Author: zbraniecki

Categories
main tech

The Witcher

Yesterday, I spent few hours in EMPIK shop next to my place, waiting for a premiere of The Witcher – new PC game that bases on excellent books by polish fantasy author – Andrzej Sapkowski.

First of all, please, don’t be fooled by “fantasy” part. It’s not about faeries, it’s about very brutal world, very realistic action, very interesting moral dilemmas, and amazing action. Sapkowski is one of the most popular polish writers, unfortunately not translated to English yet 馃檨 (First tome of legends, not sage, is translated to English – Last Wish. The quality is good, maybe not as Aviary.pl work, but English language has no such great localization team…)

Now, the polish team of developers created a game – The Witcher. The game is excellent. I bought it yesterday and my flat mate too, and many of my friends did… I did track the progress of the game creating process for last 2 years and I must say that I never heard of such devotion and perfection during game creation. The reviews of the game are great, so it seems that they made it.

If the game will be such a huge success, it’ll be both, thanks to the great world and story created by Sapkowski and thanks to the amazing skills of the game creators. It’ll be the very first game ever created by Polish team that will make the international success. I encourage you all, if you have some free time, to order the game, and try it on your own.

I’m sure you’ll fall in love 馃檪

Categories
mozilla tech

Little big things on the horizon…

Glazou is right. If I can suggest you something, look at this article very carefully.

Samsung + Mozilla? Mmmm :>

Categories
main mozilla po polsku tech

Zmiany

Jedn膮 z atrakcyjniejszych form sp臋dzania czasu we wtorkowe, wrze艣niowe popo艂udnie mo偶e zmienianie 艣wiata… nie?

Discussing Mozilla EuropeNo to w艂asnie to robimy 馃檪 Pascal, Pike, Peter, Tristan i ja siedzimy sobie w ma艂ej salce konferencyjnej w centrum pary偶a i podejmujemy Naprawde Wa偶ne Decyzje.

NWD s膮 niezb臋dne, bo dzieje si臋 Naprawde Wiele. Z reczy, kt贸re ju偶 wyciekaj膮, mamy MailCo. B臋dzie wok贸艂 tego du偶o szumu, a Mozilla Europe w natrualny spos贸b zyska艂a nowego partnera. B臋dziemy reprezentowa膰 interesy MailCo w Europie. B臋dziemy te偶 znacznie bardziej aktywni, b臋dzie nas wi臋cej, zar贸wno w dziedzinie zasob贸w ludzkich jak i “visibility”. MoEu obiera dwa kierunki – chcemy by膰 lepiej s艂yszani w Mozilli Foundation, Mozilli Corporation i MailCo. Z drugiej strony, chcemy mocniej zaakcentowa膰 obecno艣膰 Mozilli w Europie.

Adopcja produkt贸w Mozilli w Europie post臋puje w 艣wietnym tempie, jednak nie koresponduje to ze 艣wiadomo艣ci膮 istnienia Mozilli jako organizacji i ludzi, to widoczne jest znacznie bardziej w Stanach Zjednoczonych, Japonii czy Chinach. Chcemy to zmieni膰.

Mozilla Europe chce by膰 bardziej widoczna jako organizacja, a nie wy艂膮cznie poprzez produkt. Ma艂o kto wie o ogromnym projekcie Mozillowym jakim jest Joost. Ma艂o kto wie o AllPeers. Disruptive Innovations, OpenWengo… To wszystko dzieje si臋 w Europie, a w najbli偶szym czasie b臋dzie si臋 dzia艂o jeszcze wi臋cej… Dania jest ciekawym krajem 馃槈

Mamy du偶o do zrobienia. Mozilla jest projektem o niesamowitym potencjale, kt贸ry wykracza bardzo daleko poza punkt w kt贸rym jeste艣my dzisiaj. My艣l臋, 偶e kiedy艣 b臋dziemy m贸wi膰 o Firefoksie jako o pierwszym wielkim sukcesie ogromnego projektu. Mozilla Europe jest jego witaln膮 cz臋艣ci膮.

Trzyletnia kadencja obecnego zarz膮du Mozilli Europe dobiega ko艅ca. Nied艂ugo czekaj膮 nas wybory, zmiany w statucie… i inne… 馃槈 Trzymajcie kciuki!

Categories
mozilla tech

ZipWriter hits trunk

聽Woho! Bug 379633 is fixed!

ZipWriter just has been included into trunk.

You may say it’s a small thing. Who cares? Opera, IE, Safari lives without it and you can rarely see users complaining that their browser lacks scriptable zipwriter, right?

Hah! Mozilla is a platform, not “a browser”. It *does* influence any effort towards Xul editors, Mozilla IDE’s and… L10n tool 馃槈

Categories
main mozilla tech

Mozilla Europe reignites

As some of you may know, Mozilla Europe BoD have a Plan to rule the world. We don’t push it in hurry, as we all know that rather sooner than later you all will understand that it’s actally good for you and the mankind as a whole.

Our current roadmap is to get more power after next elections in most European countries and slowly get people aware that our intelligence, brilliant ideas, and by far most importantly – incredible handsomeness – makes us the natural solution to all problems of the modern Europe.

Of course we’re not going to lay on our huge sofas and drink wine waiting for combined human intelligence (extelligence) to mature enough to see this obvious truth. We need to act.

The logic is simple. The blocker of our Ultimate Goal is human knowledge, maturity and awareness what’s good for you. We need to push this in the only right direction.

In order to achieve this goal we decided to meet together on 17th-18th of September and update our plan. We need to speak lauder (since we have perfect, radio-ready voices). We need to do more (since everything we do is good). We need to be more visible (since we’re amazingly handsome).

It happened, that the group of perfect, hot, well build half-gods met together as a European Mozilla affiliate and we feel responsible for the future of the Mozilla project. So the side effect of taking control over the world (for it’s own luck) will be good for Mozilla project itself.

We want you all, our community, developers, users, non-users, readers, and other kinds of BoD fans to raise your hands now, and share your thoughts, feelings, wishes and the words of thankfulness in the Wiki article.

Look at my beautiful eyes, reader. I’m speaking to you. It’s really important. What you will write there will really influence the future of Mozilla Europe (and the mankind).

Or course this is a great news for Paris and France as a whole. This lucky country that has Mozilla Europe HQ (this can compete only with Disneyland) will host all Board of Directors members together which will cumulate the amount of handsomeness, vibrant intelligence and energy that once created Captain Planet, and for 2 days will take the crown of the World from London, where the GFX Ninja keeps filling the void after Victoria and David Beckham.

For more official info, look at Pike’s blog (he’s smarter, but I’m younger ;)).

Categories
main tech

ISO says NO to fast track for OOXML!

According to nooxml website, it’s getting very likely that OOXML will not go the fast track 馃檪

Crossing fingers 馃檪

Categories
main tech

Will companies start exploiting linux packaging systems?

Today I was working on some yet_to_be_announced project for a KnownCompany.

I was also updating my flash player basing on the latest releases from Adobe, and realized that this company, and many others will have to exploit packaging model of modern distributions in order to achieve what they want.

See. Modern, user-oriented linux distros like OpenSuSe, Fedora, Ubuntu, are preparing set of packages for the release, and then “half-freezing”. When I use Ubuntu 7.04, I use a set of software that was ready by April 2007. There are two exceptions – security patches, and community contributed backports of the newer packages , but for the latter, I have to manually select that I want to get them.

It means that being a company, that wants to upgrade users browser, mail client, game, or office package, I should claim聽 that it’s a security release. It’s not an issue right now, since linux is not popular enough to be on most product managers radar, and the releases happen pretty often (half a year in case of Ubuntu), but as Linux will become more popular, I’m more than sure that it will start to happen. All companies I was working for would like their latest versions to be deployed for all users soon after the release. Not half year later. Also, what about users who will not upgrade?

Look at the browsers. Browser X ver 3.5 has been released on Sep 2010. The Ubuntu (by the time used by 35%聽 of end users on Earth!) release 10.10 uploads it and uses in their release. Users are happy, confetti is everywhere and We Are The Champions can be heard in the background. Win-Win.

Then, the vendor of Browser X prepares release 4.0, and they’re ready on Apr 2011. Unfortunately聽 the release cycle of Ubuntu says that Ubuntu is already freezed and will not use ver 4.0 in Ubuntu 11.04. So this release is delivered to the users with Ubuntu 11.10, 6 months after original release!

At this point, many can say “Yea, Mark is calling for synchronizing releases”, but that’s not a solution. What if 11.04 is so great, that people don’t want to migrate to 11.10? If it’s a LTS and majority will want to stick to it for a loong time? (see XP-Vista migration rates) or if it’s simply not good for some reason, and journalists advice to stick to 11.04 and wait for 12.04?

I think that the only proper solution is a vendor controlled backporting highway. A process that would allow a vendor (or vendor licensed volunteers) to backport apps (usually the more front-end user oriented ones) and deliver them with the updates to all users of a release.聽 Otherwise, vendors will start pretending that such a release is fixing some Scary and Serious Security Vulnerabilities聽 that might kill your cat or grandpa.

Business is business… :/

Categories
flock tech

Flock 0.9.0 is out! Localization phase is starting tomorrow!

Flock 0.9 is out! It took a bit longer than expected, but things are moving fast now on the track for Flock 1.0.

Because of the huge amount of work and changes in the codebase, Flock 0.9 is not ready for localization yet. Enjoy this release, test, give Flock a feedback, and if you’re lucky to speak fluently any language other than English, join us in the localization effort for 0.9.5!

The initial announcement went online last week and tomorrow we’ll start the localization phase for Flock 0.9.5 due to be released late this month.

Flock L10n is getting an update now.

Right now I’m doing last bits of cleanup to reduce the amount of work for localizers and starting from tomorrow, the localization will ignite 馃檪 Check the Flock l10n maillist for more news!

Categories
tech

MDC sprint 1 in 45 minutes!

In less than one hour, on 10:00 am CEST, Aviary.pl will ignite the very first MDC sprint.

We hope it’ll be a great experience for us all! 馃檪

Categories
main

Mozilla dev days – Paris 2007

Paris Mozilla DeveloperDaysWe’re sitting at Club Confair, on Mozilla Dev Day – Paris 2007. Yesterday, the trip was extremely exhausting. Staszek and myself, we had a flight at 12:45, and I hit the airport at 12:32… but yes, they did wait for me… Actually, waiting for me is something airport does way more often than they should, and when I’m in the middle of the race to get to the airport before the plane actually run engines, I’m sure it’ll work out, but later, when I think about such cases, I’m more and more surprised that it actually worked out… 100 people waiting for my cab to get through jams… I feel bad about it 馃檨

Fortunately, I got a nice sleep after initial dinner, and right now, we’re in the middle of the XUL Tools pow-wow led by Mike Shaver while few minutes ago Neil Deakin presented what is going to be XUL widgets for Mozilla 2.0…

It’ll be day full of Mozilla 馃檪