Month: February 2006

I’m back in my flat, I need a lot of sleep, I’m very, very tired. FOSDEM was great, we made a lot of awesome stuff out there, I met a lot of great people, ate a lot of great food, spend around 20 hours on FOSDEM (during 2 days), I gave a talk about Flock browser, lead a session about Localization Projects that last for almost 4 hours, answered zillion questions, asked another zillion questions, and got interviewed about Flock by some television (reporter promised to mail me once it’s public somewhere).

A few notes are: Brussel is better than London, it looks very nice, beside of the fact that it’s dirty. Food is amazing once you know the places, beer is nice, FOSDEM Toilets are slightly better than last year, localizers must get used to the meeting atmosphere so they start talking more, we want/need you to speak, and speak laud!, Paul Kim is a great guy, I think that it’s a big luck for Mozilla to have him in their crew, I also had a chance to drink a beer with Peterv, Brian King and Dwayne Bailey (kudos to him for his work on Pootle!) and I heard some rumours from Gerv and Tristan that it could happen that next meeting will be a pure Mozilla meeting in Europe, outside of the FOSDEM, so we can attend to some FOSDEM talks, that are NOT about Mozilla, and COULD possibly be interesting. 🙂

More about it, plus screenshots from FOSDEM, tomorrow. Good night, FOSDEM wasn’t bad (beside of lack of Pike 🙁 ).

It seems that we must face some real problems before we can start the MozDevRoom.

First, Axel Hecht, who was supposed to lead L10n panel and the talk on the main room about XUL, cut his thumb and he will not attend at all :((((( We’ll try to get him on skype through.

Then, some bastard stole all Gerv’s luggage once he got here… Then, the flight with me, Marcoos, Staszyna, Pitreck and Anna was delayed by 3 hours! We of course missed the invite party 🙁

Then, Staszyna blocked his cell phone during a lobby session to convince his cell phone that the PIN is 0300. Cell phone won that match and now Staszyna is blocked.

Then, me and Anna went to some Italian Pizzeria where they had NO PIZZA (sic!), and I failed to find an USA-Europe adapter so I can’t charge my camera battery…

I hope that all bad is behind us and starting from tomorrow morning we will ignite some storm into our brains and share it to multiply the power of our work so once the FOSDEM is over, we will be all charged with ideas and motivation to make the Internet a better place for us all, spreading the fire of open source 🙂 Cross your fingers 🙂

Due to very trivial, innocent, wrong reason, Pike will probably not be able to attend to FOSDEM 2006. I hope that he’ll make it at least on Sunday, but he wrote that chances low.
He asked me and Kairo to lead the session, and of course I will do my best to help here. After the discussion it seems that I will lead Localization sessions, with Kairo’s help, if Pike will not be able to come, and we’ll try to deploy some remote communication with Pike during this session.
Anyway, it means that I will have way less time for myself, and I hope that me and Kairo we’ll not fail the task. CU there and let’s do sth great once we’re there, together!

I just applied instructions from OpenSuSe page about Xgl and my KDE started playing this tunes… It’s awesome! The default list of “behaviours” (I took the name from in-famous Microsoft’s DHTML creations from IE4/IE5) gives you a few things a’la MacOS X (window minimalization/maximalization), a’la Vista (alt+tab transculency and preview) and Luminocity (wobbly windows, a funny wobbles when menus appear/disappear).
It all looks really cool and works quite stable as for 0.0.1 alpha.

For me, this ends the thread about how bad it was that Novell developed Xgl on their own instead of discussing every feature on the maillists and allowing everyone to Veto the progress.
“camel is a horse, designed by community…”

Today, iPlay.pl sent us an email that their music store is the first in Poland and one of the few in the world that supports Firefox (and all other Gecko based browsers) starting from today!

First, I still find every evidence of the fact that Firefox hits the mainstream very exciting. And Firefox opens the space for web standards and other browsers too.

On the other hand, iPlay.pl is still part of the sad world of DRM, and I still have to wait for the place where I could by my music in some open format, like Ogg. While I understand that companies are not likely to trust users, I think that it will happen one day, because users will realise this.

Anyway, if you buy music, use Windows, and want to use Firefox, iPlay.pl is for you.

Wohoo! Flock 0.5.11 is there, it’s not perfect, but it’s great!

And we’re working hard now to bring you the next one even better and for sure, more polished. The problem with applications in this stage is that it’s pretty hard to polish the UI for them because so much work is being done every single day including the release one. It also affects L10n very deeply and that’s the reason why Flock 0.5.11 is not 100% localizable 🙁 It’s not that bad, we’re still far away from Flock 1.0, so there’s time for that, and now, once all components are localizable I can go down and hunt those hidden hardcoded things that left.

We also have source-l10n system, and I was able to create Flock 0.5.11 pl (but I’ll tag it tomorrow), and I’m sure that zh-CN version is around too. Tomorrow, I’ll update our Wiki to new instructions (we need to make fbuild.sh able to sync with a tag instead of tip for that) and I’ll post to l10n@flock.com maillist info about localization. If you want to follow the source-l10n method, you need to be able to build Flock (I hope it won’t be required before 1.0), and get SVN account from either me or Robin. Join us on #flock-dev or #flock on irc.flock.com server and ask for your login/pass, or just use an email. We’ll prepare it for you (along with SVN directories) so you can start your work!
For our localizers, I also created a special page where you can report any problematic terms you met during localization process. We’ll try to solve them to make your and our users live easier.

My schedule is based on general schedule + devrooms schedules and I must say that it’s really unfair that so many great things happens at the same time… 🙁
Fri

5:35-7:50 – Flight Warsaw-Brussel

Sat

10:30-12:00 – (Jansson), R.M.Stallman, Invitation
12:00-13:00 – (Jansson) GPL3 Discussion
13:00-14:00 – Lunch Time
13:00-13:45 – (Mozilla) Introduction
13:45-14:30 – (Mozilla) Mozilla Foundation
14:00-15:00 – (Jansonn), Plan9
14:30-15:15 – (Mozilla) Mozilla Europe
15:15-16:00 – (Mozilla) The Seamonkey project
16:00-17:00 – (Jansonn) XEN
16:00-17:00 – (Chavanne) Speex
16:00-17:00 – (X.org) Xgl – The current future of X
16:00-17:00 – (OpenSuSe) SuSe Linux 10.2 – Quo Vadis?
16:00-17:00 – (KDE) Roadmap to the World Domination; Marketing KDE
16:00-16:45 – (Mozilla) Flock (yup! By me – I must be there probably)
16:45-17:30 – (Mozilla) Mozilla Project BOF

Sun

9:15-10:00 – (Mozilla) XulRunner
10:00-11:00 – (Chavanne) Darcs
10:00-10:45 – (Mozilla) Reflow Refactoring
10:45-11:30 – (Mozilla) Flocking the Mozilla Codebase
11:00-12:00 – (Chavanne) SVN
11:30-12:15 – (Mozilla) Zap – the Mozilla SIP client
12:00-13:00 – (Jansonn) Dojo
12:15-13:00 – (Mozilla) Mozilla Development BOF
13:00-14:00 – Lunch time
13:00-14:00 – (Jabber) What’s cool & new
14:00-15:00 – (Jansonn) AppArmor
14:00-15:00 – (Chavanne) Beagle
14:00-17:30 – (Mozilla) Localizing Mozilla product and projects
15:00-16:00 – (Jansonn) ClamAV
15:00-16:00 – (Chavanne) OpenOffice.org
16:00-17:00 – (Chavanne) XUL (yup! By Axel himself Hecht! :))
17:00-18:00 – (Jansonn) The Challenge of Linux Desktop
Mon

19:20-21:20 – Flight Brussel – Warsaw

Yes, it’s hard to choose 🙁 But there are a few things I’m especially proud of. First of all, Axel will talk about Mozilla XUL on main track! Congrats! Second, there will be two talks about Flock on Mozilla DevRoom, one headed by me, and another by Erwan and Termie!  Third, all localizers from around the Europe will be refunded for their trip to Brussel! It means that we will finally be able to meet IRL with all those people we were working together around Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, Nvu, and now Flock localizations! Many of them owes me a beer or a wine or a Sangria 😉
We will have an ultimate chance to discuss the wins and looses of our work, our main goals and solutions, share the experiences and ideas, not only about translation, but also promotion, driving communities and competing with major proprietary software vendors. I only miss that Dria will not be there to discuss MDC localization 🙁

it’ll be a great weekend, and I’m so happy that I’ll be there with my friends from Flock, from AviaryPL and my girlfriend as well 🙂

Gecko, like every other Open Source project, is getting smaller and faster with every release. This is the nature of OS development, and I love it.

Look, compare Firefox, Mozilla Suite, Open Office, KDE, Gnome, Kernel, etc. Every piece gets faster with every release. If not faster, than it stays in 0 point, if it’ll regress in performance, it’ll get faster than before in the next one, because automated performance systems will catch the rise and someone will investigate that part of the code, cleaning it, and optimizing.

For Mozilla, you can look at build-graphs.mozilla.org and compare the results in, say 360 days.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that OS is faster than proprietary software everywhere. There are many other issues that can make it opposite, but comparing two pieces of software requires much more than simple timer. For example comparing browsers performance is very hard. IE will start with the OS, Opera is pure browser, while Firefox is Gecko and Gecko is full cross-platform RAD environment. Which one is faster, depends on the test and everything might make the difference, so, to make a precise statement about performance, you need very complex term. Like “App X in ver Z is faster than Y in ver U on Linux, in loading code V when not using cache”, so I think that this kind of comparison is more a journalist job (who can say “App X is reaaally fast” and noone will force them to prove their claims), but for us, most important is to compare our versions, make sure that every next is faster and seek&destroy issues that hits the default user hardest. (it doesn’t apply to pre 1.0 versions. Yes, Flock will have to be optimized before 1.0 ;)).