!?!?!?!?!?

Why does it even ask me?

Updated: because I had set signed.applets.codebase_principal_support in about:config to true to be able to pay my taxes online. I have set it back to false, and now the box doesn’t appear anymore.

Finally, Galician is 8^th in the po-debconf translation ranking.

What makes it special is that I have finally overtaken Spanish, so Galician is the highest-ranking language from Spain in that list :)

Also, I am now less than 200 strings away from Russian. That had not happened for a very long time… ;)

I’m so going to Debconf 8…

Here are my travel details to and from Buenos Aires, in case someone wants to fly with me:

• Dublin - Madrid, 7th August, 18:25-21:50, IB3183
• Madrid - Buenos Aires, 8th August, 01:25-08:40, IB 6843
• Buenos Aires - Madrid, 21st August, 21:45-14:30, IB 6844
• Madrid - Dublin, 22nd August, 16:10-17:35, IB 3184

All for 783 euros, bought 1 week ago. I’m arriving 1 day early and 4 days late, but I’ll take the chance to help the organization after my arrival and visit Buenos Aires after Debconf :)

And I’d also like to apologize in advance to anyone I ask to fetch me something, because, being Spanish, it is possible I’ll say something obscene instead ;)

I caught Swedish, so now I’m in 9^th position. Only 269 strings left for overtaking Spanish.

Yes, I’m taking this as a competition :)

It’s not every day that your work is ignored by a founder of Mozilla Europe. From El País:

En España un 23,5% de visitas se dan en Firefox, un índice que es superior al de EE UU, pero que no llega a los índices de Polonia donde el 40% del tráfico se da en el navegador de Mozilla. A pesar de estos aceptables datos [Tristan] Nitot ha recordado y prácticamente hecho un llamamiento para crear una versión del navegador en gallego: “Hay una versión en catalán de Firefox construidas por voluntarios que les importa su idioma, al igual que la hay de euskera. Pero aún no hay una versión en Galicia, muchas veces me lo preguntan y mi respuesta es que si nadie de Galicia se presenta no habrá una versión en gallego, estamos dispuestos a que la gente trabaje con nosotros".

Loosely translated:

“There’s a Catalan version of Firefox built by volunteers who care about their language, and there’s another one in Basque. But there’s no Galician version yet, I get asked this very often, and my answer is that if nobody from Galicia steps up there will be no Galician version. We would like people to work with us".

So, apparently, there’s no Galician translation of Mozilla. I guess that my more than three years’ worth of work were wasted (Dec 2001 - Jul 2004 and Jan 2006 - Aug 2006), that Xis and Galego21 did nothing back in the nineties and noughties, and that what mancomun.org is hosting is an empty XPI file.

To not speak of the paralysed/paralysing bureaucracy of the Mozilla Foundation when several groups of volunteers, one after the other, tried to reinstate the official Galician l10n team.

I would be pissed off if I cared about Galician. Because, you know, from reading my blog it’s obvious I don’t.

One of the things I do when I’m at home is translating debconf templates into Galician. I’m not doing bad at all. Although it’s just me working alone (by choice), mine is the 10th most complete translation, and climbing :)

I’m going to document my workflow, for two reasons: one is that others may find it useful or may suggest improvements. The other is that, in this way, I won’t depend on my bash history not being erased :)

I have a compendium with almost all strings in all debconf templates I translated, and several scripts I use to maintain that compendium, apply it to translations, etc. It is available at http://darcs.tarrio.org/gl-templates/, and can be downloaded with Darcs using this command:

$ darcs get http://darcs.tarrio.org/gl-templates/

In my local machine I keep it in $HOME/pos.

(You may use this compendium and scripts freely, if you want, but be sure to change all appearances of “gl.po” into the appropriate file name for your language.)

Nowadays I’m mostly driven by bubulle’s NMU announcements. Whenever he announces a NMU for a package I haven’t translated or whose Galician translation is outdated, I work on it.

This is what I do to start a new translation for a package called “example":

1. Extract the attached templates.pot file into $HOME/pos/example_templates.pot.
2. Bootstrap the translation with my compendium, using this command:

   $ ./bootstrap-po example_templates.pot > gl.po

   The script is smart enough to know that a file called example_templates.pot is a templates file for a package called example. However, I can specify a different package name as its second argument:

   $ ./bootstrap-po nonsensicalfilename.pot example > gl.po

3. The generated gl.po file is UTF-8 encoded. However, I use xemacs to translate, which cannot read that, so I encode it into iso-8859-1:

   $ msgconv -t iso-8859-1 gl.po -o gll.po

4. Edit the file.
5. Encode the edited file into utf-8:

   $ msgconv -t utf-8 gll.po -o gl.po

6. Add the translations to my compendium:

   $ ./add-total-po

   (My compendium is the total.po.txt file, hence the name.)

7. Optional: edit the compendium to remove obsolete strings or strings which may be ambiguous so I don’t want them in the compendium.
8. Send the translated file to the package maintainer using the BTS:

   $ ./send-po example

9. Record and push the changes to the compendium:

   $ darcs record -a
   $ darcs push -a

This is how I update an existing, outdated translation:

1. Extract the file into $HOME/pos/gl.po.
2. Most likely, it’s UTF-8 encoded. Encode it into iso-8859-1:

   $ msgconv -t iso-8859-1 gl.po -o gll.po

3. Edit the file, fix only the fuzzy translations.
4. Encode it back into UTF-8:

   $ msgconv -t utf-8 gll.po -o gl.po

5. Update the translation using the existing translated strings and the compendium:

   $ ./refresh-po gl.po | msgconv -t iso-8859-1 -o gll.po

6. Open the file. Hopefully you’ll have new fuzzy translations. Edit the translation and complete it, or do some strings then refresh again and edit and refresh again until the file is completed. If the file contains lots of similar sentences you can just translate a couple of them, refresh, and the other ones will then be all fuzzy. Magic!
7. When I’m done, encode into UTF-8, update the compendium, send to maintainer, submit changes to compendium.

I haven’t had my virtual victory lap yet, so here it is:

Oh, please, I don’t think I ever had a favourite film:

I cannot remember what I wrote here when I signed up more than two years ago.

And, of course, there’s something good about this form, and something (else) bad about it:

The bad: this is displayed just after it has verified my email address.

The good: at least it’s not asking for my mother’s maiden name.

Many languages are spoken in more than one country, and many countries have more than one language. When you forget this you do stuff like language selection menus that use flags to represent languages. This is problematic for several reasons, starting with having to ask yourself what flag you are going to use to represent English, and how to deal with the angry letters you’ll receive when you use the national flag to represent a regional language. So, using flags to represent languages is definitely discouraged.

This said, have a look at this small piece of the KDE l10n stats page:

The funny thing is that the flag you see next to “Galician” is the flag of Greenland. And Galician is not spoken at all in Greenland! So, what happened? Why did they use so wrong a flag?

The problem is that the ISO 639-1 code for the Galician language is “gl”, which is the same as the ISO 3166-1 code for Greenland. So, when choosing the flag for Galician they confused the language code with the country code and selected the flag for “gl”: that is, for Greenland.

(I’m surprised that they used the Ukrainian flag (“ua”) for the Ukrainian language (“uk”), and not the Union Flag. Perhaps that would have been too obvious an error :) – although I have been told by email that the ISO 3166-1 code for the UK is “GB”, not “UK”)

So, my takeaway message is: don’t use flags to represent languages and if you do, make sure you use a flag of a place where the language is actually spoken!

Addendum: I have just seen that Basque is accompanied by the flag of the European Union! That’s because the language’s code is “eu”. Ah, and there are three variants of the Chinese language (Hong-Kong, Simplified and Traditional), all with the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Someone is bound to receive angry email – Taiwan is a political hot potato. I have sent email to the maintainer of the page.

msgid "Unable to cw::util::transcode package display format after \"%ls\""

WTF. That’s not even proper English. How am I supposed to translate it?

No, really. My mind boggles. I’m going out for a walk in the beautiful Dublin weather.

If I think that the FSF did the wrong thing, is there any way in which I can display my opposition? Can I become a negative member? Can I make an antidonation: get them to give me money?

Update: In other words: I think that the AGPL is not free. Clause 13 is a restriction on usage. I’m very disappointed. (And the GPLv3 is not a high note for the FSF either).

Now, who leaked debian-private to Randall Munroe?

Just a brief note to announce that Galician has recently surpassed Brazilian Portuguese in the po-debconf translation page, and now it stands at the 11th position.

Yes, this is exciting for me :)

Only 264 strings left to catch up with Russian :)

BTW I’m in Sunnyvale (California, US) until Aug 10th. If someone wants to meet, just email me. My email address should be relatively easy to find. If it isn’t, leave a comment or something.

July 5^th, 2007 will be the 10^th anniversary of the Debian Social Contract.

Also, on July 5^th, 2007, I will be flying to Dublin to start a new job at Google Ireland the following Monday.

Today (well, technically yesterday now) was my last day at Allenta. It’s been several good years, with nice and funny coworkers (and friends), learning and doing lots of very varied stuff. However, after several years I felt a need to do something a bit different. It appears that working at Google is all the rage now, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon ;)

Oh, yeah, I’m excited about living in Dublin, and about working at Google. I already have so many plans, I’ll be happy if I manage to undertake ¹/₁₀ of them ;-)

If you live in or near Dublin and want to meet, feel free to call or email me. My Spanish phone number is in the Debian developer database or in all of my domains’ WHOIS records. My email addresses are all easy to find.

As I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have outside of work (assuming I will not be out exploring the city when not working), it’ll probably be a bit hard for me to keep up with mail and with the Galician debconf template translation stuff. Today I’m in the 12^th position in the ranking, with only 12 strings left to catch the Brazilian Portuguese team. I know that the Catalan team wants revenge from when I overtook them. It’s your opportunity, nois! :-)

For several days now, I have been seeing messages like this in my logcheck output:

Jun 27 19:24:07 maestro postfix/smtpd[14339]: warning: malformed domain name in resource data of MX record for neolookups.com: *.mx.*

Obviously, the MX entry for the domain “neolookups.com” (and all its subdomains, apparently) is “0 *.mx.*”.

It turns out that you cannot search for “*.mx.*” on Google, so I ask you, dear Lazyweb, is this one of the latest tricks spammers use to try and thwart antispam countermeasures?

I had prepared a modified version of this photo, making each bike shed door a different color, and with labels on them saying “KB”, “MiB”, “Tb”, “Gib”, etc.

(It was in reference to this thread, in case you were wondering).

But then I noticed that the original photo had a CC by-nc-nd license, which means that derivative works are forbidden without permission. I could have asked for it, but when/if I received it, it would already be too late for the joke.

So, no modified photo for you. And how does something on which you cannot base your own work be a part of any sort of “Creative Commons”?

Today I found out that I can ad-lib a 45 minute talk about l10n in Debian.

For the record, I like the new color of the Iceweasel icon. It is certainly easier to see in the toolbar.

44 translated template files remain in the BTS. I will rest and wait for them to be uploaded.

It’s not yet the time for Russian translators to panic :-)

From the po-debconf language ranking page:

Afterwards, I will rest.

(I’m going after the 12th position. Three weeks ago I had fewer than 2800 strings translated. Not bad for a language you didn’t even know existed).