in reality was a Mini Cooper)
- Drunk
- Whoa! Awesome…
I always find it fun talking with drunken people, especially if you pretend you’re wasted too.
Day 2 stared slowly, and by 11am the amphitheater was populated for Pierros’ talk about Fedora and its Greek community. His presentation was insightful on the areas where Fedora shines as a distribution and project with a particular emphasis on how friendships and fun are evident in most of our events. I really liked his graphical theme too: he emulated Fedora’s installer, anaconda, as the presentation theme. Neat. Costas’ presentation on FEL and Fedora Spins was quite interesting too, and the room was pretty crowded.
My presentation on Transifex went well too. I realized this was the first time I presented our work to the Greek hacker community, so I was a bit nervous too. I pitched why localization is important to both software and publication in general, and the current problems in this area. Then I run a live demo of Transifex and was able to finish in time for quite a few questions which filled all the gaps I left out of the presentation like translation memories, Launchpad’s shortcomings and translation team workflows.
The F11-el hackfest did OK, but not without surprises. Day 1 included some power surges and network unavailability, and day 2 some urgent calls from $dayjob. We did manage to get some translations done, testing of F11-preview media, and some prototyping for some team features in Transifex.
Later on in the day I had the honor of being invited to the OpenCoffee Larissa III to talk about hacking and entrepreneurship. Delved into some open source licensing and investment discussions too. Had one of those not-fresh yet delicious ‘cranberry & white chocolate’ cheesecakes of Starbucks.
The evening was.. well, my English vocabulary isn’t rich enough to describe it. It included some very good food, some insightful discussions on the powers that drive Linux forward (is it new users or contributors?) and what space each major Linux project fills in the open source landscape.
The highlight was post-dinner, when a disturbingly dangerous mixture of Fedora, Chania LUG and Larissa LUG folks got together with beers at the hotel and busted some guts laughing. Tears were runnig when the reception called at 3am to tell us to shut up, and Christos replying “We’ll think about it and get back to you”.
(Click on photo for names of people — help collect names/tweets)Had a very relaxing and insightful trip back with great discussions with security hacker Fotis aka ithilgore.
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at night, Tuesday 12 May 2009
Foss, Linux, Transifex
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FOSSComm recap (Comment!)
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Transifex appliance on cloud computing
Testing a Transifex appliance running on Amazon’s EC2 for customers. rPath rocks.
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at night, Friday 8 May 2009
Mini-Post, Tech/web, Transifex
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Transifex appliance on cloud computing (Comment!)
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Tx interview on greek radio
Tx was featured on a popular Greek radio station past week. I really enjoyed the discussion, where we had the opportunity to talk about the importance of universal access of information, open source and digital rights, beautiful code and entrepreneurship.
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at night, Sunday 3 May 2009
Tech/web, Transifex
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Tx interview on greek radio (Comment!)
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startup2.eu and Tx
Transifex on the startup2.eu European web 2.0 competition! Votes are openly accepted at http://www.startup2.eu/upcoming.php.
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at night, Tuesday 14 April 2009
Mini-Post, Transifex
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startup2.eu and Tx (Comment!)
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Transifex GSoC Ideas
RT: @transifex: Coder currently in University? Take a look at the Transifex GSoC Ideas @ http://transifex.org/wiki/Development/SummerCoding
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at night, Wednesday 11 March 2009
Foss, Linux, Mini-Post, Transifex
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Transifex GSoC Ideas (Comment!)
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Transifex in yum for Fedora 11
Reviewers needed for packaging Transifex in Fedora’s yum repositories in time for Fedora 11. Also, Python packaging gurus might want to drop their 0.02 to the Django application packabing thread on fedora-devel.
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at night, Tuesday 3 March 2009
Foss, Linux, Mini-Post, Transifex
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Transifex in yum for Fedora 11 (Comment!)
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Hacking in bed
Late-night hacking in bed feels pretty good, I should do this more often.
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at night, Tuesday 24 February 2009
Mini-Post, Transifex
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Hacking in bed (Comment!)
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Playing with data presentation
Working on making data presentation in Transifex lighter and more useful. Hide unimportant bits, expose vital ones, keeping a generally usable and friendly environment.
Feedback please! More shots to come in the next days.
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at night, Thursday 5 February 2009
Transifex
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Playing with data presentation (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.
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at night, Sunday 1 February 2009
Mini-Post, Transifex
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Theming Tx’s hgweb (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.
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at night, Thursday 29 January 2009
Tech/web, Transifex
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Transifex 0.3.2 released (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! :-)
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at night, Saturday 24 January 2009
Foss, Linux, Transifex
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Transifex accepting donations (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.
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at night, Saturday 10 January 2009
Fedora, Personal, Thoughts, Transifex
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A seat on the Fedora Board (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
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at night, Wednesday 17 December 2008
Foss, Linux, Indifex, Tech/web, Transifex
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Chasing a dream (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.
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at night, Sunday 21 September 2008
Tech/web, Transifex
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Experimenting with Django (Comment!)
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TC/OpenCoffee σε βίντεο
Πίσω στον Ιούλιο ο Γιώργος Τζιραλής με φώναξε να παρουσιάσω το Transifex στο OpenCoffee/Techcrunch event (recap). Τα παιδιά είχαν τη διάθεση να βιντεοσκοπήσουν τη σύντομη παρουσίαση, παρόλο τον χαμηλό φωτισμό και θόρυβο, και το βίντεο της παρουσίασης είναι πια διαθέσιμο στο opencoffee.gr.
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at night, Monday 15 September 2008
Mini-Post, Transifex
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TC/OpenCoffee σε βίντεο (Comment!)
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FUDCon Brno on its way
Yes! A small window of time to blog about what’s up in Brno!
T-1 FUDCon
- Vienna. Delicious food, museums. Tourist guides neglect to mention that apparently Vienna causes burned-out feet. And a good-night’s sleep didn’t seem to help.
- Travel to Brno by train was pretty cool. Diego found it a bit strange that taking a 1.5-hour train from Vienna can buy beer 700% cheaper. And mind you, some beers in Brno are darn good.
- Next day we’re at the Brno Red Hat office with David. More or less hacked all day long, among discussions with office-locals Marek, Josef and Radek. Some major things accomplished were a good discussion with Diego and Christos from Greece on plans for reusable data validations in Tx and API completion along with the CLI. I went into deep meditation for a few minutes drawing on the blackboard deciding how to handle the merging of all the branches we have around (7 of them?).
- Mexican lunch brought a discussion with the Anaconda team on their localization challenges, and tips on how to debug similar issues. Glad to meet in person a few developers like Nils Philippsen, Lubomir Kundrak who are using Transifex to localize their apps and with whom we had a few good online discussions.
- End of day0, had an International dinner which proved not international enough — no Czech person to help us communicate with the waitresses! Next time I’ll try to be careful for both what I’m saying in CZ and the way I’m waving my hands, as I managed to order a 3-person Greek salad for each person on the table. Oops.
- Learned a lot while walking to the venue of day one about the challenges inherit in the OLPC efforts. Change is difficult, and it’s even a bigger challenge
Hackfest
- Ah, the hackfest. Rough day for me — was on the mobile phone for most of the day with European Parliament members for some urgent issues. Had the chance to work on a few issues on our Damned Lies (@$#) instance, but not much time (and energy) left to do something more important. Looking forward for tomorrow.
Jumping a day later: Tx presentation went pretty well. We were around 20 people from various groups: Developers, translators, project managers. Got some good questions and more energy to get a common instance up and going soon.
Off for the social event now. More updates tomorrow.
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at night, Saturday 6 September 2008
Fedora, Transifex
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FUDCon Brno on its way (Comment!)
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Tx hacking at FUDCon
Here we are, at FUDCon Brno! A big thanks to the folks at the RH Brno office for taking care of everything we might need so far. Hotel, breakfast, venue, network — all is good, so off for a full day of hacking.
Transifex is one of the 6 hacking sessions today. I’m sitting with Diego and a few other hackers, and we’ve put up for consideration a few goals for the weekend:
- Package Transifex (both server and client) in Fedora (
yum installrocks) - Add support for translation statistics in Transifex
- Complete the API and add respective features in the CLI
The task for today is statistics support. The plan is laid out on the wiki page, and we’ll probably hack our way through: work will be split in file operations (find the translation files in the code, prepopulate the DB table with them), stats calculation (get a file, calculate stiff) and presentation (UI, templates etc).
- Package Transifex (both server and client) in Fedora (
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at night, Friday 5 September 2008
Fedora, Transifex
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Tx hacking at FUDCon (Comment!)