invention

I have finally gotten round to fixing up the Translate Toolkit so that moz2po / po2moz can be properly used with language pack xpis from the Firefox 1.5 series.

  moz2po -i en-US.xpi -o firefox-pot/ -P
  # convert to .po files, edit / merge with other .po files
  po2moz -t en-US.xpi -i firefox-po-${lang}/ -o ${lang}.xpi -l ${lang}

And that's literally all that's needed! The next snapshot should work, and I'll aim for a release by Monday.

Wanting to run virtual machines on my Linux machine, I decided to hunt for a QEMU rpm. I found this nice page that explains how to build QEMU rpms for Fedora Core. However he uses the kqemu accelerator which is not open source and I would rather use qvm86 which is.

So I patched the spec file so it now builds qvm86. QEMU and qvm86 rpms, source rpms and spec file here. The kernel module for qvm86 is built for my CCRMA kernel so you may want to rebuild the source rpm... for which you will need compat-gcc-32.

So, OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released. If you've tried the 1.x series, this is much, much better. There's a very interesting interview with Louis Suarez-Potts available.

ith unusually good timing I've managed to get South African builds of all our latest translations produced the next day. You can download them from here. University of Pretoria has kindly offered to host files for us so these files will move there soon (at the moment its my home machine so access will be fairly slow).

Currently there are only Windows builds but as soon as I persuade it to build rpms on Linux they will be there too. Note that the icon set on Windows is (fairly) ugly and shortly to be replaced.

You can install the language packs on top of a standard OpenOffice.org 2.0 installation. This is really nice if you just want the standard install translated into your language.

We'd like to do testing following the QA tests - please use the translate-discuss mailing lists for your language (on the right of that page) to report back on this.

Next up for me is to integrate some translate.org.za branding, dictionaries and spell checkers, etc.

After being busy with lots of behind the scenes things and other work, I feel like I'm finally making progress on the following:

Building OpenOffice.org on Windows - I've been working with Michael Meeks to get ooo-build working nicely on Windows with the 2.0 series of OpenOffice.org builds, and my builds are running quite happily now. This will make it easier to manage patches, updating between versions etc (compared to using the standard OpenOffice.org build system). I plan to update the Windows building page on the go-oo Wiki as neccessary, some of my notes from build problems are in openofficebuild on the translate wiki.

Pootle - have fixed one or two small bugs and hope to keep on doing so, as well as planning to add better searching support so people can file bugs or suggestions for translations more easily.

Translate Toolkit - actually integrated some patches (from Matthias Klose) - there are quite a few more on bugs.wordforge.org sitting around for me to process, but its nice to be off the ground.

South African OpenOffice.org - which is what the build work above is for: I am now building OOo 2.0rc2 successfully, need to move to rc3, incorporate the latest changes, and get our branding, spellcheckers etc in.

A friend gave Danielle the Complete Flumps DVD for her birthday, and we've been watching them together as a family. This is giving us lots of fun and me some inspiration for Pootle quotes

It's Danielle's birthday today, and she's 30! What a privilege to have such an amazing wife!

Last night she fell well trying to stop James falling off some stairs, and twisted her ankle really badly, looks like the ligaments are torn. So its a hoppy birthday.

James has been starting to talk and yesterday he learnt how to say (something like) "Happy Birthday" so I recorded bits of him and mixed it with the song I wrote for Danielle to walk into our wedding to ... You can listen to it in Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format. - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.