Silme 0.5.1 carries 5 changes, each of them making it a little better. In particular it fixes bugs that were blocking Adrian Kalla’s version of compare-locales to get its first release.

So, what’s new in 0.5.1?

• New method: silme.diff.EntityList.has_entity() should make testing entities in diff faster
• Two bugs in silme.io.jar that made it impossible to use
• Performance improvements in silme.io.jar.get_package() (can we upload silme script to Fastest Firefox? ) by just ignoring to load zip entries for directories
• We don’t close ZIP file in get_package if we didn’t open it there. It was a bug that caused silme.io.jar to fail with subpackages
• Major rework of URI schema accepted in silme.io.jar. It is now possible to do:

  ioc = silme.io.Manager.get('jar')
  l10npack = ioc.get_package('jar:chrome/package.jar!locale/ab-CD/package')

This is the very first minor release in the history of Silme projects, and we’re happy to make it!

You can download it from HG repository or use pypi for silme0.5.1.

I’d like to thank Adrian who helped by identifying bugs and writing patches for this release. You may also want to check his newest project which uses Silme to create a sleek localization extension for Komodo! It’s called Koala

Next in line is Silme 0.7 which will bring new features and optimizations and we’re planning an alpha release to happen early next week. If you’re interested in hacking localization related code and never tried silme, it may be a good moment to give it a try and help us on the way to 0.7

It was one of the most complex and most challenging talks I ever had to give. It was about the Mozilla. It was about who we are, and how we try to describe ourselves. About how we think of ourselves and the challenges we face.

The rationale for doing such talk is to do what we have to – to over-communicate. To manifest ourselves and explain ourselves to people who care about the web. To rephrase some questions that people pose – about the goals, about how to measure a success, about how to make sure we stay meaningful while staying true to our mission.

Explaining Mozilla and explaining the kind of semantic space in which we brainstorm these days is an extremely complex goal. It’s harder than speaking about new experiments and features that we work on. It’s even slightly against what people want to hear about. But I believe it’s vitally important. We have to express ourselves and explain ourselves and I decided to give it a try at eLiberatica.

Bonus points goes for the fact that I wasn’t speaking in my native language, and also the audience listen to such a complex talk in a foreign language.

Despite all of that, I believe it went well. I feel thankful that people bared with me through all those topics, and I hope the deck may be useful for other speakers willing to mix and mesh it

I definitely recommend a keynote version for the best experience, but pdf dump provided for those who don’t use keynote:

• Entry at library.mozilla.org

It can’t get any simpler than:

easy_install silme

Also, if you missed it (I know you did), here comes the very first documentation. It comes out of doxygen (which is probably the best of the worst choices for python docs) but it works and it’s there for your convenience.

If you happen to be a master of doxygen and you know how to make it work better, contact me pls!

Description

Today, I’d like to introduce you to a new Mozilla Community Theme style guide. MCT Style Guide is a document that explains the design decisions made by the theme authors that allows people who use the theme to extend it following the original concepts and keeping their new elements in sync with original one.

Rationale

Mozilla Community Theme was created to give us a fresh theme that can make it easier for communities to set up a professionally looking website without having to look for a designer or crafting something on their own. Three months after the release, MCS is becoming a popular option among our communities when they’re making their choices with regard to the website. We like to think that the reason is because we offered maximum freedom and flexibility with this set, letting people do what they want, while providing high quality of the design itself.

One element that we did not cover very well until today, was how to extend the theme. How to move forward. Not only modify what we gave you, but also add new elements, theme new websites, or T-shirts, or posters… That’s where the Style Guide hits.

Style Guide

Style Guide is a short book that presents the concept choices together with list of modification options that, in the theme author’s opinion, will match the theme and let you keep the unified look and feel no matter where you’ll go.

What’s exciting about it, is that it opens communities to a new level where they have all the tools and resources that usually professional web agencies have and they can develop their skills and get accustomed to the new concepts. While working on our hobbies, we’re getting real experience that translates directly into our portfolio.

This Style Guide lets you dig into:

• color palettes
• typography decisions
• layout and grid models
• branding options
• methods of preserving space and light between text blocks that influences readability of the text
• texture options that influence how the website looks
• and others…

We hand this to you, so that you can experiment and develop the theme further or just customize it to your needs. What’s really important and exciting is that as all other parts of this project, the style guide is open! You can download Indesign document or editable PDF document and hack the Style Guide itself.


I’d also like to use this moment to thank Tara Shahian and Seth Bindernagel who have worked together with the theme authors on this 1.0 release of the guide.

So, grab it here and… we’re accepting patches

Release

So, here we are, Silme was asking for a release for long enough and I postponed it over and over so it’s time to make the cut. Today, I’m proud to announce the very first official release of Silme – python l10n library. Silme has been announced to mozilla.dev.l10n long time ago, and since then it has been continuously developed in a small, but quite interesting project structure with support from Adrian Kalla, Stefan Plewako, Ricardo Palomares, Staś Małolepszy and management guidance from Seth Bindernagel.

It’s very, very hard to explain Silme concept to those who never tried to work on localization development.

Let me try: It’s like a DOM API for localization.

Works? Probably not… Well. Let me try the descriptive way. Silme is a toolset for a developer who wants to work on localization tools. It can read localization files, it can write them, it can modify them, it can search through them, it can process them, merge, split, localize and help you get some statistics out of the localization files. It probably can juggle them, although support for this is rather experimental.

Standing on the shoulders…

Silme is definitely not the first library of that kind and has been created basing on lessons from TranslationToolkit masters, who for years lead the development of most widely used l10n dev library in the world. TT is not the only one. In fact, anyone who created a tool related to localization had to create a library for it but it was probably limited to on-demand needs, and was treated without enough love and respect from its masters.

The reason is that number of people working on localization tools is… let’s put it that way. The number could not qualify for the big number competition. Even for a descend number in fact. And those who do work on the tools, are really extremely focused on getting the output here and now, and everything that has to happen on the way from PO or DTD file to the moment when you can see a window with a textbox asking you to translate the string is less important than the actual UI and workflow. Thanks to this approach we at least have some tools that we can offer to localizers and make their life happier.

The one particular example where the situation is different is the world of gettext, with its great tools like KBabel (now Lokalize), Pootle, PoEdit and swarm of little helpful scripts around Translation Toolkit project.

Format equality

And now, Silme tries to replicate this success on the cross-format level, giving some sense of self-respect to the non-gettext formats like DTD and Properties. In fact, Silme is intended to be format-neutral with support for as many formats as possible. Gettext, DTD, XLIFF, TS/QM (Nokia QT) and others. It also can read entities directly from SQLite or MySQL and we’re experimenting with grabbing entities directly from an HTML file. We hope that this will open an easier way for developers around the world to craft their own tools, or new projects to focus on the actual tool, not having to reinvent the way to parse entities or compare them.

More that that. We hope that new localization formats and languages will have an easier start being just able to reuse everything that Silme has to offer and tie it with their vision and potential. Yes, L20n may be that language.

Some numbers

Silme 0.5 is a result of countless hours of testing, coding, debugging, making mistakes and fixing them, analyzing performance, and introducing bottle necks only to spend another couple days trying to remove them. Adrian, in particular, spent significant amount of time sending me testcases and letting me know that I broke everything with my shiny, new API, but all in all what we have here is a pretty neat piece of code, if you ask me.

What you see on the right is a cute result of hg activity script  run on all 385 commits to our HG repo. Not sure if its self-explaining so left me give you a hint. 35 commits per day is a big number. (and our module owners are not in the race, they have some godlike powers for sure).

In terms of LOC, the stats are as follow:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Silme library        49       580       413      3784 x   4.20 =       15892.80
With scripts etc.    78       982       529      5574 x   4.20 =       23410.80
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(data from CLOC)

Done?

Ha! Of course not! Silme is just at the beginning of its journey and although we already can see first projects investigating potential use of it, we have a long way ahead till we can mark stable 1.0 release, and claim success.

In particular, on the Wiki page you can read about our plans for the next release – Silme 0.7. You can also find basic tutorial (work in progress) and a few example code pieces that you can use to figure out some bolts and nits used in here.

As this post gets to its closing, and your excitement about the potential uncovered by the tales of python libraries, localization developers and mysterious land of happy i18n, l10n, l12y and other abbreviations where all strings fit the space, all words have perfect translations, declensions and countless plural forms are well handled and…

Umm… where was I… ah! yea. So… it’s time for me to close this gathering and let you surf ahead on your Internet waves. And if you happen to find this project interesting, don’t hesitate to step by our newborn IRC channel – #silme on irc.mozilla.org and cheer the brave men and women who work there.

From now on, you can expect short incremental updates on the way to Silme 0.7.

We’re going to talk about the past, present and the future, vote for a team leader, plan Ultimate Tech Dictionary (called “Godzenie Wody z Ogniem”) and discuss opportunities for improving our day-to-day operations.

You can find more info at wiki.aviary.pl, and photos from past all-hands on flickr.

Now, I’m wrapping up to get on the plane to Brussels for FOSDEM 09!

If all goes well I should regain control over myself from Mr. JetLag soon. Right in time for the most exciting event in the year. I can’t wait for Mark’s keynote!

The rules

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven things

1. I was a shrimp.

I’m rather not a very spiritual guy and I have serious doubts regarding all religious concepts, but one thing is damn sure. I was a shrimp. I don’t know how, or why, but in previous life (or pre-previous) I had to be a shrimp.

Some people feel they can think like a cat. That they can easily switch their thinking and understand other sex. I have similar feeling about shrimps. I can think like a shrimp… of course it’s impossible for me to explain that to you because you cannot, so trust me. Shrimps are smart.

I feel some concept of emotional response whenever I see a shrimp, I find them uterly cute and innocent, I easily impersonate, I feel I understand how they spend their lives, I never, ever eat them and I tend to think of people who it them as being cruel. For safety and sanity reasons I have a simple rule of not eating anything that has amoung of “legs” different from 2 or 4 and in case of seafood I’m limiting my food to fishes.

It causes several issues while hanging out with my Mum who loves shrimps.

2. I used to have very long hair, was superskinny, dressed only black and played guitar in a power metal band

When I was thirteen I was absolutely sure I will be a heavy metal guitar star. I didn’t miss any Iron Maiden concert, had every Running Wild, Manowar, Rhapsody, Blind Guardian album and was suprt skinny. I don’t know how to explain that but I was the kind of a “too tall too skinny” kind of kid. I could not how someone could do sports and get a bit of muscles ever and what for.

Although I dress a bit differently now, I cut my hair and listen to different music most of the time, I still love to play heavy metal, and I definitely would prefer not to miss an oportunity to go for another Manowar concert or finally get to Blind Guardian one

3. I love irish/celtic folk culture, scandinavian mythology and good fantasy.

I love to read Tolkien and polish fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowski (who’s first part of the sage just hit the shelves for english speaking readers, and the game The Witcher based on his world received really warm welcome being the first solid polish game for PC. Console version is in works).

And I really mean in. I read a lot of books, I try to watch all the fantasy related movies, when I was fourteen I chose a nickname that somehow stayed, I play celtic/irish folk on a guitar, I play feadóg, I can do a small talk in Sindarin – elvish language from Tolkien, I know how to handle a sword or use a bow (I’ve been in a brotherhood) and the only part that is missing is that I don’t ride horses. Once I lear this, I’m switching to being a knight.

4. I wrote a book when I was sixteen. And a dozen of poems.

They were a mixed bag of fantasy and drama. I’m really proud that exactly one year later I was able to recognize a pure example of teenager graphomania in my work. Well done, gandalf, you’re not an ego-maniac!

5. I’m a city boy.

If you ever watched my favorite series – Northern Exposure – you may remember challenges of a New York city boy in a small town in Alaska. I go through that all the time. I was grown in a world where the source of milk is a grocery store, not some wild animal. I received decent education, so I recognize a chicken from a pig, but you’d have to be there to understand my surprise when by the age of nineteen my friend explained me that nuts are growing on trees…

And don’t get me wrong, I was a scout. I know a lot about survival in the wooden environment. I can set up a tent, find wood in a forest (yup!), ignite a fire or shower in a river. Just don’t expect me to know all those little sneaky details about how exactly cow is different from its male equivalent and what are those different forms of farm creatures that runs around when your in a village. Or types of flower. Or trees. I recognize green ones and bald ones.

6. I train martial arts. UFC kind of stuff.

So, please, avoid commenting the amusing coincidence of this with pact nr 2. I do train MMA in a pretty raw form. It all started when I was 18 and I spent literally 18 hours per day in front of the computer (rings a bell?). It caused me to start looking less skinny and it definitely wasn’t a favorable way of loosing your skinny status. The decision was to find “some sport” around my office and the nearest thing was Karate Kyokushin club. It was a fascinating experience, because the idea of hitting somebody in a face during recreation time wasn’t exactly what I was aiming for at the beginning, but you know… you’re getting used to it

In fact, I became addicted and went for trainings aproximately 5 or 6 times per week with two or three hours of training per day for around 1,5 year. I did it all only to realize that the better I get the more constrains there are. Traditional martial arts are made of them – don’t do this, hitting like that is forbidden, you can’t block this way, clinch is forbidden, no choking… c’mon! Is it a fighting sport or a game?

So I started extending my scope of interests to Brasilian JuJitsu and boxing and finally met a guy who pointed out that there are training clubs where people fight without all those bounderies. And he didn’t have to repeat twice. Since then I’m doing MMA on all levels, I’m doing stand fight, ground fight, submision wrestling, bjj, I like thai-boxing, kick-boxing, boxing… everything. I’m an amateur, so I don’t get into “show me how good you are” kind of competitions, but I enjoy training and fighting, so if you want to spare, come to my club.

Oh, and because people are becoming confused at this point. To do MMA you don’t have to be a mindless meatmade tank. MMA requires different kind of intelligence (yes, there are many kinds, not only mathematical), reflex, speed and stamina, but gives you a lot of joy that is on the very opposite side of the universum from computer science and social science which makes it a perfect place to relax from former two.

I promise you that nobody from my club would ever mob anyone on the street. What’s interesting is that such kind of people are not used to hard and long training, technique, and they cannot survive in a friendly atmosphere of MMA clubs. So what they do instead is that they spend a lot of time on body building and then use quantity methods to attack in a bigger group. Don’t mix those two groups please

7. I used to play in youth theatre and was a journalist.

When I was 10 I joined a youth theatre and played there for 6 years. Majority of my interpersonal skills, emotional inteligence, auditorium management, role taking comes from that time. I also found that to be the most inspiring and motivating environment a child can find. I have a strong belief that being in such environment has a great impact on the maturity and ability to maintain child in yourself and self-reflection skills. I recommend parents considering sending their kids for such thing. It was amazing 6 years of my life that shaped a lot of me.

Then I led an air show for teenagers in Radio WaWa for three years and did some internship in polish TV as a journalist. Ultimately I spent a year leading a TV show about computer games when I was eighteen. Its name was “Gamebox”. This one gave me even more confidency at public speeches, but it confirmed that I have a huge problem to act in front of camera when there’s a scenario I have to follow. I so much prefer live dynamic performances.

8. I have ADHD. Twice

If you didn’t notice yet, I love to do things. Any things. And a lot of them. I love to play soccer, read books, fight MMA, dance irish, code, learn elvish languages, study sociology, swim, sail (oh yea, I’m sailing for 8 years now). Except of that, I’m inline skating, biking, playing RPG games, passionate about Mozilla project, I translate software, do work on volunteer communities motivation models, hack Linux (I’ve been using Gentoo for years) and does some basic gymnastics. People tend to tell me I have too much energy and it takes me a concious effort to synchronize with the energy level of the group I’m in. So if you recently spent some time on a small talk with me and it was calm and relaxed, please appreciate how much effort I had to put in this. Thanks!

Oh, and I write eight points when asked for seven. Don’t give me more coffee! My energy level is violating European Union standards.

Next people

I find it really hard to find people not tagget yet… so let me think about it a bit more

KDE4 is a fascinating project. It is a great topic for a book. Project that started when KDE started loosing ground inside Linux DE to Gnome, when KDE became less active, less motivated and somehow drown in lack of direction they managed to build a vision, action plan, set up a clear direction and follow it.

What’s even more amazing is that they followed it despite massive criticizm they had to face around KDE4.0 release.

The vision was, and still is, extremely challenging. It’s not about “updating to current standards”. It’s about setting up new ones. They do not “follow” Windows or MacOS. They experiment to the scale rarely seen in Open Source projects which tend to choose evolution over revolution usually.

This time, we’re talking about changing metaphors for windows and desktop objects, about changing the concept of multitasking, about blending all elements of the DE into metamodels, about Jeff Raskin’s Zoomable User Interfaces, about semantic desktop (Nepomuk), consistent theming (Oxygen) and tons of smaller projects that are setting up a strong fundamentals for Linux desktop environment being unique and innovative.

In each of the dimensions mentioned above they broke some status quo.

Linux had small concept from ZUI – virtual desktops. But KDE4 decided to go for real one – full featured Activities. Spaces devoted to selected activities – am I in work or home? is it sunday or weekday? My desktop serves different purposes depending on my current activity and KDE4 is experimenting with it.

Linux had themes, but Oxygen is the only project I know of which is community based (not company sponsored like Fedora theme or Mandriva) and brings consistency and quality to the visual message they send across icons, themes, banners, websites etc.

Nepomuk is a breathtaking project with extremely challenging goals of making desktop serve as semantic desktop platform. By this they mean ability to get valuable information about system elements. File on my hard drive was sent by John. Nepomuk will tell me that. The paragraph in my document was copied from Wikipedia, Nepomuk will store the url. The file I’m about to delete was my favorite mp3 that I rated 5 stars in my music player and played 5000 times yesterday. Do I really want to delete it? etc. This is just a teaser, but a quite interesting one, won’t you say?

Plasma is taking a widget concept several light years forward. We all agree that everyone took MacOS’s concept of widgets and it was good. But Plasma is making everything on the desktop a widget, or plasmoid as they call it. Task bar is a plasmoid. Start menu is. Clock in your task bar is and notification is. Everything is a plasmoid and plasmoids adjust to the area they are presented in. You can add a contact list on your desktop, but if you drag&drop it to taskbar it will present differently. Or you can take your fancy rss reader and d&d to top panel to make it switch into a scrolling rss reader fitting your bar.

It’s just a teaser. There are much more projects like solid, sonnet, decibel, okular, marble (google earth for open source) and more. The vision is exciting and they had to expose it in order to bring polish and quality to elements they built. That’s what KDE4.0 was and it received a lot of bad press for being not ready to use. KDE4.2 is the first release that gives a solid user experience but what’s truly amazing is that inside the concept of KDE4 there’s room for breathtaking KDE4.3, KDE4.4, KDE4.5 and forward and from now on, each next release will have to focus on things not known in other desktop environments.

Today, if you compare planetkde with planet.gnome (maybe not today, because of the release, but on average day) its such a striking difference with 10-15 blog posts per day on KDE planet with new projects, concepts, mockups, experiments vs. Gnome planet which gives you rarely any idea on what is going on and what you can expect from the next version. (or just look at KDE4.2 feature plan, and Gnome 2.28 plan).

What an amazing flip. I hope gnome will use this time to revitalize itself into Gnome3 vision.

Just following KDE experiments is exciting. It’s a pleasure to watch such healthy and vibrant open project that dares to travel on an uncharted map and delivers promise of Linux DE experience becoming innovative and unique.

If you didn’t try KDE4 yet (lucky you), now its the time to give it a try

If you open http://hg.mozilla.org/webtools/mcs/file/tip/theme/source/ you will find full source PSD files of the theme.

What does it mean? Well, this is another step on the way of making sure that we have a really good theme that is open to everyone according to what we understand as Open. And understanding of it is not that common.

Think of it. How many open themes do you know. There are a lot of themes that you can download for free, but that’s not making them open, right? Next, there are themes that may provide sources, even on open licenses, which makes them technically open but does it make it easy to work with. Its almost like opening sources of a software, but not making the sources readable, not helping with hacking them, not providing documentation, and build environment… If you track all open projects out there, they usually take a lot of time to open their projects exactly because re-licensing sources is not enough. Because it will not make people want to use it and contribute to it.

Because in order to get this kind of activity around your project, there’s much more that needs to be done, and the source files for MCS are exactly doing this. It’s not only theme, it’s a theme with PSD files there, and the PSD files are licensed on Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Share-Alike and it is ready to be modified. The source has all the layers properly grouped to make working on theme sections easy and natural. It has guidelines that help you keep the scheme in shape while modifying and it makes it easy to change colors or elements that you will likely to want to modify. It is a fully open source theme, and we have an example implementations there to show you, but you can change it however you like and come up with your own implementations.

We will provide tutorials on how to do this, and we hope to see people modify it in creative way and upstreaming their changes to make the theme look even better in result of community effort!

I would like to thank Legal Team in Mozilla (Catherine, Harvey), Tara and Seth for making this possible!

I may be wrong, but I think this is the first case ever of opening the theme this way. I would love to see other examples, but it I think we’re just opening a new chapter with both, Mozilla Community Theme and Mozilla Community Sites – since I think no other project is offering such powerful tools for its communities to develop themselves around their own websites.  Mozilla is leading 

p.s. if there’s someone who knows how to port psd file to gimp xcf without loosing… everything in the file, then I’d love to get your help!

]]> http://diary.braniecki.net/2009/01/16/mcs-source-files-released/feed/ 5