invention

Some interesting articles to read when I came back from holiday. It seems Swahili free software stuff is moving forward in lots of fronts. Tomorrow I'm going up to Pretoria to train some of the KiLinux team on using ooo-build for building localized OpenOffice.org.

Kamusi Project Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is a good read, this is a great project.

Tanzanian government uses OSS for localisation shows how the government is realising the importance of free software.

Also found this article on the Guardian on Owning ideas a good read - not neccessarily technically right in everything, but has some good insight and is accessible to people unfamiliar with the debates... e.g. Patenting ideas rewards failure and makes success more difficult. ... This is madness. Ideas aren't things. They're much more valuable than that

Looks like Firefox 1.5 is going to be released shortly, thus making this a fun week Most of the issues in the translate toolkit for Firefox 1.5 have been resolved, there are still some that I'm working on but people seem able to produce their translations OK using it.

Well I clearly didn't manage to release 0.8, there has been a fair bit of patching and adding tests (particularly ensuring round-trip maintenance of source files in Mozilla, David Farning has been filing many bugs). And quite a few bugs in our bugzilla have been fixed.

I'm off on a week-long break so I've released 0.8rc5 (with a Windows build that the snapshots don't have) for anyone wanting to use the latest code.

I did my first real patch for OpenOffice.org: Support for multiscreen displays in Impress is now beginning to work (but more work to do as you'll see in the bug).

I got one of our OpenOffice.org 1.9.128 CDs, and I must say they look very nice. Very South African.

The thing about this OpenOffice.org is, it comes in all 11 South African languages.

Would you like Mrs Balls Chutney with that, sir?