W środku zlotu społeczności Mozilli w Whistler, BC, Kanada, na jedyną drogę łącząca Whistler z Vancouver spadła lawina.
Staramy się nie stracić pogody ducha. 🙂
Lekcja na przyszłość – nigdy nie wybieraj na miejsce spotkania miasta, którego nazwa jest nazwą kodową Microsoftu…
Update: Teraz jeszcze jakaś ciężarówka przecieła linie i nie mamy prądu w hotelu… robi się ciekawie 🙂
Few minutes ago Tristan and I delivered a presentation on Mozilla presence in Europe and because not everyone could join us, I was asked to push our slides online. Here you are:
Enjoy 🙂
Last half a year was amazing for me. I joined Mozilla Corp., reignited my participation in Mozilla project, worked on several exciting projects and it’s an amazing coincident that this half a year is almost over exactly now, when I’m sitting at Whistler, with 400 creative, innovative people and we’re all listening to Mitchell Baker speaking about our open source roots, and the trunk of the project being about “Human interaction with the Internet”… It’s thrilling.
There are several projects that I’m trying to launch related to Mozilla, I will be speaking about them during the Firefox Summit, and I will blog about it once the summit people share their feedback on it.
One of the elements of Mozilla ecosystem that has been super exciting for me is localization and internationalization. And the great news is that there’s a lot happening around L10n in Mozilla these days. We’re improving the l10n build system, l10n processes, but there’s one very visibly missing area in L10n land – tools. We finally have a project that is going to target this – Verbatim. Verbatim is a project aiming for a webtool that will allow localizers focus on the translation instead of having to spend time trying to figure out how to do the actual translation. If you’re in Whistler, we have a presentation on Verbatim today 🙂
But that’s not all! There is one project that was something I’ve been coding over weekends and while at the airports and on flights and in many other places. It’s inspiring and challenging for me enough to keep working on it over evenings, nights, sundays, and holidays which I have to apologize for to my girlfriend 🙁
Yesterday, I tagged stage2 of the project which means it’s more or less ready to go public and be reviewed by you all, and has a chance to explain itself to the level that may attract others to join me and participate in it.
The project name is Silme, and it is a python localization library that has been structured in a multi-abstract level model. Thanks to it, the library works natively with DTD, Properties, GetText, can work with XLIFF, L20n, ini files and any other l10n data format. Beside, it can work with files stored on drive, in SVN, in CVS, in MySQL, SQLite and virtually any other data source.
On the other hand it’s extensible and flexible enough to work in web app, command line tools, or GUI tools. It’s not only for Mozilla, as any other project can build apps on top of this library. Be it Songbird, Miro, Seamonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird, Addons.mozilla.org, Flock, GNOME, KDE, etc., etc.
If you find above description interesting, please read the original announcement and join the project. It’s totally open and very alpha. If I try to express where I am with it, I think I just passed the mark when the code self explains the idea. Nothing more.
Beside, it’s a lib. Unless people like to localize directly in python env, we need apps on top of it. And it’s at least as challenging as a library itself, but if you want to write a localization app, I think it’ll be easier if you will be able to focus on UI and features of the app, and minimize the work on sole entity operations that Silme does cover.
So… here we are. I’m confident I will keep working on it, and some small simple apps will be created for my own use, but it’s very, very far from being useful, and need a lot of work to get there. Ultimate goal will be to work smoothly with an exciting project that is being mindcrafted in Mozilla these days – L20n.
Please, remember that it’s a hobby library for now, a product of several years of work as localizer, countless nights spent with my friends from Aviary.pl – Polish Localization Team, and the creative environment of Mozilla project. It’s up to you all what will happen next with it 🙂 So mail me, or reach me on IRC if you want to discuss things about possibilities that Silme opens!
Tomorrow, I’m comming to Moscow to meet with Mozillians 🙂
We’ll be in Rosie pub (google map) starting from 16:00 I think (at least me, because of my flight).
So, if you’re in Moscow these days, and have a free afternoon/evening tomorrow, and you think you might be a little bit thirsty – join us, I’d like to use this opportunity to meet as much of you as possible!!! 🙂
Then, on Monday, we’ll be going to Protva Open Source conference in Obninsk, where I’ll be presenting the vision Mozilla has on the Internet and the future of open web. It’ll be exciting for me to be there with all those people who work on the open source in the country that is currently doing a huge step toward open source schools, and if you combine with how big Russia is… amazing 🙂
So feel free to join us tomorrow or see you at the conference!
Yeah!!!
So, Linus announced that (most?) of the bkl-removal tree has been merged to kernel for 2.6.27!!!
BKL means Big Kernel Lock, and is the system responsible for several slowdowns in Linux, including several delays in booting process. While from what I understand the first chunk of patches will not solve everthing, it’s a huge step forward! 🙂
Congratz to Linux team!
With the recent announcement by OpenNews.ru we got a chance to look at the browser market in Russia.
Firefox is just breaking the 20% mark there which means up 5% during recent 5 months (15% in the end of January).
The other good news is that the modern browsers are up by 11% and especially Firefox 3 is really received well with over 6% of the market in less than 2 weeks from the release!
In other countries in the region, Firefox 3 is also getting good grades from the users. In Poland over 5% of the Internet users have switched and in Hungary it’s almost 6%!
What’s interesting in those number is where the users came from. So in case of Poland, Firefox 3 raised 4% in two weeks, 2.9% came from former Firefox 2 users, 0.7% from IE6 users and 0.3% from IE7 users!
In all countries of the CEE region that we track, we can see from 4 to 6% of the market taken by Firefox 3 users in such a short time after the release. The response is amazing and it’s the best prove that the work of Mozilla project matters. Congratulations to MozillaRu, Aviary.pl, Magyar Mozilla Project and all of you who contributed to this achievment!
p.s. Just to compare, it took Firefox 1.0 over 10 months to get 6% of the market share in Russia, it took Firefox 2.0 over 5 months to break 6%, and it took Firefox 3.0 around two weeks.