Been experimenting with new things too. One of them was various mockups to improve the way we present information to release engineers who need an overview of how a release looks like from a localization perspective. Take the XFCE default branch πpage, for example. It gives a good overview of the release, and I was wondering if we could make it even more rich by breaking up the statistics in the ones comprising the total percentage.

I’ve been playing around with a mockup for this. This came up in Inkscape:

What do you think? Does it make sense? Is it useful?

Update: I neglected to mention that the numbers and colors are random, but the idea is that they are completion percentages and red = low ones, green = high ones.

So, FOSSComm is now over and everyone has returned to their base after a really fun weekend. Kudos to the Linux Team of TEI Larisas for the excellent organization, and a big thanks to the TEI itself for sponsoring some great swag and coffee/food!

Day 1 ended with the side-effects from tsipouro and other poisonous liquides quite visible on a couple of hackers. A person had to sleep in our room, since even a few blocks’ walk was pretty much out of the question. Definitely out of the question.

Drunk

Wow.. the world is spinning…

X

I swear I just saw a Ferrari pass (in reality was a Mini Cooper)

Drunk

Whoa! Awesome…

I always find it fun talking with drunken people, especially if you pretend you’re wasted too.

Day 2 stared slowly, and by 11am the amphitheater was populated for Pierros’ talk about Fedora and its Greek community. His presentation was insightful on the areas where Fedora shines as a distribution and project with a particular emphasis on how friendships and fun are evident in most of our events. I really liked his graphical theme too: he emulated Fedora’s installer, anaconda, as the presentation theme. Neat. Costas’ presentation on FEL and Fedora Spins was quite interesting too, and the room was pretty crowded.

As usual, I grabbed my camera and 50mm fast lens and flash and evaded people’s privacy by taking portrait pics of them. I’m quite happy with the “Faces from FOSSComm ‘09“ result.

My presentation on Transifex went well too. I realized this was the first time I presented our work to the Greek hacker community, so I was a bit nervous too. I pitched why localization is important to both software and publication in general, and the current problems in this area. Then I run a live demo of Transifex and was able to finish in time for quite a few questions which filled all the gaps I left out of the presentation like translation memories, Launchpad’s shortcomings and translation team workflows.

The F11-el hackfest did OK, but not without surprises. Day 1 included some power surges and network unavailability, and day 2 some urgent calls from $dayjob. We did manage to get some translations done, testing of F11-preview media, and some prototyping for some team features in Transifex.

Later on in the day I had the honor of being invited to the OpenCoffee Larissa III to talk about hacking and entrepreneurship. Delved into some open source licensing and investment discussions too. Had one of those not-fresh yet delicious ‘cranberry & white chocolate’ cheesecakes of Starbucks.

The evening was.. well, my English vocabulary isn’t rich enough to describe it. It included some very good food, some insightful discussions on the powers that drive Linux forward (is it new users or contributors?) and what space each major Linux project fills in the open source landscape.

The highlight was post-dinner, when a disturbingly dangerous mixture of Fedora, Chania LUG and Larissa LUG folks got together with beers at the hotel and busted some guts laughing. Tears were runnig when the reception called at 3am to tell us to shut up, and Christos replying “We’ll think about it and get back to you”.

(Click on photo for names of people — help collect names/tweets)

Had a very relaxing and insightful trip back with great discussions with security hacker Fotis aka ithilgore.

All photos from the event @ The Gallery.

Feedback please! More shots to come in the next days.

I realized today how good it feels right before a release. It’s something like the moment you fasten your seatbelt on the aeroplane before a trip. You know, after everything has been pack(ag)ed and transferred, you made it to your deadline (or changed flights), passed the security/QA. Just waiting for the take off. Satisfaction, planning newer, greater things.

The smallest suspicion of weight is maybe whether your forgot something behind, but OK — you have this for the whole period until your next minor update.

Today we released Transifex 0.3.2.

Codenamed “As good as it gets”, this release includes a large number of bugfixes and improvements from more than 20 people. The diffstat weighs in at 76 files changed, 36245 insertions(+), 16465 deletions(-). For a full list of features take a look at the Release Notes for 0.3.2.

Tarballs and packages are available at the files section of transifex.org and on the Python Cheese Shop.

Fedora’s Transifex instance will be upgraded once we test the new version a bit. Bugs should be reported on Trac.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible.

I’m very glad to see some of my efforts have been using in production by the Fedora community.

Fedora rules!!!

The Localization is the first point for people be able to get a great accessibility over programs. Yes, I know, you can believe me! I’m still an English student, but hopefully, I’m able to write some simple English texts and read other ones, even with some mistakes, but it was not always thus. Well, have you never been on a situation where you simply couldn’t understand anything, because you didn’t have a localized user interface? If you haven’t, then you are a lucky guy, or perhaps a very respectable polyglot.

That kind of thing happen every time everywhere we can imagine. We have several languages around the world and most people only speak your native language. Around 95% of people in the world have a native language other than English. So, how does it make a program usefully for the most people? A program with i18n support can make the difference in these cases.

Localized stuff make things easier, accessible. Users can read, browse, find information and mainly they can understand things. It points me to think as would be easy to me write this post in Brazilian Portuguese, surely I could explain all my ideas more clearly. What do I mean? Basically I mean a localized environment ‘make people feel at home’.

So, what have I been doing to make Transifex a powerfully tool to manager translations around the world? Well, thanks some helps from amazing community guys on this WoC (Winter of Code) to me, we got some things done, including a new Transifex Release 0.3.

However, before listing a summary of my work on Transifex until now, I would like to thanks Dimitris Glezos to encourage me to apply for this GSoC and also for all support, Asgeir Frimannsson to mentor me, the Fedora Infrastructure Team for some many times that I have been boring them on #fedora-admin, People that have had comment on this blog, Fedora Project for be an amazing project and finally Google for a Winter of Code.

Now, lets summarize all my work for the Transfex development:

• Full i18n support in both templates and database
• Support for editing repositories – the editing modules part will be implemented soon, after some changes in the model version 2.
• Switched templating language from Kid to Genshi
• Switched widget library to ToscaWidgets
• Unit testing
• AJAX: Widgets for AjaxForm with client-side validation
• AJAX: Async module checkout on Refresh button
• AJAX: Async file upload on the submit form

Bellow we have a list of all commits to my development branch:

1. Rev: 366 – Initial Ajax Support: Client-side validation, async file upload and refresh button for submit form
2. Rev: 365 – Minor: Added ‘transifex.egg-info’ and ‘*.directory’ to the .hgignore file
3. Rev: 325 – Fixed Forms action
4. Rev: 324 – Fixed commit redirect to ‘module/foo-module?branch=foo-branch’ instead ‘module/foo-module’
5. Rev: 318 – It’s needed to avoid i18n problems because we are using genshi-based toscawidgets
6. Rev: 317 – Added some new test cases
7. Rev: 316 – Form submit without the exception handling breaks test cases
8. Rev: 315 – A fix for the cvs import from the hg repo.
9. Rev: 314 – Fixing the test module for HG repo. Changing to the Transifex repo. Smolt has been moved to git.
10. Rev: 313 – Lib versions updated
11. Rev: 312 – Changed to always delete and create the .mo directories langs when `i18n.py -c` (compile) it’s executed.
12. Rev: 311 – It causes an exception on Genshi 0.5
13. Rev: 310 – Fedora Project’s database messages updated
14. Rev: 309 – Potfiles for view updated.
15. Rev: 308 – Potfiles updated
16. Rev: 307 – Ignore .mo files
17. Rev: 306 – It should be uncommented for be able to do the initial repositories check-out
18. Rev: 305 – Submit form fixed to work with TW and Genshi.
19. Rev: 304 – A fix around the i18n support for the new structure with two directories for view and data potfiles.
20. Rev: 303 – Merging with the last Christos’s changes
21. Rev: 302 – POTfiles splitted into two separated directories (view and data).
22. Rev: 301 – Added the new POTfiles splitted
23. Rev: 300 – Potfiles for database added.
24. Rev: 299 – Some fixes around i18n support for the repo form
25. Rev: 298 – The i18n.py has been changed to handle two separated POTfiles (view and database).
26. Rev: 297 – Library versions added
27. Rev: 296 – Some fixes for repo edition
28. Rev: 290 – Added some changes around the modules forms by Christos.
29. Rev: 289 – Edit repo added. Now it’s possible to edit the repos.
30. Rev: 286 – The modules and repositories forms were migrated to use ONLY ToscaWidgets. It doesn’t need dbsprockets lib anymore.
31. Rev: 285 – Merge Dimitris’s changes
32. Rev: 284 – New POT and PO files generated by the new i18n.py script. The files are cleaner now.
33. Rev: 283 – Replaced some tabs for spaces. We must never mix tabs and spaces.
34. Rev: 282 – For now, when a module is added it has only a branch. So, we don’t need to check if it’s a list. By Asgeir.
35. Rev: 281 – Cleaning…It’s not needed
36. Rev: 279 – Now the descriptions and summaries of modules and repos are put directly into the POT file.
37. Rev: 278 – Changed modules url of the module datagrid
38. Rev: 277 – Added all modules and repos of Fedora Project instance to the POT/PO files
39. Rev: 276 – The function ngettext doesn’t work as expected. Dropping the use of i18n with pluralization.
40. Rev: 275 – Enable translations of repos
41. Rev: 274 – Some fixes around the i18n support into the template
42. Rev: 273 – A CSS fix to the log grid
43. Rev: 272 – Set the mysql database unicode to utf-8
44. Rev: 271 – Set the genshi default encode to utf-8 to avoid some problems around it
45. Rev: 270 – Changing to use the default function gettext “_”
46. Rev: 269 – Some fixes around the i18n support for the forms and others minor fixes
47. Rev: 268 – Need to work with SQLAlchemy 0.4.x
48. Rev: 267 – Repository and Modules forms migrated to dbsprockets
49. Rev: 266 – Datagrids moved to ToscaWidgets
50. Rev: 265 – It doesn’t need filter to select all entries
51. Rev: 264 – If ToscaWidgets is installed we need to declare gettext explicitly to be used into the templates
52. Rev: 263 – Some configs to work with SQLAlchemy 0.4.x
53. Rev: 262 – Added Genshi configs to the sample-dev.cfg
54. Rev: 261 – Genshi and SQLAlchemy branches merged
55. Rev: 235 – Added i18n support (on Genshi)
56. Rev: 234 – Initial Genshi migration. We need to fix the widgets and possibles problems with ‘py:attrs’ yet.
57. Rev: 233 – A CSS fix
58. Rev: 137 – Menu Changes:
59. Rev: 136 – Fixing a space error
60. Rev: 135 – Change a link to the correct form

BTW, you can take this list of commits running the following command in my Transifex repository:

hg log –template ‘{author}Rev: {rev} – {desc}\n’ |grep diegobz|sed -e “s/Diego Búrigo Zacarão <diegobz@\(projetofedora.org\|fedoraproject.org\)>//”

That’s it! I hope my work can make some difference for the Open Source and Free Software as them make the difference to me! Definitely, to be an Open Source and Free Software enthusiast is rock, you can work and know rock people!! Now, it’s the time to attend FUDCon 2008 Brno and then stay in Greece coding for a while. The work continue!

Thanks all!!!

However, continuing implementing new features for Transifex on TG1.0 is not trivial. Specially as we are not using default components like SQLObject, kid template and the own TG1.0 widgets. So, as we already on a big change/migration of components, maybe we could think seriously in a TG2 migration. It could avoid another big change/migration later.

Also, another interesting point for us is implementing too many Ajax features on our tool. That seems to be a promise feature in TG2. Implementing it on the current version of Transifex is not an easy thing to do. To be honest, I don’t know if that worth.

My intend is to follow the tendency, but knowing how much safe it is right now. So…

• How much unstable TG2 is for be used in Trasifex?
• Do we should move to TG2? No? Why not?
• Any thought about Ajax?

Any comment is welcome.

Test cases are simple to write. They help to much when we have several people working hardly in the same branch. So, people can pull/push and see if some code, that it has been coded for somebody, breaks anything.

Most of test cases has been written by Dimitris only can test pages (view) that doesn’t need identity. We had a problem with pages where an user should be logged in. Fortunately we could find out a way to solve this problem. BrowsingSession is the way!

class TestModuleTranslator(TestModule): """Test how module pages look to a translator.""" def test_moduleinfo_logged(self): """Test access to the Module Submit page""" user = testutil.BrowsingSession() user.goto('/login?user_name=guest&password=guest&login=Login') user.goto(u"/module/%s" % self.testmodule) assert 'Submit translations' in user.response

Using BrowsingSession you can browse for any page that need identity and do any test that you want. That’s simple and works fine for any situation that I’ve tested.

The Transifex’s test cases has written until now can be found here. Hopefully we’ll have more soon!

• SQLAlchemy 0.4.6
• Genshi 0.5
• ToscaWidgets 0.9.2
• TurboGears 1.0.4.4

I have been working on the job made by my GSoC mentor Asgeir. He has migrated Transifex from SQLObject to SQLAlchemy, and really that was a great job!

My part of job was to migrate our template from kid to Genshi and consequently to use ToscaWidgets instead the own Widgets of TG 1.0. That really was a hard work, since that I’m still learning about python and TG, and to many things are changing on the TG and ToscaWidgets world right now. It was a problem, specially talking about documentation to use Genshi and ToscaWidgets on *TG 1.0*. Well, maybe I could contribute with my experience about this directly on those projects after the GSoC.

After that I could figure out how to do the ToscaWigets (form and validation) works properly, I’ve written some code to make the repositories editable, so now it can disables, enables and/or changes any repo information using the administration form.

And finally, I would like to tell you that this version of Transifex has a full support for i18n and I would encourage translators to start to translate it for their local language, even that we could add many other strings in a short time, because exciting new features have been being included in Transifex.