Advogato blog for menthos

2 Jul 2006

Sun, 2 Jul 2006 16:50:35 GMT

I'm back from my 6th GUADEC. I actually got back early Saturday morning, but it has taken some time to sort things out. Interesting to see that it is actually almost as hot in the south of Sweden as in Vilanova, which is kind of rare. But naturally the surroundings are not nearly as dried up as in Spain. My gold fish are still alive and well in the small garden pond.

GUADEC was a big success, as always. The OpenOffice.org and Firefox l10n talks during the warm-up weekend were very interesting, but the difference in attitudes was astonishing. The OpenOffice.org guy was all about enabling different cultures and minority languages to create and view content in their own language. In short, every effort mattered.
On the other hand, the Firefox guy the next day focused primarily on the number of downloads a particular localization would bring. He would prioritize the methods and procedures for a big language over a smaller language any day, in the hope for higher download rates.
It's a pity that neither of them attended the other one's talk, because I think that would have brought an interesting discussion. I am fully convinced that we in GNOME are closer to the OpenOffice.org spirit in this area. Every effort matters, and while some of our tools and process doesn't currently fit every team, it is certainly our goal to make that happen.

Other talks that rocked was the "Creating Passionate Users" talks by Kathy Sierra. It was mostly documentation-oriented, but it truely made you want writing exciting technical docs, no matter how strange it sounds. Of course the "Big GNOME Deployments" talk also rocked. It's exciting to know that there are whole states where there are computers running GNOME in basically every village.

But the most exciting talk of all was the presentation of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) talk, made by Jim Gettys. There are all sorts of challanges with that, both hardware-wise and software-wise. It is also poses a huge challenge for localization. The talk and discussions focused mostly on technical limits with i18n, and I forwarded the notes from this and discussed this with Danilo Segan, the intltool co-maintainer, and it looks like most of the issues can be solved.

Danilo also presented his new status pages at the conference. Danilo, you rock! Hopefully we can bring the status pages online soon. Unfortunately, I just learned that there has been some trouble with the shipment of the server that the GNOME Foundation was supposed to get donated for this purpose. Let's hope this gets sorted out.

Among the new people that I met was Sigurd Gartmann, a Norwegian translator, and Benjamin Berg. Benjamin is a young GTK+ theme engine hacker from Germany, and he was all excited about his first GUADEC. He was even more excited when he got his hands on my Nokia 770 when we had a beer at a Vilanova beach cafe one evening. Only a few seconds later, he was all over the UI of the device, testing widget responsiveness and stuff. When I met Benjamin at lunch the last day of the conference, he was extremely happy: Appearantly he had since met and discussed with a Nokia developer, who then subsequently had given him a Nokia 770. I think that was an extremely good decision, and I am confident that we will hear more from Benjamin in the future...

Last but not least, it seems everyone is thanking Quim Gil for the conference. Obviously, the conference would not have happened without Quim's efforts, but I think there is more to it than a "one single hero" story. I would like to express my thanks to all the volunteers that helped out with the conference. You guys really did rock, and the effort you accomplished is simply astonishing. A big thanks!

Lets hope we all meet together in Birmingham next year!

Update: You can find all my pictures at Flickr.

4 Sep 2004

Sat, 4 Sep 2004 17:18:32 GMT

Some bad news: I probably won't be able to complete all Swedish GNOME 2.8 translations in time for the 2.8.0 release. There's just too little time left, even if I worked all hours a day on it. I'm the only one to blame for this, because I've been working much on other stuff lately.

Some good news instead: I just reported my 1000th GNOME bug report. I just wish I had been as good with triaging and resolving bugs.

And in other personal news, I yesterday learned that I had passed the last exam I need to get my M.Sc.EE degree. Huzzah! Now everything that's left is for me to finish the courses I have started, and some bureaucratic moves to actually get this on paper.

18 Mar 2004

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 11:25:42 GMT

I really should write more often. Anyway, things are looking good in the GNOME 2.6 translations area. Even though I often complain about it I'm not entirely sure we've actually had more string freeze breakages this time around than before. Sometimes they just come in a single swoop (when people suddenly realize there is a freeze and they need/want to break it because of bug fixes) and we appear to be drowning in both actual string freeze breakages and breakage requests, while other times several weeks appear to pass by without a single thing when things have calmed down a bit. Just so that you're sure of it, I and other translators are immensely thankful to all developers who manage to not break the freezes. You know who you are, so feel proud!

We will have some new exciting language support in GNOME 2.6. Some new language translation teams have formed, and some older ones appear to have gotten a lot of new energy. The Canadian English and British English teams are examples of both of this. For those who cannot stand US English spellings, help is on its way in form of a new GNOME release. For those who prefer US English, it's still the default and obviously as supported as before.

In GNOME, a language counts as supported if it has more than 80% coverage. Among the new languages that has passed this barrier we find Arabic, Croatian, Mongolian, Lithuanian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian (Data shamelessly stolen from Kjartan). Still, things are changing rapidly as more translation teams commit their updated translations. And that's still almost a week old automated report... I'm excited to see the new one coming tomorrow.

I've managed to update the Swedish GNOME 2.6 translations to make them complete some weeks ago. I'd like to direct a special thanks to André Dahlqvist who has been tremendously helpful in reviewing the Swedish translations and reporting problems in them. So the GNOME Desktop & Development Platform release is fully translated into Swedish this time as well, even though I haven't managed to keep the Swedish translations of other GNOME-using software (such as Fifth Toe etc.) update in a similar manner -- I've simply had to prioritize the coming GNOME D&DP release.

In other news, I've made the Swedish Fedora translations complete again, and I've started to add and update many Swedish Translation Project translations, especially those that have relevancy to GNOME, like GStreamer. Unfortunately that means that I'm now responsible for 52 translations in the TP, but I think that I'll manage it somehow.

19 Apr 2003

Sat, 19 Apr 2003 20:48:18 GMT

Yay. We have our first place back. For now. Things are changing rapidly.

Malcolm: sv@CHEF is actually completely valid.

18 Apr 2003

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 14:33:54 GMT

Ok, first update this year. That Portuguese translator is really driving me nuts. He stole our first place! ;-)

20 Dec 2002

Fri, 20 Dec 2002 02:00:18 GMT

Almost a year since the last update. What has happened? A lot... The Swedish translations in GNOME 2.0 have been 100% ever since GNOME 2.0 was released (apart from when the occasional unannounced string breakages happen... *grin*). Currently I'm struggling with the GNOME 2.2 translations. I've got a lot of help from a new Swedish translator, Janne, recently, who now maintains the GIMP-Plugins and Gnumeric translations.
I have been appointed as a GNOME Translation Project contact person together with kmaraas, so probably means a lot more responsibility in bringing developers and translators of GNOME together and aid communication and so on, I would guess.

In the summer of 2002, I did my master thesis work. The report is in Swedish though. I and Lina (who I did the thesis work with) had some disagreements on how to present our work. We arrived at a compromise -- I managed to get through to write our report in LaTeX instead of Word, and she managed to get through that we should write it in Swedish instead of English. In retrospect, our professor was somewhat disappointed, since the final results of our work was interesting, but the report being in Swedish made sharing those results difficult. In any case, we succeeded with our work, and I'm a happy camper now. If I only could get finished with the other parts of my studies (those I need before I have my exam), life would be perfect...

30 Dec 2001

Sun, 30 Dec 2001 23:40:18 GMT

Long time since the last entry. The Swedish Gnumeric translation is now complete. Horray!

18 Jun 2001

Mon, 18 Jun 2001 16:21:59 GMT

An even even longer time since the last update.

According to the new unofficial (and working) GNOME translation status page, sv now has 96% translated messages. Am I happy? Yes. Can it be improved even further. Yes.

What has happened since my last update? I'm now the translation coordinator for the Swedish team (sv) in the GNOME Translation Project. I met a lot of nice people at GUADEC. I will start work this summer tomorrow, but I hope to be able to still update lots of translations on my spare time. Am I boring that way? Yes. :-)

28 Dec 2000

Thu, 28 Dec 2000 01:39:10 GMT

An even longer time since the last update.

We now have 87% or 88% translation status for the Swedish team. My goal is of course well above 90%. Let's see if we get there.
Currently, there are other big, none-GNOME, translations that also require attention =(. So lets see what happens. Also, I have to pass some exams. Heh.

I believe I have contributed to all modules on the GNOME translation status page now, except for maybe two or three of them, so there's no point in listing them here.

No progress on the Sourceforge i18n. Even snails moves faster than Sourceforge, it seems.

I've found two new pet projects: Nautilus, the new upcoming GNOME file manager, and Galeon, a GNOME web browser based on Mozilla. Both teams' developers are really nice people, and I try to contribute to those projects as much as I can.

20 Oct 2000

Fri, 20 Oct 2000 23:13:41 GMT

Wow, a long time since the latest update.

We (the Swedish team) reached 79% in translation status this week, and even got ourselves mentioned in the online edition (as far as I know) of the only Linux magazine in Swedish. But, of course, news turn old really fast. The day after, we were at 81% ;-)

I don't know if I should keep my habit of mentioning the translations I've fiddled with since my latest diary entry... but I'll do it this time: dia, evolution, gal, garp, gedit, gernel, gfax, gnapster, gnome-chess, gnome-db, gnome-iconedit, gnome-lokkit, gnome-vfs, gnomeicu, guppi3, gxsnmp, helix-install, helix-setup-tools, libgda, libgimp, memprof, pan, sodipodi and xpdf.

Also, I managed to translate parts of SourceForge into Swedish. But I also think I'm pissing off Tim Perdue with my annoying requests for more translatable stuff. :(