invention

Just leaving to go to a training camp for the Swahili Localization Project in Arusha, Tanzania ... should be fun but already missing Danielle and James and I haven't left yet!

Will be quite a comprehensive training camp and I'll be doing a session on using the translate tools for localizing Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc...

Over the last week I've started development on Pootle, a simple web portal for localization... named after a Flumps character thanks to Danielle's suggestion.

Its been really fun and the progress has been quick. Once its workable we'll try get a public implementation somewhere. Just needs a few additions (user registration, etc).

I just use PO files on the disk and aggregate stats on them to make it nice and fast. Hopefully will use it in Tanzania for our upcoming training course

Looked through Firefox and Thunderbird extensions and have a setup I like now...

Firefox

• Web Developer - indispensible for hacking around with sites.
• JavaScript debugger Venkman - fantastic, always used this in Mozilla and now I can use it from Firefox. Now if only I could plug it into IE :-)
• ChatZilla - so I can chat on freenode.net
• CuteMenus - nice icons on menus
• Disable Targets for Downloads - what it says
• Duplicate Tab - useful because it duplicates the tab's whole history
• miniT (drag and drop tags) - really neat, lets you drag tags aroudn to change the order or even between windows
• Nuke Anything - lets you delete any object from a web page you are viewing
• View Cookies - simple addition of Cookies to Page Info
• Image Toolbar - makes it easy to save / copy images
• OpenBook - gives you the whole tree by default in the Add Bookmark dialog.
• FoxyTunes - lets you control a variety of music players. I want to use it to control Music Player Daemon but authentication broken at the moment.

Some language ones:

• Translate Page - translates web pages using Google
• Translate - translates web pages using BabelFish and Google

Thunderbird

• EnigMail - OpenPGP message encryption and authentication
• QuickReply - Lets you reply in the mail window instead of opening a new one. Very nice, I've done some development in the past, still a few bugs
• ClearSearch - Adds back the Clear button for quick searching messages
• Show SMTP Username - this crashes thunderbird sometimes
• Mail Redirect - Allow to redirect (a.k.a "bounce") mail messages to other recipients

Did some work at the Jubilee Linux lab (5 old slow computers each with their own version of Fedora - 4 at the moment because one of the power supplies has died...)

upgraded to xfce-4.1.90

This is the latest version of xfce (the lightweight desktop environment we use). It's supposed to be a beta, but for the use at the lab it should be perfectly stable (I've been using it at home to test). The main reason for this is the kiosk mode (next item) The other things the latest version does that was a major missing element in xfce 4.0 is you can have a start menu on the panel (similar to windows). I haven't enabled this at the moment as people are only using a few apps

set up kiosk mode

This version of xfce has what is called "kiosk" mode which enables the administrator to set up what settings users are allowed to change (panel icons, desktop settings, etc). I have set this up so the normal user can't change anything, and set up some default options so it should work exactly as wanted. Note that it does make it slightly difficult to actually change the settings if you want to override it.

set up the default panel

I have set up the panel to contain a link to terminal (which most people won't use), openoffice.org, mozilla, help, log out, and the time. I have also moved the workspace switcher from the panel (at the bottom) to the taskbar (at the top)

cleanup

We had very little free space on some of the machines (20MB!!!) so I did some clean up of packages we don't use. - removed Omni printing libraries (57MB) - removed OpenOffice.org i18n libs (250MB) (fedora installs all the languages avaailable by default!)

Looking nice now...

Worked quite a bit on ooo-build stuff the last two days.

Got cvs access sorted out so I can add my patches directly.

Got a full + complete build working on Fedora using src680-m55 with ooo-build head. Started trying to get it going with mingw.

Realised I was messing up passing configure options to configure in my dobuild script. This meant that trying to recompile and switch from kde back to gtk was fruitless. Have run a new build and looks a bit better now...

Took a while to sort out mingw (mostly because of above config options), leaving it building now. Haven't got ccache working there yet (gets confused about paths) but that will help a lot. Anyway, just leave it and see if it builds tonight. (Note: CLASSPATH was set to something that caused problems with ant). Only have 400MB free on my Windows machine so building on a Samba share, will probably make it even slower

In fact it fails to build stlport. So I probably need to look at the 1.1.x cws for mingw and see if I can get that going...

Well I've been trying to build OOo 680 (2.x series) using ooo-build, which doesn't quite work yet.

I'm putting the patches I'm using at http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/ooo-2.x-patches/ along with a patch to apply to say what to use, what not to use.

Hopefully it will build someday ...

Interesting logic from Mr Rumsfeld:

Several hours after his appearance, Mr Rumsfeld issued a statement saying his comments had been "regrettably misunderstood" and that he had acknowledged there were ties between Osama Bin Laden and Iraq based upon CIA intelligence.

This included "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad", he said.

Aha! I have "solid evidence" of the presence of al-Qaeda members in the USA (admittedly, its old, from about September 2001). They must be funding them!!!

I didn't have a laptop at OOoCon 2004 and didn't manage to write anything in detail then, and have been busy since, so this is my executive summary...

Was fantastic meeting loads of different people, lots of whom I've been in contact with before but not met in real life... and attending some great sessions. For me the discussions afterwards were often the best part. Was able to make some contributions about how difficult the localization process currently is, and what we could do to improve it. Also a lot of discussion on how to make it easier for developers / others to contribute to OpenOffice.org.

Javier Sola who runs the Khmer project in Cambodia: he uses our translation tools and says that in fact they're the only viable way to translate Mozilla into Khmer and other languages that use Indic scripts. Was fantastic to see the depth and breadth of the project - translated Firefox and Thunderbird, nearly finished OpenOffice.org, has developed a public domain Khmer Unicode font, and is writing lots of documentation on the localization process, using our tools as a basis. Were staying in the same place and on the first afternoon, managed to bash out a final version of moz2po / po2moz so that you can do a round-trip from xpi to po and back again.

Pavel Jan�k has been absolutely fantastic doing our OpenOffice.org builds for us, so it was nice to meet him finally and say thank you, though I'm still not sure he realizes what a help it is. Since the conference we're now working on getting our tools working with OOo 2.0 and generating PO files automatically for all languages...

Various people from Sun were there, including Eike Rathke, Joerg Barfurth, Ingo Schmidt, and others... Was great to hear about new features for OOo 2.0, especially the new installers and how they will be able to produce language packs etc.

Michael Meeks did a great session on building the developer community, at which I signed a JCA, thus making all the patches I'd previously had integrated legal

Dan Williams did a talk looking at various possibilities of migrating the OpenOffice.org resource system to be a loadable-on-demand XML based system, possibly with caching. This would be great and could make localization a lot simpler by splitting out the text strings into a separate file for each language that could be replaced on demand.

Caolan McNamara ran through debugging/profiling techniques for OpenOffice.org and how to make them work as God intended.

Chris Halls, the Debian maintainer for OpenOffice.org, suggested ways to simplify the build process - breaking down the source into manageable parts, not including external libraries, providing the build tools as binaries, etc. Man, I want all that yesterday!

Had a great discussion at a Chinese restaurant with cph and Jacqueline McNally on ways to make it easier for new developers to get involved. Going to have READMEs for each module - yay. Also suggested having janitorial / TODO lists like the Wine project does.

All in all, was a fantastic conference, and really glad I was able to go.

Found this really helpful article describing how to mix sounds automatically with ALSA (linked from a review of Fedora Core 2) and so now mpd can play in the background and other programs can still make sounds ... yay

Beware! I apt-get dist-upgraded my system to the latest fedora development rpms, and part of that upgraded dev to udev. All very nice. Except I couldn't open a terminal. So I rebooted. And then it wouldn't even boot up properly because it couldn't allocate a console. So I had to use a rescue CD to create the /dev/console node, then it was fine.

See udev broken (removes dev, gives "unable to open an initial console" warning on reboot) - this was marked as NOT_A_BUG - fantastic!