dB

Mozilla has announced localised Firefox Download pages.  Try the tasty Afrikaans page.

All I can say is that I'm very happy today, we've been frustrated by this for a long long time.  But the new l10n teqam is listening.  I'm greatful for that.

Now to the task of convincing Axel that en-ZA is localisation and would allow us to corner another section of the browser market in South Africa.

I've just completed getting python-Levenshtein packaged for Fedora, it's currently being pushed to Fedora 9 you can help by testing and commenting on the package.

With the release of a desktop version of Fennec, Mozilla's new mobile browser, it is now possible for me to really test and experiment with it.  I'll leave the general browser discussion to Tectonic.

One of the aims of Virtaal is to exploit the cross-platform nature of Python and deliver a platform neutral translation tool. We still want to tool to feel like it belongs on the platform; menu placement, icons, file dialogues, etc. and this requires a little bit more work.

The Translate.org.za team does all of its development on Linux so we are porting to the other platforms.  Let me give you some ideas of what we've done and issues that we've seen:

Friedel, Walter and Wynand have been busy releasing new versions of the Translate Toolkit, Pootle and spoiler warning a new translation tool.

Also Wynand has been working on a OpenDocument Format converter.  I've just tested it on the OpenDocument 1.2 draft7 spec.  Nothing like taking a huge document and putting the converter through its paces.  Its early days lots of custom [[placeable_N]] in there.  Check out Wyand's branch called odf-xliff-first-try.

Here is a picture of the two together:

I attending the PanSALB terminology standardisation workshop over the last two days and gave a presentation on technology that Translate.org.za uses and has developed to assist in terminology development.  Bad timing with all the work I have to do.  I'll hopefully write more about the event and my impressions later.

GNU is 25 years old and the FSF celebrates with a video from Stephen Fry (which you can translate).  And Mako reminds us that a generation is 25-30 years thus we have a whole generation that has been birthed in the life of this software.  Perhaps my daughter's generation will wonder why people didn't see Free Software as obvious.

In a country like South Africa, famed for racial discrimination during apartheid, you would think that the Independent Electoral Commision (IEC) would be very sensitive to the issue of discrimination and exclusion.  If you're an Internet Explorer user you might want to experience the discrimination yourself (or try Google Chrome, Firefox, in fact any other browser to face exclusion)

py lib 0.9.2 has been released and I've created Fedora packages (src.rpm, debug, spec)

Manhy of you might not now but I've been a member of the South African Standards Burea committee that looked as OOXML, that's not our only job but from the work we did you wouldn't be wrong inthinking otherwise.  I've remained pretty quiet about the going's on  there, its tempting to write but honestly I think it improper. But now as the process winds its way towards OOXML actually being published, I feel I can speak more freely.