I recently got a question by email about the lecture I presented at FOSDEM, and by that mail I discovered that the video of the lecture was uploaded to YouTube (FOSDEM 2012 Debian packaging for beginners). While I thank the person who did the upload, he/she did not keep the right license for the video which is CC-BY-SA 3.0 (as noted at FOSDEM archive). You can also grab the webm file directly. Well, the next task will be to listen to myself in order to improve for FOSDEM 2013 See you there.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, FOSDEM

In the last 6 months I ve devoted a lot of time to the open source projects I m part of. I decided to take a vacation from most of the open source stuff I do. This is mainly to balance things better and make sure I don t feel burnt out. I m not disappearing completely, but rather shifting into a lower gear and focus on the things I enjoy most regarding open source.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, LibreOffice

After not attending FOSDEM for a few years, this year I decided to attend and also give a talk about Debian packaging for beginners , a replay of a talk given by Gergely Nagy in Debconf11 (video). As the per distribution devrooms were replaced a few years ago with the cross-distributions rooms, I thought it might be a good chance to have this kind of introduction talk to help people started contributing to Debian (or derived distributions). The talk wasn t meant to replace reading the documentation (new maintainer s guide, developer s references and the debian policy), but it s a good start for those who want some hands-on experience. The idea is to start with a just the upstream directory and progress trough the various errors and warnings we get during the build process using dpkg-buildpackage. The outcome is of course very basic, but enough to get people ready to do things on their own, including various QA tests on the package (e.g. lintian and debdiff). The presentation covers the important points of the 3 main files in the debian directory: control, changelog and rules. It addition it holds some information about the various tools one can used to test the packages. I hope to make another version of the presentation to be more standalone than just having the main points during the talk itself.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, FOSDEM

As a Linux integration guy at Zend, most of my time is spent in compiling PHP related code or dealing with the variety of Linux distributions we support. With the coming release for PHP 5.4, we (at Zend) had some interesting stuff going on. As part of the RC phase, I got to check the status of the 50-60 PHP extensions we provide, especially the PECL extensions which have different release cycles than the main PHP. With minor versions, this usually doesn t really matter, but for major versions this means that some extensions need a little bit of love and fixes to work well with the new PHP version. This of course with the help of our developers. The changes are usually one-liners due to a variable type change, or finding commits in the extension s SCM and applying/back-porting it to the current versions (e.g. pecl memcache). Our policy regarding the patches we have, is that they should at least be sent to upstream (a core member or a bug report, e.g. #55703). I think I m in the best position to enforce that patch policy, so in a few recent cases, I found myself asking one of our developers if the patch he sent me was already accepted upstream before willing to take it into the build process (in this case they are used temporarily, till we ll work with the next RC or final release).
Filed under: PHP

As LibreOffice is approaching its final 3.5.0 release, I d like to sum up the RTL status for RC1. So far, 6 RTL related bugs were resolved in the 3.5 cycle (#32530, #34222, #40950, #43790, #43793, #44078), and a few minor issues reported directly to the developer s mailing list got quick responses. Most importantly, the new features of page break and header/footer not only support RTL but actually looks good. During the LibreOffice conference I was suggested to help with these features, providing feedback, and I m glade the needed attention was given to it. Besides that, a few l10n and translation issues were solved in the process of doing the Hebrew translation (which also reflects on other RTL languages). At a few cases, these issue because a general l10n issues which affects all the languages. In general, I found the core developers responsive to mails about RTL support. I m sure the talk about RTL problems during the conference helped, as well as being more active in the project and having more personal acquaintance with the developers. That s being said, RTL support for LibreOffice still has problems, which I hope will be pushed during the 3.5.x cycles (full list at Bug 43808, the rtl meta bug). As to get some focus regarding was is to be done, I m listing the top problems:

1. #44657 RTL UI: Horizontal scrollbar in calc main window is broken
2. #33302 brackets inverted in rtl text (mac only)
3. #37692 RTL list numbering reverses its direction
4. #42070 - RTL support in broken in presenter Console extension
5. #32531 - Incorrect cursor key movement between table cells of different directionality
6. #104515 - RTL UI: moving active embedded object to the left moves it to the right (reported for OO.org, but verified in LibO)
7. #37128 - Writer saves text alignment of RTL paragraph not according to the ODF specification

I hoped to have the first two done for 3.5.0, but didn t succeed in getting them fixed. Will keep trying
Filed under: i18n & l10n, Israeli Community, LibreOffice

PHP 5.4.0 is around the corner, with RC6 released this weekend. With the courtesy of Ond ej Sur it s already available in experimental. Earlier this week, Raphael Geissert, tested some PHP extensions with the new version and reported 16 bugs (severity: important) against those who failed to build with PHP 5.4. As they will become RC bugs when 5.4.0 will enter unstable (probably around mid February), I preferred to handle them sooner than later. The result is 3 patches sent (one already uploaded) and 5 NMUs done. During the process I poked through a lot of upstream SCMs. In the way I found out a trivial change was done in PECL s SVN two years ago for all the extensions located there, which got me suspicious regarding some extensions we have. For non PECL hosted extensions, I had to track if and when a fix was done and use it for building or do a trivial fix myself. Packages using the 3.0 (quilt) source format were extremely easy to fix, and I was quite happy it generally went fast. In general I m a passive subscriber to the Debian PHP Maintainers mailing list, and finally could help actually and not just reply emails. For me it s also doing some Debian work after a few months of focusing on the coming LibreOffice 3.5 release. update [26/1/2012]: From the 16 issues, only 2 aren t fixed already or will be on the next upstream release. As their upstreams are dead, this is in the hands or the debian people, at least till they ll FTBFS on unstable (instead of experimental).
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, PHP

Oh, shit yet another step to shrink the public domain.
Filed under: Free software licenses

The Israeli patent registrar have reverted previous ruling regarding patents on software and published a draft for the procedures to accept such patents. The procedures are open to public comments for the next 30 days. Two years ago the patent registrar have started to consider revising the the issue and got many position papers (e.g. Hamakor s papter). At the end he decided not to accept patents on software. De facto, at least one such patent (US patent 7,596,609) was accepted to be valid in Israel after that ruling. Now that the rulings is reverted, I guess will see many more software patents granted here. I wonder about the implications on the local software market hopefully it won t stagnate due to patent wars such as the ones we see every now and then in the US.
Filed under: Software Patents

See you there
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, FOSDEM, LibreOffice

In 1977 Tal Brody said after winning the Euroleague Basketball cup with Maccabi Tel Aviv as sentence which became quite famous in Israel:

We are on the map! And we are staying on the map not only in sports, but in everything.

I found out through Invar Hovav that there s a regression in the Ubuntu installation doesn t believe this is true anymore, as according to lp#905754, you can t select Israel or its major cities, and instead get suggestions for Gaza and Hebron. This is a regression from past installers when you could at least choose Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Gaza. It used to be hard to pin point each location, but was still possible. This might be part of a bigger problem of selecting close/adjacent cities, but the default behavior in the past was different. From the technical point of view, the Gaza and Hebron TZ files are weird (tzdata version 2011n-1). Both don t have info for 2012 daylight saving time (usually start in late March or early April). Hebron switches twice a year to DST, hopefully nothing critical uses this time zone.

$ zdump -v Asia/Hebron grep 2011
Asia/Hebron Fri Apr 1 10:00:59 2011 UTC = Fri Apr 1 12:00:59 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Hebron Fri Apr 1 10:01:00 2011 UTC = Fri Apr 1 13:01:00 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Hebron Sun Jul 31 20:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Jul 31 23:59:59 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Hebron Sun Jul 31 21:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Jul 31 23:00:00 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Hebron Mon Aug 29 21:59:59 2011 UTC = Mon Aug 29 23:59:59 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Hebron Mon Aug 29 22:00:00 2011 UTC = Tue Aug 30 01:00:00 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Hebron Thu Sep 29 23:59:59 2011 UTC = Fri Sep 30 02:59:59 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Hebron Fri Sep 30 00:00:00 2011 UTC = Fri Sep 30 02:00:00 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200

And Gaza only have a 3 months daylight saving time, while Israel has 6 and European eastern time has 7 months (all are UTC+2 region).

$ zdump -v Asia/Gaza grep 2011
Asia/Gaza Sat Apr 2 10:00:59 2011 UTC = Sat Apr 2 12:00:59 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200
Asia/Gaza Sat Apr 2 10:01:00 2011 UTC = Sat Apr 2 13:01:00 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Gaza Sun Jul 31 20:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Jul 31 23:59:59 2011 EEST isdst=1 gmtoff=10800
Asia/Gaza Sun Jul 31 21:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Jul 31 23:00:00 2011 EET isdst=0 gmtoff=7200

p.s.
This isn t a political post, don t make it into one.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu

Following the good examples of Christian Perrier (Debian l10n leader), I m glad to publish translation status update for LibreOffice 3.5.0 beta0. Information is based on the documentation foundation pootle server. 9 languages at 100%: Catalan (ca), Danish (da), French (fr), Scottish Gaelic (gd), Portuguese (pt), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt_BR), Russian (ru), Slovenian (sl) and Chinese (China) (zh_CN). 15 languages at 99%: Asturian (ast), Bulgarian (bg), Breton (br), Welsh (cy), Belarusian (be), German (de), English (United Kingdom) (en_GB), Esperanto (eo), Estonian (et), Galician (gl), Latvian (lv), Norwegian Bokm l (nb), Polish (pl), Turkish (tr) and Slovak (sk). 1 languages at 98%: Hungarian (hu) 15 languages at 97%: Assamese (as), Czech (cs), Chinese (Taiwan) (ch_TW), Spanish (es), Basque (eu), Finnish (fi), Irish (ga), Gujarati (gu), Croatian (hr), Italian (it), Icelandic (is), Kannada (kn), Marathi (mr), Dutch (nl) andTelugu (te). 2 languages at 96%: Hebrew (he) and Japanese (ja). 1 languages at 95%: Vietnamese (vi) 5 languages at 94%: English (South Africa) (en_ZA), Indonesian (id), Khmer (km), Tamil (ta) and Uighur (ug). 4 languages at 93%: Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn), Catalan (Valencia) (ca_XV) and Korean (ko). 1 languages at 92%: Oriya (or). 1 languages at 91%: Swedish (sv). 1 languages at 90%: Greek (el). 11 languages between 80%-89%: Afrikaans (af), Bosnian (bs), Hindi (hi), Lithuanian (lt), Macedonian (mk), Burmese (my), Norwegian Nynorsk (nn), Occitan (oc), Oromo (om), Sinhala (si) and Ukrainian (uk). 11 languages between 70%-79%: (no list) 10 languages between 60%-69%: (no list) 13 languages between 50%-59%: (no list)
Filed under: LibreOffice

I ve recently been to the LibreOffice Conference 2011 in Paris. It s very nice to finally meet in person all those names from the malinglist and the bug reports. Although meeting most people for the first time, I left the conference with a strong feeling of a community (which I m proud to be a member of), this is a very motivating feeling. During the conference I had the chance to work on LibreOffice related issues:

• Hebrew translation for version 3.5 (up by 2%).
• Fixes to the Hebrew translation for version 3.4 (noticed a few string changes in 3.3 not included in 3.4).
• Patch to fix a small typo in the code (noticed while trying to find the meaning of the string before translating).
• Patch to fix the appearance of the BrOffice logo in RTL UI instead of LibreOffice (fix to the 3.3 branch, already fixed in 3.4).
• 3 patches (1, 2, 3) to cleanup unused .chaos file types with Michael Meeks s encouragement and help with doing some digging in the code.
  Apparently, even non programmers can write patches with the appropriate help.
• Check about 30 RTL and Hebrew related bug reports for my RTL issues presentation, verifying them with 3.4.3.

The 3 patches began when I noticed a few weird strings to translate in the context of installation media good luck to those who will try to install LibreOffice from 5.25 disk, 3.5 disk or a tape drive. These 3 strings are now removed from the code with other 36 unused strings. So translators please take the strings to translate with a grain of salt. Post conference tasks (always ending up with more stuff to do after a conference):

• Recreate my RTL issues presentation so that the live example of bugs could be presented as slides.
• Keep advancing with the Hebrew translation (3.5 and 3.4 fixes).
• Finish the fdo bugzilla search for RTL bugs. I found out some other people who reports bugs (and try to coordinate with them).
  A list of RTL related bugs in LibreOffice I know of is here: http://wiki.hamakor.org.il/index.php/ _ _ (still work in progress, in Hebrew).
• Create a meta bug for the RTL bugs, and prioritize the issues to focus on what s important to make sure is fixed for version 3.5.
• Start testing version 3.5 for RTL bugs (daily / weekly builds).
• Help Christoph Noack with finding which PaperCuts we have in LibreOffice and try to get them fixed.

Filed under: LibreOffice, Openoffice.org

I m in Paris for the LibreOffice conference, but today after a random talk with a guy that had a Mozilla badge/pin, I found myself in a tour to the Mozilla Europe office (which is also in Paris). Thank you random guy David for the tour (: The office itself looks very nice, and reminds me of the work space of many software companies. But the unique part of the tour was David pointing to people and telling us what they are working on. It s interesting to see the people behind the sciences, although we didn t talk with them in order not to disturb the work. I remember most when we David pointed to a guy and said he s the one doing composer. Maybe because it s very clear what he doesn t, while some people work on more internal parts or more conceptual concepts like performance . After seeing some cool posters on the wall, I got a chance for a short chat with Tristan Nitot and ask him some questions about Mozilla Europe and the office. I m still trying to understand how Mozilla works (as an organization), and this was a good chance to get familiar with the European branch. For me, the highlight of the tour was the chance to say to the people at the office thanks for the software just before leaving and saying goodbye. Not in everyday you get a chance to see the faces behind the software you use daily.
Filed under: Mozilla

Happy 10th birthday Mozilla bug #98160, I hope you won t make it to your 11th, but who knows I hope the same for your younger brothers bug #166240 which is only 9 years old. Many thanks for all the people who tried to help RTL users switch their textarea directionality and alignment easier. Another bug in the it sometime sucks to be an RTL user department is bug #119857, soon to be age 10. I m lucky to have BiDi Mail UI as a good workaround, otherwise I couldn t read emails in Hebrew with the proper alignment/directionality. In another department, I must say I love daylight saving time, as I have more hours of sun, but this comes on the expense of my schedule as due to bug #504299 all my events aren t on the right local time, but an hour earlier. Although the post is written cynically, I would like to call the Mozilla community to help with fixing these issues. I also want to thank the people who are already helping with these issues or helped in the past.
Filed under: Free software applications, i18n & l10n, Mozilla

Hello planet Mozilla. For my first post appearing in the planet I d like to write about a recent community aspect I experienced, the rest will probably be more technical. While we have some great volunteers participating in Mozilla, there s aren t any Mozilla representatives in Israel. To be exact, there are a few Israeli that do work for Mozilla (and I think they work from within Israel), but we don t feel them in the local free software community. I was very surprised to see 5 people from Mozilla attending Wikimania 2011, but this is of course a good surprise. I would have excepted to see representatives in a free software conference, but we still haven t had any international free software conference in Israel (maybe some day I could bring Debconf here). A week later I had another representative arriving for a free software conference I organized called August Penguin. This is the first time having someone arriving from abroad just for the local conference. For me, a free software user and contributor, Mozilla is mostly a software project. Meeting the various representatives gave me the chance to know some of the other sides of the organization and its activities. For me that was really interesting and I think that it would be positive to do many of the activities also in Israel. Besides the interest in the organization, I had the chance to host some of the representatives by showing them around, providing a place to crash at and making sure they stay after the conferences would be as easy and enjoyable as possible. Reflecting back, my place would probably could be the Moziila Inn as I had 3 people from Mozilla as guests in one week (on separate days). For me that was fulfilling the community side of the term free software community , as we re not only a technical community. Others might even call this an outreach program (a term I heard from all 3 guess in various contexts), but I m still not sure who is outreaching to whom (: So if you happen to work on Mozilla stuff, and arriving Israel, drop me a note
Filed under: Israeli Community, Mozilla

A month ago I sent a talk proposal for the LibreOffice conference regarding RTL issues in LibreOffice . Today I got the response:

Thank you for your paper submission to the LibreOffice Conference.
We are happy to inform you that your proposal has been accepted.

Cool but now the hard part begins with preparing the talk itself and making sure people who are used to left to right languages would also understand and take something productive out of it.
Filed under: Free software applications, LibreOffice

Well, it seem that 20 year really flies by when you re having fun (:

I m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready.

Linus Torvalds, 25 August 1991 on comp.os.minix (original message)

Filed under: Proud to use free software

FireGPG is an extension that provides GPG encryption and decryption options for Firefox. It was discontinued a year ago, and didn t support Firefox 4.0 due to changes it introduced. I was happy to see that the source is still available ,and also maintained enough to have a easy option to build the extension manually. For Firefox 5.0 just download the code and use the build.sh script to build an xpi file, then install it as usual. The Firefox 5.0 support got version number 0.8.5. I m thinking about repackaging it to Debian, as it was removed from Debian testing/unstable (version 0.8 is available for squeeze). Thanks bit for the maintenance work and Aaron C. de Bruyn for making sure the single repository holds these changes.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, Free software applications, Mozilla

The first LibreOffice conference is approaching (12th-15th of October), and I m very excited about it. I recently sent a talk proposal for RTL issues in LibreOffice. I guess that most of the developer aren t aware from personal experience to the RTL issues. And I hope that with this talk I could make them think some more about RTL when they code LibreOffice. If the talk will be accepted, most of my example are going to be from Hebrew. I ll be very happy to get help from Arabic speakers so I could show some more issues and examples. If there are other languages that want to join let me know.
Filed under: LibreOffice, Openoffice.org

I m organizing August Penguin, the yearly free software / open source conference in Israel for and by the community. We celebrate the 10th time we re holding this conference. I started going to these conferences just after high school, later I got more and more involved and now this is my 2nd year of being the main organizer (with a few others who provide great help). To celebrate the Linux 20th anniversary and August Penguins 10th anniversary, I thought to print copies of the Linux 20th anniversary T-shirts. I tired to contact the Linux Foundation to coordinate this, but got no response. I m writing this post to ask for help with finding the people who can approve this printing in behalf of the Linux Foundation. For those who can read Hebrew, the conference schedule is available at Hamakor s wiki. The rest are welcome to read the English version (provided by Google translate, so not totally accurate).
Filed under: Israeli Community