Betawikissä tuhannen euron porkkana

--- cut ---
Vuoden 2007 lopussa Siebrand asetti lokalisointitavoitteet MediaWikille.Tavoitteet olivat todella kunnianhimoisia. Näyttääkin siltä, että näihin ei päästä. Emme kuitenkaan aio luovuttaa ilman taistelua. Vielä on vajaa viikko aikaa saavuttaa nuo tavoitteet. Sinä voit auttaa saavuttamaan tavoitteet suomen kielen osalta.

Yhteistyössä Stichting Open Progressin kanssa pystymme tarjoamaan sinulle kannustusta. Tarjoamme 1000 euroa jaettuna kaikkien kääntäjien kesken, jotka ovat tehneet yli 500 uutta käännöstä MediaWikiin ja sen laajennuksiin vuoden loppuun mennessä.

Myös muut Betawikin projektit kaipaavat apua. Kiinnostaisiko sinua kääntää vaikkapa FreeCol-peliä tai Mantis-virheenseurantajärjestelmää. Ystävällinen ja yhteistyökykyinen ympäristö saattaa sinut vauhtiin sekä auttaa sinua kehittymään suomentajana parantamalla käännöksiä yhdessä.

Betawiki löytyy osoitteesta http://translatewiki.net.
--- cut ---
(lähde)

Katso myös http://lokalisointi.org/.

Pohjoismaista FLOSS-blogiyhteistyötä

Jos blogit.vapaasuomi.fi ei riitä, kannattaa harkita myös uutta pohjoismaista F{N}OSS-blogiyhteenliittymää: http://fnoss.org/planet/. Koskapa myös muut kirjoittavat sekä äidinkielellään että englanniksi, ei suomen kielikään haittaa.

Jeremiah Fosterin käynnistämä Planet onkin tervetullut lisäys, sillä en ainakaan itse tiedä kovinkaan paljon muiden Pohjoismaiden vapaisiin ohjelmistoihin liittyvistä asioista. Poikkeuksena ehkä Free Software Foundation Europen aktiivinen Ruotsi-osasto, joka on järjestänyt muun muassa FSCONS-tapahtuman.

Vastaavasti olen melko varma, että suomalaisten puuhista ei juurikaan Linusia enempää tiedetä, siitä huolimatta että täällähän tapahtuu vaikka mitä! COSS:lla on englanninkielinen sivusto, mutta noin muuten esimerkiksi vapaasuomi.fi tai eri jakeluiden sivustot jäänevät kielimuurin taakse. Kannattaakin välillä miettiä, miten kansainvälisiä yhteyksiä voisi parantaa. Kirjoitin vähän aikaa sitten FSFE:n wikiin Helsinki-sivua alkuun, tosin vain suomeksi :P Ja FSFE on nyt kuitenkin vain yksi järjestö monista.

Why I don't like blogger.

Hmm, I think it's happening again. I changed the Planet Ubuntu to only feed on posts tagged 'ubuntu' from now on, and now as an example tagged one post as 'ubuntu', in addition to this one I'm now writing. Google told me that using "Label actions" to change labels wouldn't affect the feed, but it looks like the feed timestamp for my previous, older post was again updated (not the "Published", but "Updated")... so I guess I won't be tagging any further old posts, unless it turns out the previous problem I had was that the Published stamp was also renewed and the Planet Ubuntu ignores Updated stamp.

If you have a solution, please tell it.

Update: Solution found! Thanks, artfwo.

Fixing Ubuntu translation problems in a CoC-adhering way

(sorry for spamming the planet earlier when I joined, I blame Blogger, and hi all)

It's not always easy to be an Ubuntu translator. Ubuntu has always gotten a good share of critic towards Launchpad, its translations handling and its lack of devotion towards KDE. Let's first list the problems briefly:

• Rosetta has struggled with translation imports, performance etc. each release, only slowly getting better. The struggle continues each release, but usually for different reasons than with the previous one.
  
• Fixing problems directly in Rosetta is impossible since Launchpad is closed source
• Initially some or many of the translation teams evolved chaotically, resulting in similarly chaotic translations in some cases, with no systematic way to fix all the problems until after Ubuntu 7.04.
• Some imports have historically been messed up, and the worst apparently were on the KDE side
  
• Ubuntu chose GNOME for the first flavor, and therefore KDE only for the second flavor.

There. Now that those are listed, let's just concentrate on making the most popular desktop distribution the best localized distribution there is with the aid of unique tools that are provided to enhance Ubuntu. The tools make it possible to translate every last bit (in main) regarding a distribution release, regardless of the multitude of release schedules or lack of with individual projects. If everything would be just mainline GNOME or KDE programs and distributions did zero customization (or integration), this would not be needed of course. As it is, Launchpad's Rosetta tool is still a bit unique. It's hard to have a devoted translator knowing each software's schedule for every language. An example is eg. F-Spot or any other individual, smallish project.

I have often felt alone pushing very visible i18n bugs in eg. installer and elsewhere, getting the source codes, trying to find the culprit, checking if all languages have the problem and trying to be as polite as possible when approaching all too busy developers, hopefully with ready made patches. I've enough free time only barely to check the most visible problems on the GNOME side in my language, since many problems are relatively complex and might be a combination of source code side problems and Rosetta's import problems.

So, the KDE4 Rosetta import problems are new, very bad but should not only result in bashing Ubuntu/Launchpad. Reportedly the main problem should also be resolved by week's end, let's hope so. After that, a lot of work remains to have top-notch KDE translations in Ubuntu. Here's hoping that if you do care about KDE translations (I would, if I simply had either free or paid time), don't just rant about the problems. Find out the package that actually has the problem, do exact bug reports, ask politely from the maintainer but only when you know what to ask, get the source code (if available ie. not Rosetta problem), do patches and PPA uploads with fixed packages. I'm not claiming such would not be done, I have just seen whenever I've booted into KDE in earlier releases that there are things that look like long-hanging fruits with that ugly English (it's ugly when you expect some other language:)) that could be fixed. On the GNOME side, like I stated, I've felt there are not too many people doing what I've done - helping in i18n of codec installation, ubufox, installer, hwtest, .desktop entries in default installation etc.

Of course the current KDE4 problems are bad, but we've had bad problems before, and there are bad problems on the GNOME side too :) Luckily there is also the possibility of post-release language packs, though I certainly hope there will be no need for those just because of the current situation. I'm also fearing how the documentation side turns out, since the deadline for documentation is 2nd of October, the delay from archive upload to Rosetta import completing is sometimes huge and the deadline for translations is 16th of October...

Regarding Rosetta-specific problems, I'd like to share a few additional observations:

• You need to do some ugly stuff to fix everything. Some import problems might not get debugged for a good time, so in addition to filing a bug report, please upload the upstream PO file as "Published upload". And I have to admit even I haven't filed bug reports of everything, currently unfiled is at least an investigation plea for why libc translation was never automatically imported in Finnish. I have filed some bugs, though, almost all fixed now.
  
• Go through everything relevant in Rosetta, yes browse through all 1400 template titles for those low-hanging fruits that can be fixed simply by making more translations. Check if anything highly visible is untranslated for one reason or other, and translate it.
• Do a basic installation of an Ubuntu flavor and use it in your own language - if you see anything not in your language, it's a bug. Try first figuring out if the problem is fixable by just translating something in Rosetta. You may also install additional language support (some big language like French or German might be good idea, since they have relatively good coverage) and check if the problem is global. Find out if the problem needs a source code patch, is a Rosetta import problem or something different.
• Sort by "Changed in Launchpad" in the template view for your language, revert whenever possible to upstream translations and commit fixes to upstream, see my instructions in a post to ubuntu-translators.
• Also see the same post and think if your language's Ubuntu translator team should be more strictly controlled.

In addition to those translation team members that are technically competent, I would hope that more non-native English speaking developers would use their native language, despite the fact that many computer hobbyists use English. The ordinary users don't use English, and even developers don't need to use English. With English, a non-native speaker might kind of lose the contact with the concepts of what the UI terms mean, since the images that words form in one's mind work the best only in one's native language. The same reason some even good translations sound funny to a English UI user, since they hadn't thought the "F-i-l-e" menu actually means a certain real-world thing adapted into non-real world's use.

If you got lost with the last chapter, concentrate on the previous ones ;)

Clutter usage increases in future Nokia devices

Just a tidbit from maemo summit I'm visiting: Clutter will be available and used in the so called "maemo 5", which is an SDK and eventually results in a device from Nokia. Clutter is a OpenGL "2.5D" library, which means in practice easy manipulation of 2D objects in 3D space, with all the OpenGL smoothness you will want. Even though I still wonder if it will ever be that Nokia devices will use 100% free software in the whole functionality, like is possible with the Openmoko devices, I definitely have to congratulate on choosing Clutter. Good usage of Clutter will show example to others, too.

Hopefully Clutter usage will also increase on the desktop side, as I think it's the enabler of more aesthetically pleasing user interfaces in all kind of devices. Just a random example of a suggestion for Ubuntu using new gdm face browser.

Neo FreeRunner does music, GPS, Internet and more...

I received my Neo some time ago and have been playing on and off with it ever since. Granted, it's not end-user ready indeed and even more courageous people should be ready to do some heavy learning. It's not that it wouldn't be mostly installing correct software and tweaking a few settings, but the fact that it's the first real phone using free software means there is a lot of low-level stuff that is being created along with Openmoko.

Anyway, things have progressed, initial GPS issues were fixed by the great Openmoko kernel team and generally the community has found fixes for anything I've thought asking about.

Currently the status I have is that:

• GPS works great, I'm using TangoGPS with OpenStreetMap to a great success - and this is one thing that's working very well out-of-the-box (now that the GPS fix issues are resolved)
• WLAN works - I initially used USB networking as specified in the Getting Started page and shown in the picture on the right (mini-USB connector), but now I simply click WLAN on and login to Neo from my laptop if I need to do some more heavy tinkering
• Music playing (Ogg) works, see picture below - mixer settings had to be tuned for adequate party speaker sound quality, but Neo is now ready for some DAP (Digital Audio Player) action as well (extra battery pack recommended for longer use...)
  
• Internet via GPRS didn't work at first, but I found a way to initialize it correctly and now it's just a matter of clicking a button - Neo's current software distribution comes with WebKit-based browser that does the job for basic browsing; my main usage has probably just been fetching AGPS data (and soon DGPS) for GPS speedup
• Oh yeah, as the final item - it works as a phone! This is actually not so straight-forward as one would think, and related to the previous note about low-level stuff... how about creating virtual modems you offer via gsm0710muxd and assigning GPRS and gsmd to use them ;)
• I also imported of all my contacts from my previous phone for the Evolution data server used currently in Neo

I have been trying to do my part in updating Openmoko Wiki with information I've found myself or on mailing lists, and I hope others will continue to do the same for everyone's benefit. I have also created a Finnish main page for the Openmoko project.

Here's an image of Neo connected to Altec Lansing inMotion iM4 speakers:

Neo FreeRunner has its quirks and problems, especially as the current software task has been abandoned in favor of the new "ASU" stack, which of course isn't ready (and which will be replaced with FSO at some point...), but still: it now works for about all the stuff I've used phones before, and some new things like GPS and of course the total freedom to change anything anywhere in the software.

It's an enormous promise, and I'm already getting delivered a lot of the good stuff.

Neo FreeRunner is now available, order yours

Neo FreeRunner, the GSM/WLAN/GPS phone to free your mind, is available now! Go ahead and order yours:

• pulster.de (Germany)
• bearstech (France)
• TrueBox Technologies (UK)
• IDA Systems (India)
• openmoko.com (US and the rest of the world, currently only 850/1800/1900 variant since the first hundreds/thousands of 900/1800/1900 variants were all sent to European re-sellers)

Yes, it has no 3G, as a proper chip suitable for a free driver implementation was not found in time, and the point was not to make yet another device full of compromises to users' freedoms. Everything else it probably has. Except for final software which it does not have, so please keep in mind this is still meant for developers at this point of time even though the hardware for this first device is now ready. It does work as a phone (calls, text messages, calendar) out of the box, though.

And of course I've ordered mine already, as part of a group sale! Though now that we have European re-sellers, the benefit is not as great as the postage costs aren't too big anyway.

Ubuntu Developer Summit at Prague

I thought I'd have provided nice photos and all that during the UDS-Intrepid (ie. the developer summit for the 8.10 releases of Ubuntu family, nicknamed "Intrepid Ibex"). All the nice photos on my camera are not just very easily available without the specific USB wire, and I actually doubt it'd be easy to find xD card reader since it's such a rare format. So, instead of getting multitude of crisp, noise-free photos from the best low-light digital compact camera on the market, you'll be getting one really crap camera phone picture from a phone with one of the worst and cheapest phone cameras there is! So, enjoy!



Anyway, it's been great to finally meet some of the people I've discussed on IRC over the years about eg. fixing Ubuntu I18N bugs. Just last night in the bar I was sitting with a bunch of Ubuntu people, knowing maybe one of them before-hand. After something like half an hour the guy on my left started talking about his package uploads etc. which sounded strangely familiar. It turned out he was Marc Tardif to which I had just a few weeks ago provided a small (but pretty visible/important for non-English users) i18n patch together with Finnish translation of the hwtest program he's maintaining. And things like that happen basically all the time here: "oh, it's You" (and mostly in a positive tone ;) ). It's a pretty good thing that at least here at the conference place we have name tags, especially for first-timers like me.

I still have a grand plan to find the Bluetooth guru around here and give him/her a Bluetooth dongle which is probably breaking some USB/Bluetooth standards but could be maybe made to work properly by someone else than me. I've two of those actually so I'd be happy to give this one away.