Just a quick note for all stakeholders: silme has been moved to hg.mozilla.org.
First update after public announcement. During last week, Silme received several minor stability patches in trunk and got initial support (patches [1], requests, feedback on API) from several developers including Stefan Plewako from Aviary.pl and Flock projects, Adrian Kalla from Aviary.pl and an intern in Mozilla Corp., and Pike himself 馃檪
Beside of that I spent some time during Firefox Summit on talking with people of Pootle/TranslationToolkit fame to identify potential problems that they faced. It was extremely supportive for me and gave my major take away is that if I want to reach my goal of having one, common abstraction layer for l10n objects I have to merge two very different concepts – single locale files (like DTD, properties, ini) and multi-locale files (XLIFF, GetText, tc).
Multilocale branch has been ignited to address this. I already did several tests and it seems that I will be able to support both models in one API without making both feel like hacks.
Pike raised another concern, that I tried to keep for later which is a concept of entity/l10nObject processing. Initially I assumed that it’s a minor topic, and on this level of abstraction I assumed that leaving the entity values unprocessed is OK for now. Unfortunately, especially with L20n being the next Big Thing for Silme, entity processing becomes very important and has to become a legimate element of the library skeleton.
I started early hacks of l20n.py format parser leaving my brain in free conceptual thinking mode and waiting for Pike’s time to talk about grammar inconsistencies.
Last big thing to come is a soon to happen switch from svn repo on my server, to shiny new hg.mozilla.org. This requires me to spend a few hours on svn-to-hg migration tools, but should help with later branching and support easier collaboration between many developers.
Current roadmap is pretty dense for stage3, and may be latter splitted, but does not currently involve work on end-user oriented apps like a webtool. Once I have this two major restructurizations ready (multilocale/pre-processing), I’ll get back to providing proof-of-concept tools. We’re of course looking for more developers so let me know if you’re interested 馃檪
W 艣rodku zlotu spo艂eczno艣ci Mozilli w Whistler, BC, Kanada, na jedyn膮 drog臋 艂膮cz膮ca Whistler z Vancouver spad艂a lawina.
Staramy si臋 nie straci膰 pogody ducha. 馃檪
Lekcja na przysz艂o艣膰 – nigdy nie wybieraj na miejsce spotkania miasta, kt贸rego nazwa jest nazw膮 kodow膮 Microsoftu…
Update: Teraz jeszcze jaka艣 ci臋偶ar贸wka przecie艂a linie i nie mamy pr膮du w hotelu… robi si臋 ciekawie 馃檪
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 馃檪
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 馃檪
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 馃檨
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 馃檪 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 馃檪
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!!! 馃檪
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 馃檪
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! 馃檪
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.
W ten weekend zesp贸艂 Aviary.pl spotyka si臋 na piwie w Krakowie i Warszawie. Tym razem zdecydowali艣my sie na ma艂e spotkania – ca艂y projekt wydania Firefoksa 3 by艂 tak ogromny, 偶e ch臋tnie usi膮dziemy w spokoju w pubie i napijemy si臋 czego艣 opowiadaj膮c sobie o wydaniu i pracy nad nim.
Je艣li kto艣 z Was jeszcze zastanawia si臋 co b臋dzie robi艂 w sobot臋 w Krakowie lub niedziel臋 w Warszawie to zapraszamy 馃檪 To dobra okazja, 偶eby wznie艣膰 cho膰 jeden toast – za otwarty Internet, kt贸rego ju偶 nikt nam nie odbierze 馃檪
Co jeszcze mog臋 powiedzie膰?
Nie mam pomys艂u co powiedzie膰… Mam nadziej臋, 偶e to b臋dzie osiem milion贸w najbardziej zadowolonych ze swojej przegl膮darki ludzi na 艣wiecie 馃榾
p.s. nie m贸wi膮c o np. 14 milionach pobra艅 Firefoksa 3 z download.com. No bo po co o tym m贸wi膰? przecie偶 to i tak szale艅stwo…