Think Global, Make Locales!

I am back from two very nice days for Barcelona Mozilla Europe Camp. Many thanks to Pascal, Paul, William and Delphine, to the nice people at the Citilab and all who contributed to this great meeting…
To put it short, it was great to see all these smart and geeky people hectic about what is next in Mozilla ecosystem, how to shape the future, how to make things better for the final user.
But my real surprise was not to see brilliant coders, team leaders, evangelists… sharing thoughts, concerns and vision, my real surprise was they were so open to discussion, ready to listen to what anyone had to say or propose, and even asking for feedback every now and then.
Let me give a personal example. During a session about MozDev by Brian King, I asked something about the install.rdf in extensions, in my hesitating and awkward English. Though my question was probably not very relevant and should have been asked to Axel Hecht, I was answered with great care, and Mark Finkle (who does not even know who I am of course) gave me his professional card so that I could remind my problem later on. I felt very honoured of course

Here are some shots of the nice people who were in Barcelona Mozilla Camp

On the background the great Chris Hofmann, Mozilla Engeneering Director, is taking the mike, while on the foreground a young wizz web designer is shaping the future, creating the GUID for a new funky Mozilla app (codename: moZebra). Hey this is the burning edge!

A great moment was when I met some folks I never had a chance to meet before in real life. First in the morning was Georges, aka Sonickydon, our Greek major contributor and a very kind person…

Sonickydon

At last I met the incredible “lazy old man” Joooliiiaaaan ! Giuliano Masseroni, from Mozilla Italia, is The Man Who Had The Idea of BabelZilla and launched the project along with Jürgen. It was a pleasure to see him along with Simone (Underpass) and Francesco (Flod) from the Italian crew.

jooliaan and me

The Italian crew is also working at night at the Sal café, on the beach!

On the second day of the meeting, after various schedule changes, I delivered a little speech on BabelZilla during 20 minutes.

Here is the slideshow I used (Open Office presentation format) welcome2bz_19b
You can also browse my notes to get along with the slides and the online format (Google doc)

Now here is Pau Tomàs, a cool Catalan extension developer to whom I made some years ago the first locale support for his very handy gTranslate extension.

I really like his freaky look, I was probably just like that some 35 years ago . Times are not a-changin’, kids!

Time for serious discussion between Tristan Nitot (Mozilla Europe prez) and Aza Raskin, the wizz guy who is developing Ubiquity.

Here we have Jan Odvarko (right) from Firebug development team. Please translators, remember Firebug needs your work , just join here on BZ !

Dozens of photos can be browsed here

Here are other image thumbnails to click, provided by Sonickydon

(if you want to add images here, just give the link or send them as attachment)

Blogposts about the Mozilla Camp to be found on European Mozilla Community Blog, on William’s Blog, Tristan Nitot’s one, among others…

After a long time I have some news for the WTS.
The next WTS will have a version control system.

Because I know that you’re curious here are some screenshots from the new system:

Version Control on the WTS!

Viewing Logs

Showing File Content using GesHi Syntax Highlighter

'Blame': Viewing Who Did What

Viewing File Diffs

Viewing More Diffs

When users read ’software localized’ they immediately realize that software messages are written in their own language but when developers read the same phrase they should immediately realize that software must fit specific languages rules and character sets.

The difference seems obvious but you can discover very strange behavior when applied to Mozilla platform.

Consider the cyrillic charset, Firefox is translated (ie localized) in Russian but when developers need to interact with underlying operative file system with file paths containing native language characters the life becomes tough.

Recently an user left a post on ViewSourceWith (VSW) extension forum about a bug with cyrillic file names, so I thought the problem was on VSW but after some test I realized the problem is related to Mozilla XPCOM implementation.

The UTF-8 format usage is sometime inconsistent under the hood expecially when must read, write or simply use file names containing non-ASCII characters.

I was very surprised to discover the APIs that run processes don’t work properly especially under the planet-most-used operating system Microsoft Windows.

There are many open bugs on bugzilla (172817, 409796, 408923) but nobody cares so I’ve decided to write myself a working (I hope) component for Microsoft Windows.

The lesson learned is: Localizing software is important but making software locale compliant is important too!

Do you agree?

What is the Firebug extension?

It is a smart and powerful Web Development tool. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Sure it is mainly a geek-oriented tool
Grab it on AMO -Learn more in documentation

Who is maintaining this extension?

Joe Hewitt was the original creator but it is a whole development team now! Just recently Jan Odvarko decided to manage the localization process relying on BabelZilla. He is very welcome .

Localize it!

We remember  in the past the question of localizing Firebug was controversial, various coders, though being Chinese or Spanish,  prefer to have it in English, and surely very specific technical terms must definitely not be translated. But we believe that the overall interface messages should be delivered in the user language. It is free choice then for developers to switch to en-US only if they feel like doing it (Quick Locale Switcher extension is very quick and efficient to change your language). Note also that some developers would prefer to stick to en-US interface because of the poor quality of the translation for their language. This is clearly a challenge for BabelZilla translators!

Firebug on BabelZilla: translators required!

There are currently 32 localizations for Firebug on the WTS, but only part of them are ready-to-use and set to “released”.  Some translators are missing in action for a long time, others are too busy to update at the moment… hey we are volunteers after all!

But now we call old and new forces to join efforts :

• If you are a former translator, already registered, and still willing to maintain your translation, please do your best to update within a decent delay. Keep on doing the good job!
• If you are a registered translator but for whatever reason not wishing to maintain your translation, send a PM to an admin to let us know and try if possible to find someone to take over, in your language forum on BabelZilla or by whatever other means. Thanks a lot!
• If you are new to BabelZilla and willing to start translation for your language, just register at the bottom of this page and do it!