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:
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.
US website created to promote army – GoArmy.com – good design, clear layout, games, wizards, modern look&feel, trying to be XHTML 1.0
Polish website created to promote army – Wojsko Polskie – news, archives, ugly layout, ugly design, adverts, guest book, damn, even a name-day calendar (sic)! Trying to be HTML 4.0…
As you might have notice already, I updated my wordpress to WP 2.0.
The upgrade process was a pleasure, as always, those guys really know how to make sth easy. One click and it’s ready. Neat 🙂
I also changed skin. When I choosed Blix, it was totally unknown theme, with some licensing problems, abandoned by it’s author. Now, it seems that 1/3 of the blog world uses it. So, it’s time to create a new trend, right? 🙂 Meet Blue Horizon with a few modifications 🙂
It’s nice, quite clean theme, I like the top image (I used it in XPDE), I like colors, I like the space, I don’t like the sidebar, and I’ll try to make it better.
If you don’t like it, give me url to any other nice WordPress theme, and I’ll add it as a choice.
I’m also going to update/write the pages that are listed above, but that’s not anywhere high on my todo list, so enjoy wp2.0 for now and I’m back to hacking bugzilla.
Thanks for any feedback
Interview at Blog Network Watch with Heather Snodgrass of [decentcontent] & Spoke Media.
[…]
Q: Software that you use each day?
A: Photoshop CS2, NVU, Flock, Fetch, Adium, Entourage, iTunes. I’m fairly basic when it comes to my applications.
Enjoy 🙂
I’m shocked. Today I visited Marcin Gorny’s blog. Beside of other interests, he is a beta tester of Microsoft products.
Now, take a look at those screenshots. Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3, Screenshot 4.
Notice that this is slightly modified Windows XP.
Now, thanks to the magic, in 15 minutes you can do almost the same amount of work as Microsoft did in 5 years! Marcin published the full step-by-step description on how to modify WinXP into Vista look&feel.
Now. Tell me. If we can agree that you can have WindowsXP looks like Vista. What Microsoft, the biggest IT company in the world, did between year 2001 and 2006 when they were/are working on Windows Vista?
Is that the same as they’re doing with IE7? The same old Trident, and a bunch of code that was previously coded for Maxthon?
I’m wondering if it’s possible to legally create customized build of Windows XP so it looks like Vista and sell it in WinXP price.
Ok, I’m getting near to split this diary into two parts.
The current plan is to host tech diary on gandalf.wordpress.com with current URL – diary.e-gandalf.net and move my private blog to blog.e-gandalf.net. The later one will be in Polish and will focus mostly on my private feelings about the politics, philosophy, science, culture, people and my, yet to be published, World Domination 1.0 plan.
It also means that all previous tech notes will still be available on blog.e-gandalf.net instead of diary.e-gandalf.net which is a pity, but I really have no idea how to move all previous posts from one wordpress to another where I have no access to database 🙁 (wordpress.com).
Anyway, if wordpress.com will not allow me to create private backups of my diary, I might consider just creating second wordpress instance on this server (glups, mrman will kill). But I will still need some solution to move all blogs from one instance to another. And my mind tries to avoid accepting that I must write a script for that 🙁
