Michal's blog

DemoCamp Guelph 7

There was a great crowd (wish I'd remembered my camera!), lots of new folks. Communitech did a quick chat on what that offered as services to entrepreneuers, they've been sponsoring the GuelphDemoCamps  since their inception. I hadn't realize that all of their services were free to the community.

I represented the Sun Startup Essentials program and was fun for me to sponsor a round of refreshments on their behalf and talk about their great new program for Startups. Feedback I'm getting in general is, finally :)!

The quality of the demo's were great and I was amazed at how much open source technologies are being applied in lots of different ways. Chris Long of Well.ca did a presentation on Solr and how they are using this search tool within the application to deliver highly relevant results to users. Solr also has the feature of word recognition on a partial or even incorrect basis. So if you type LaRosh vs LaRoche it will still recognize what you're after.

Christian Fobel did a demo of Arduino.cc - now this was a totally fun open source robotics gadget. I had never seen that before so I was blown away.

Brydon and Ali also tried something new they'd seen at another conference, a kids panel on technology. What a great idea to find out how kids are using the web and technology. Here were some of the highlights from the panel:
* no fear of internet because there are "too many educational things at school about it" and "Facebook has privacy settings - no one but my friends can see my pictures" and "no chat rooms cause they're lame"
* why not myspace? fb is what is used now, not go to website harder to understand
* where do yo go for research for school? "grandma, internet for book search, my parents then my sister, and the library to sit for hours"

Declan Whelan talked about test based development. Part of the agile concept of development and coding for the use case tests. And, John Rockefeller demonstrated GiantGoat.com a new web-based CMS they just launched.

Thanks Brydon and Ali for another great event. 

Firefox for peace

I sat with Erdal for dinner during the Firefox Plus Summit, he localizes Firefox into Kurdish. I was incredibly humbled and inspired by his story about how he started contributing to Firefox Kurdish. At the risk of embarrassing him, I hope I do not; I would like to share his inspirational story of contribution.

Erdal is a medical doctor and spent some time in Turkey during their “war” (the war of the Turkish army against the PKK Guerrilla) in the 90s involved in humanitarian help. He saw many horrific things during this time that stayed with him. After this experience, Erdal wanted to find ways to help. He learned the Kurdish and Turkish languages and because he was technically skilled and felt that would be valuable contribution; he started localizing open source software into Kurdish, with the belief that this would be a peaceful movement forward. After the 1980 coup in Turkey no one could dare to even speak Kurdish for fear of being imprisoned or persecuted.

Erdal found a Mayor of a town in Turkey who had supported the translation of children's books into multiple languages including Kurdish. They connected and the Mayor felt that localizing open source software would be a wonderful thing for his Kurdish constituency and the community at large so he offered his support to Erdal’s efforts. Erdal and a team of contributors (including journalists and others) translated Ubuntu and Firefox. Since offering his support, this Mayor has since been indicted on criminal charges of misappropriating state funds and his governing council has been dissolved. Erdal says, while this sounds terrible, if that mayor had been mayor in the earlier time and did similar things, he would not have been tried but probably faced more severe consequences e.g., death.

Erdal’s hope is that by localizing Firefox into Kurdish he is making a contribution to a peaceful togetherness. I believe he is and so, I am encouraged to support localizers in their efforts to bring accessibility to communities around the world. Thank you Erdal. I hope others take inspiration from this story in their work.

I appreciate that language can be a highly emotionally charged topic as it carries with it political, historical, cultural issues. I mean no offence to other languages or cultures by describing this story. My intent is to share one person’s story that I found personally inspirational.

Fennec for L10n

Following up from the Firefox Plus Summit here is the presentation that Christian Sejersen and I gave last week about localizing Fennec (the code name for Firefox for the mobile device).

I think the presentation went well. We had a packed room and got some good feedback and positive comments. Feedback centred around issues for which we are still working on the answers to, like fonts and testing. These will be challenging areas to address, and I'm sure we'll collectively find a solution that works :). Thanks very much to Philippe Dessante of the French team who has already localized Fennec and blogged his step by step how to (we posted a link in the presentation).

I was excited by the translate.org.za guys - Dwayne Bailey, Adel Zaim, and Friedel Wolff - reaction to the presentation. Dwayne immediately saw the potential to more easily localize and thus reach African communities. My understanding from Dwayne is that in Africa, communities will share a cell phone to access the internet, email, etc. And, because Fennec, at this stage anyway, requires a much lighter effort for translation it holds the potential for greater impact by getting to more African languages and thus communities. Awesome!

As always, please send me feedback. I hope the presentation provides some good information on where we're at currently towards localizing Fennec and how to start localizing it.

Congratulations to all our Localizers!

I just heard from Asa that we have now exceeded 20 million downloads in 1 week which is wonderfully incredible! Without your efforts we could not have achieved such overwhelming success.

It is an honour to work with all of you localizers, translators, testers and others who enable us to create so many great localizations for Firefox.  I congratulate you all on the extensive use of Firefox in all of your languages and locales!

Thank you also for participating and encouraging your users to help us go for a world record on Download Day for Firefox 3; we received over 8.000.000 downloads in 24 hours!

From what I hear in the channels many of you have or are about to have local celebration parties for Firefox 3. Please tell us about them either at www.spreadfirefox.com or leave me a comment with what you did and how it went :) I hope you ENJOY with your teams and users. You deserve wonderful celebrations :)!

Thank you and ...keep it open, keep it safe, use Firefox!

Yours sincerely,
Mic
L10n-driver

Firefox 3

Holy cows, I'm so excited :)
http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2008/06/11/coming-tuesday-june-17th-firefox-3/

and if you haven't already, check out:
www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord

wahoo

Brand new languages shipping in Firefox 3 Beta5

We are very happy to report that we will have five new languages will be released in our upcoming Beta of Firefox 3. These locales are Afrikaans, Indonesian, Mongolian, Norwegian nynorsk, and  Serbian. We would greatly appreciate your help in reviewing those versions when they are released in the next few days. You will be able to download them by either checking out Mozilla's all-beta download page or do a search for "Firefox Beta 5". If you find things that can be improved please file a bug or send me feedback in this post. Thanks and most especially thanks to the localizers responsible for these new builds.

Web Services for Firefox 3

I'm pretty excited for the upcoming release of Firefox 3 - we have been working at many improvements in the Localization approach - and this year we managed to ship over 18 locale's for Firefox 3 Beta 1 (first time we've ever done that!).
I will be working with Mike Beltzner over the next few weeks to write up guidelines for the web services like Search, RSS, etc that can be customized for local markets. These will compliment the existing Firefox 3 localization page. As an example, I recently learned that the motivation behind including the BBC feed in Firefox was to demonstrate the dynamic, fun and potentially entertaining use of embedding and RSS feed into your Firefox chrome. I had thought we chose the BBC for the comprehensiveness of the news content (which I'd previously written in some bugs). All that to say the new guidelines should enable some great local user choices that really show off Firefox well. And, I look forward to having those kinds of discussions with localizers to make Firefox more relevant in local languages.

RSS in Firefox

My responsibility on the Firefox team is to support internationalization of Firefox. One of the things I do is review international locations for choices on product elements such as search engine, RSS feeds and RSS readers. The objective generally is, of course, to provide the best user experience by creating choice across these elements.

Defining the "best" in each locale is often difficult for me as my context is limited to the languages I speak and geographic locations I've lived. In our upcoming major release of Firefox 3 we will be adding capabilities for protocol handlers. As such I'm looking for help in finding good sources of information on international choices for RSS readers and feeds and search engine's. There was some good debate in the Mozilla L10n (localization) Forum on Google Groups, and there are some great bugs (much as bugs can be great ;) that illustrate the challenge of finding good choices. I hope you can help me find good sources e.g., lists of international choices across these product elements.

Thanks