Sound Juicer "We're Singing In Tune But Now It's Over" 2.23.1 has been released. Tarballs
are available on
burtonini.com, or from
the GNOME
FTP servers. Nothing that amazing here, sorry:
Machu, what you posted recently made me recall how some local friends told me were treated upon check-in at Oaxtepec, where DebConf6 was happening. It was maybe four or five persons, including myself, treated with arrogance, indifference and rudeness when there were issues (or say, situations) with the rooms or something, by that Argentinian woman, who was the nice representative of the Orga team with the local venue.en_US because they don't want
to use their local language as the system language. This in turn
causes new problems, mostly due to the metric system used in the
sane countries.
I finally got around to debug how to get the system to speak my
language. The key here is the file /etc/default/locale
which on Debian based systems contain the locale settings. Usually
there is just one line in that file.
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Since I live in Finland and want my computer to speak English I
can add the following lines:
LC_NUMERIC="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="fi_FI.UTF-8"
This replaces the settings for numerals (decimal separator and
such), paper (yes, the rest of the world uses A4), name, address,
telephone and measurement (YAY, metric system!). This way I have a
nice English speaking system with Finnish settings.
I tried setting LC_ALL to fi_FI.UTF-8
but that causes gnome to speak Finnish to me, even though the
LANGUAGE and LANG settings are set the
English. LC_TIME is something I'd like to use, but I
find the Finnish abbreviations for weekdays and months to be
confusing. LC_MESSAGES causes gnome to talk partially
Finnish, the general locale is English as it's supposed to be, but
for example gnome-panel changes the menu entries to Finnish.
I wish that it was easier to set these settings. I also doubt
that various tools know how to respect these settings and will
overwrite that file with the default setting. That is why I'm
writing this entry so that I remember how to fix it when that
happens.
In the end the system is flexible but it's built in a funny way.
The actual variable built by combining 2 or 3 values: language,
country and possibly encoding. So to make thing easy for me I would
have to declare en_FI.UTF-8 locale and start
translating applications to that locale. I don't want to, so I'm
sticking to this "temporary" solution.
I found an interesting but old analysis from Don Stewart about trends in the tiling window manager market.
I was curious so I tried to make it again to see the result 8 months later.
I took the vote data rather than installed, because it's more accurate: it tries to count people who use the software rather then people that just installed it. And we all know that installing a software does not mean you're using it.
awesome is rising fast. It has overtaken larswm and xmonad very quickly. Now it seems it just kicked wmii out of the game, and the next target will be the famous ion3, which should be deprecated in some weeks.
I'm very impressed. I never though it will happen that way. That stats, so it means anything you want them to mean, but I think it's very cool anyway. 
I think that the next thing to do is to beat the floating-only window manager like the *box, etc An interesting challenge, so stay tuned! 
So, I should be at DebCamp, but I'm back home after driving 800km in one day.
Why? I still don't know.
The main reason for this post is the irrational and unilateral response I got
from the DebConf Orga Team, with no right to replica of any kind, and with
the violence and humiliation we were treated with. I've helped to make
3 DebConf's possible, and have been involved in many ways for the past years
in Debian, so this shocked me deeply.
The short story is that there was an extra bed in the room I was staying in, the
person who was suppose to be in that bed is a close friend of mine, so I asked
if someone else could use it while they weren't, since that meant I could take
the necessary equipment that I managed to get for DebConf, and also introduce
to Debian someone who is very active and well known in our local community
(and also part of the umbrella foundation used for local finance issues).
I was excited about getting there, like every year. Just to make this extra
clear, this person had already booked the full week of DebConf, just not
DebCamp, as he previously thought he couldn't attend. When he found out he
could, he was thrilled to be able to go and help setup. So, I made the mistake
of not notifying the Orga team about the switch. I did this because it truly
was harmless action, where a bed which would otherwise be wasted would get
used, and, I did not notify the Orga team because they've been very
aggressive, inflexible and unhelpful throughout the planning of the
conference. This doesn't justify it, just explains why someone who generally
is helpful decides to take the wrong path to solve something.
Up to here, nothing very exciting. What made this special, is that when one
of the organizers, Margarita Manterola, found out about the switch, instead
of coming to talk to me, even though she's known me for *years*, she went
and informed the hotel that somebody had committed a crime, and checked in
under a different name, as if me or the person that came with me where
some random stranger. All I can say is, WTF?
Let me stress this, the email that was sent out[1] twisted the facts, to the
extent that some of them are a lie, like the problem arrived at check-in,
when it actually happened while we where napping a few hours after we had
arrived, and any effort made by the Orga team with the hotel where wasted,
as it was one of them who had originally created the problem.
Instead of solving this among us as a group, and, again, "solve" is a
bureaucratic thing, because no one was being harmed, Marga decided to
actually *harm* me personally, the person who I had brought, and DebConf
as a group. What got solved? Nothing. I left, along with someone who
would of otherwise been helping out build DebConf, while the Orga team
demanded a ridiculous fee for me to stay in the hotel.
Rules are rules, I understand, but I also understand everybody listens to
downloaded music, people in Germany install[2] nmap, and a very long list
of rules that we tend not to follow because they're unreasonable or
unnecessarily complicated.
Is this really what DebConf is turning into?
All I can say is I'm very sad and shocked that the people I've worked with
for so many years decided to condemn me over such a meaningless issue, and
especially that the local team, Martin Ferrari, Damian Viano, Maximiliano
Curia and Margarita Manterola would do such thing to "one of there own",
and that the international Orga team would mindlessly follow through with it.
I apologized to the hotel, I do want to apologize to the innocent people who
had to deal with this, and, even though my intentions where good and unselfish,
I regret what happened.
Despite all of this, I'm still deeply committed to Debian, have worked during
the year and deserve to relax and enjoy it, so I will be there for DebConf
as a regular attendee.
See you there!
[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20080802.231856.66c7d3fd.en.html
[2] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1629259&from=rss
#!/usr/bin/make -f
include /usr/share/dpatch/dpatch.make
build: build-stamp
build-stamp: patch-stamp
dh build
touch $@
clean:
dh clean
%:
dh $@
#!/usr/bin/make -f
include /usr/share/dpatch/dpatch.make
build: patch-stamp
dh build
clean: unpatch
dh clean
%:
dh $@
First day at debconf8's debcamp! I have published an ical
file with the stuff I plan to attend, if anyone is
interested: http://people.debian.org/~kov/kov_debconf8.ical.
Btw, dear lazy web, the official ical file is using ART as
TZID, and that seems to make Evolution go nuts on the timing
of the talks. Anyone has got a clue on what my be happening?
I downloaded the file and changed it to use
America/Sao_Paulo as TZID and now Evo acts correctly.
This morning's newspaper featured a front page article reporting that elementary schools are bad at math. The third paragraph states:
"The quality of arithmetic education has a strong variation. Nearly a quarter of all schools is weak, over a quarter are strong. Exactly half scores 'average'."Maybe I've been badly educated, but don't those statistics match what should be expected? If it's a normal (gaussian) distribution, both the lower and higher scoring chunks should be about the same size and indeed, the average part should be by far the largest. Of course I could be misunderstanding it all, probably due to me also being educated under this system.
apt-get install -t experimental adept
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu intrepid main
adept. I have missed
desktop files in this alpha (it might be a little on purpose too, as I’d like
people to run the program from terminal to be able to check the debug output
and possibly send it along with problem reports).
If you have sudo (Kubuntu-ers do, the rest can use kdesu or similar):
sudo adept
sudo adept installer
sudo adept updater
Various people have asked me why there'd ever be a justification for ACPI tables to base various types of behaviour on the operating system they're running on, and why Linux claims to be Windows. There's pretty straightforward explanations that don't involve conspiracies, but they're not necessarily obvious. Let's start from the beginning.
You can approach debconf translation work in two ways: you can be active and seek out packages to translate and update, or you can be reactive and translate and update packages when someone requests it to be done. Usually, nobody takes a purely active or reactive stance; for example, lately I used to react to calls for translation updates, but when I had some spare time I would go translate a couple of new packages.
When you work actively, the web page whose URL you need to know is http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/. There you have links to all languages for which there are translations. Click on yours, and you’ll see a page listing the state of every source package’s debconf template translations for your language. First, you see the partially-translated packages, then the fully translated packages, and finally a list of packages which are not translated to your language. For each package in the first two sections you can download the .POT and .PO files; the names of the packages in the last section just link to a big webpage from which you can download every package’s .POT file.
In the top part of the page you have links to other useful pages. An interesting one is the ranking page, which lists all the languages in order of completeness.
For working reactively, you need to subscribe to the debian-i18n mailing list, because when there is a call for updates or for translations it is always sent to that mailing list. Also, if there already is a translation for your language, another email will be sent to the translation group’s mailing list, as well as to the file’s latest translator.
Calls for translations include information on the deadline and the package maintainer’s preferred methods for submitting the translation. There may also be some notes from the package maintainer. Finally, the .POT file is attached to the call for translations sent to debian-i18n, while the old .PO file is attached to the call for translations sent to the group and the latest translator.
Calls for translations can be sent by the package maintainer when the debconf templates have been modified and the translations need to be updated, but they can also be sent by other people for many other reasons. For example, for the last months there’s been a campaign to upload packages for which there were newer translations that hadn’t been uploaded yet, so NMUs for these packages (non-maintainer uploads) were announced, including a call for translations. Also, there was a campaign to review all packages’ debconf templates, make them more consistent, improve their grammar, etc., and a call for translations was issued for every package after the review.
Running the Galician debconf template translation as an one-man show has an obvious problem: translations don’t get reviewed. Being only one, I would only catch typos, and the odd thinko, which is not very useful. The real use of reviews is to see if the grammar is sound, see if the translation sounds natural or forced, etc., and it has to be someone else who does it. If I review my own translations, of course they’ll be perfect.
When someone else picks those translations up after I stop doing them, it would be useful to make a full review. Fortunately, I’ve been keeping a compendium of (almost) all debconf template translations, so doing the review is as simple as downloading that single file and reading it.
I’d recommend that one single person read the full document and makes notes of grammatical/orthographic mistakes, common patterns, vocabulary choices, etc., and then those notes should be used to go through the compendium again and fix and update everything. The result would be useful for two things:
First, it is a very big collection of examples you can point people to when they don’t know what style to use to translate. So, when someone asks in the mailing list about the best way to translate Couldn’t create temporary file , you can search for similar sentences, see how they were translated and suggest the same solution.
Second, you can use that compendium to apply the results of the review to all translated packages very quickly. The idea is to regenerate the .PO file from the compendium. You can do it actively (see what packages have had their debconf templates translated into Galician, download .POT files, apply compendium, upload .PO files) or reactively (when you have to update a .PO file, download the .POT instead and apply the compendium, then update the resulting .PO file).
Experiment, Use, Share, Work, Contribute.
But never finish, is an inphinite cycle where you can always learn from everybody and you have a lot to teach the other. Isn’t that the freedom?. Enjoy it.
Next.