Month: January 2006

Google at work on desktop Linux – So predictible. I’d love to see the effects of Ubuntu and Google cooperation, but on the other hand, I doubt that Linux is ready for desktop.

Google has to be patient, wait for Gnome3 or KDE4, wait till those pieces matures, it should take us a year. If they won’t be patient, they’ll just get disappointed.

Google bookmarks … As always, hats off… KISS heavly involved.

I just woke up (It’s 07:53 am here) after almost 12 hours sleep, I’m sitting in the hotel room, eating Madeleines and drinking orange juice.
The hotel room is nice, I have a bad, shower, refrigerator and internet connection. It suits all my needs 😉
One thing sucks. They’re blocking SMTP somehow. I don’t know why, but it’s blocked, so I can’t send any emails – Andy, Robin, others, I’m sorry! I just can’t answer you 🙁 I’ll do this from the office.
Today, I want to do some shopping, and join the crew in Flock’s HQ around 2 pm.

We’re now in the L10n freeze stage, which means that I have few days before the release, to remove all hardcoded strings, clean L10n files structure, and prepare for Flock 0.6 localization. Yes, call me Mr. Mission Impossible 😉

Ah, and I’m working in AMD64/GCC4 environment (Gentoo on my notebook), so Flock doesn’t compiles by default, I need to manually patch it after every update. And even with the patch on board, I still can’t build clucene – Yosh claims it’s my env fault, but it still makes my life harder. I’m going to ask for help today 🙂
Of course, we’re in early stages of development, so the Freeze is not that cold as it should, some folks are still working on UI changes, and I’m doing my job at the same time. I hope it’ll change for the next release.

So, team, just CC me to all bugs you’re working on for 0.6 release, and I’ll be happy.
I’m also wondering if we should move to Firefox 1.5.0.1 before this release. It would be good for the security reasons… Robin? Anthony?

Now it’s a breakfest time. Yummy!

In two days time, on Saturday, around 2:00 pm, my plane will land on the San Francisco airport and I’ll join the team in Flock’s HQ. Yeah!

For next two weeks I will be working from Palo Alto, CA 🙂 I’m very excited and have high hopes about what I’ll be able to do while being in the garage with you all, guys! 🙂

See you, and if you’re from CA and want to take a beer with me, it’s a high time to mail me about it 😉

A few mixed things to take a look at:

• New build of IE7 has leaked – what is interesting here is that the default position of stop and reload button was moved on the right side of the address bar. I’m not convinced to this idea.
• Mozilla on FOSDEM 2006 – with Flock folks on a board 🙂 join us there!
• Mozilla was announced 8 years ago (plus one day) – let me repeat. Thank you all, who contributed to Mozilla project, for helping bringing back choice and innovation to the Internet. Internet is way too important to be left in the hands of a monopoly.
• 10 brands of the world – Firefox is 8th. Wow!!!!! Amazing!
  by the way – do you see a big missing one? 😉
• Linux not standing in wait while Microsoft sinks its own ship – great article and charmy title – that’s exactly how I see the market 🙂

Have a nice reading

We’re getting near to Flock 0.6 release.

It’ll be the first Flock release that will use source-l10n, it should be 95% localizable, and it’ll be hosted on flock.com as the contribution builds.

I just posted the 0.6 localization info to flock-l10n maillist. We should be l10n-freezed on 26th, and I’ll spend last week on clearing as much as possible hardcoded strings and updating Wiki.

With source-l10n on a board, localization of the Flock, based on Firefox l10n, should take you no more than 2-3 hours!

If you want to help us localize Flock to your language, join our maillist, add yourself to our Wiki, and help us make Flock easy to use in your country 🙂

OpenSource is about the choice, about the ability to co-create, about the freedome, about the ability to reuse. Every open source project has a chance to decide what parts of the open source thing they want to use.

My story with the Open Source started from Mozilla project around 5 years ago. For the long time it was the only project I was involved in, and it built my vision of open source. I see how Mozilla uses bugzilla to create a common layer for insiders and outsiders to make it easier to join and help, I see and understand the rules of CVS, trees, branches, I see how Mozilla uses the Wiki, LXR, Bonsai. It’s so natural for me. Combined with Devmo it allows to easly learn the project, join it, work inside, share ideas on Wiki, file bugs, solve them, the flaw is really awesome. The only waek point is the lack of reviewers, but Mozilla is aware of the problem and tries to solve it.

In Flock, we’re trying to apply the rules to slightly different project. We’re open source by the heart, but we’re more profit focused by mind. Thanks to great work of Bart, Geoffrey, Chris, Ian, Yosh, Lloyd, Daryl, Manish, and the rest of the crew (through, I brainstormed about our model with the listed folks only), we’re making a great progress in creating our own model that joins the two powers without forcing anyone to feel bad with his believes.

But I’m always suprised meeting the way other open-source project works. Gentoo is still similar to us, Slackware is very one-person focused and hardly web’ed so there’s no that much tools I can use nor the way to influence it progress, or it’s different so much from Mozilla that I didn’t have time to find the way.
But the real shock is every relation with PHP guys. I filed a few bugs, and I always felt offended and abandoned. I filed a bug and there was no response for very long time and I was unable to do anything. I didn’t even know who to contact. Then, someone responded that I’m wrong, and it should work (mis-work?) like this, closed the bug and that’s all…. No place for the discussion, no way to get the info why for example the fact that in some cases some function responds TRUE when it failed to do it’s task is ok for them, nothing. I really don’t get it.

Another example is MediaWiki. If you’ll follow the dates and comments on this bug, and you’re familiar with Mozilla way of driving OpenSource, you’ll be surprised. I was one step from loosing my hope that it’ll every get checked in, but this returned me some hope.
It took them 2 months to check in very small patch. So the bigger one might take much more, right? 🙂
Both patches are live tested, one on Flock wiki, one on MDC. With that trivial patches, the decision to check in should be way faster IMHO. The cost of delay might be that the author who willed to upstream that patch won’t have time to update the patch to the trunk for many months, and the his work will be in vain.

Any predictions about when the second patch could possibly go in? The winner will get a beer 😉

So, we’re three weeks from the next Flock browser release.

We made a huge progress since 0.4.10. We’re source-l10n now, we have SVN repository for our localizers, we’re ready to reuse Mozilla L10n code…

And today I sent the very first email to whole group of people listed on out Wiki. In the next few days I’ll send two or three more about the specific issues like  Localization of Flock 0.7, mid-term plan for localization sites, localization policy.
At the moment I’m working on the script that will be able to switch ab-CD.jar directory structure into source structure and backwards. The goal is to make it easy to localize basing on the package (old method), or using source-l10n (new, better method).

I also want to prepare a perl (python maybe?) script that will allow us to make localized Flock basing not on sources, but on en-US flock package. This will be a real “repackaging” and should limit the resource use on tinderbox machines. This is still just a vision, since I’m not sure if it’s better to build a script or use Makefiles for that.

Anyway, those are just tools, the process is ready. If you’re a Flock localizer and for some reason, you’re not listed on the Wiki, you can read the initial email here.