Earlier this week I saw a request for help from the Israeli community to fix an RTL issue in the Ubuntu installation. Although the request is in Hebrew, the screenshots speak for themselves and show the cropped text on the right side of the screen. There s a combination of a few problems:

1. Some of the text has LTR directionality, probably due to sentences beginning with an English word. This could be worked around by some translation changes or forcing directionality with RLM characters.
2. The text is aligned to the left. This might be due to the sames reasons above. Maybe it s also possible to override the alignment of RTL languages regardless of the directionality.
3. The text is cropped on the left side. Seems that just mirroring the English positions isn t enough to get good results. (I didn t check the code to see if that s actually what is done, but that s one of the common ways I saw to handle support for RTL programs).

LP bug #798768 was reported a month ago, but it seems to repeat LP bug #560114 reported in April 2010. Any help with these issues will be more than welcome. Of course, I ll be glad to help in any possible way (sorry, I don t write code) and I m sure this also applies to the members of the local community.
Filed under: Ubuntu

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar
• / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

• Danke
• Thank you
• (RTL or not?) / toda
• Gracias
• / arigat
• / n ndi
• Obrigado
• Grazie
• C m n
• Kadin chey la
• / Efharisto
• Dank je wel
• Tak
• D ngge
• Merci
• Kiitos
• Tika hoki
• / dhanyavaadhamulu
• Thank you and God save the Queen
• Mul umesc
• Tack
• / didi madloba
• Gr cies
• Dakujem
• / Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
• Paldies
• / kop khun krap
• Terima kasih
• Hvala (hr)
• / Dhanyavad
• / Hvala (sr)
• Hvala (sl)
• / Akun
• / Sukriya
• Takk
• / Nandri
• Maki biyen jianbakik
• D kuji
• / Xiexie
• / Aabhari aahe
• Faleminderit
• / Kam sah ham ni da
• / Blagodaram
• / Xiexie
• Hvala (bs)

I have been working in the last weeks in the removal of the last pieces of KDE 3 from the Debian archive and I have found there are a lot of packages that is sad having to remove. If you are looking for a good idea/excuse to learn and improve your KDE 4 / C++ /Qt4 skills, have to do a small application for school or you just feel like some useful coding, here is the list:

• creox real-time guitar effects
• kbarcode barcode and label printing application for KDE
• kbiff KDE mail notification utility
• KKBSwitch keyboard layout indicator for KDE (see this post also)
• kmyfirewall iptables based firewall configuration tool for KDE
• kpogre a graphical administrator tool for PostgreSQL
• kredentials KDE taskbar applet to update kerberos/AFS credentials
• ksociograma technical educational software to make sociograms
• ktechlab circuit simulator for microcontrollers and electronics
• qalculate-kde Powerful and easy to use desktop calculator KDE version
• score-reading-trainer trainer for reading music notes

Note that I do not list here software whose port in KDE 4 is being developed although it is still not finished and therefore it is not packaged in Debian. By the way, even if all those packages are being removed from Debian testing and unstable, they will remain in Squeeze, so you can keep using them or install it from there.

As part of the KDE3/QT3 cleanup after the Squeeze release, Debian is about to remove the kkbswitch package from it s archives (unstable, testing). I got a request to keep the package available as it solves some complicated situations when having more than two keyboard layouts. As a response to that request I m staring to look for someone who is willing to port kkbswitch to QT4. I d be more than happy to continue maintaining the package if such a port is done.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, Free software applications

The H Open Source have announced that Oracle have released it s Oracle Open Office 3.3. I was very happy to see that title on my RSS feeder, and checked download.openoffice.org to see that version 3.2.1 is still the main version, and that RC8 is on its way. Then I read the whole item on the H, to learn it not only me (hence I could stop trying to clear my browser cache). I do think having Oracle s support for OpenOffice.org is a good thing, as a lot of organizations are looking to buy OO.org support from a big company. But this doesn t justify what is going here with this press release by Oracle which make me, as an OpenOffice.org member, feel like a there is some kind of a ripoff going on. How can they release an enterprise product before the community version is final? Is there anything Oracle or its developers aren t telling us? I can t prove anything, but this really looks ugly. Many people, including myself, have invested a lot of time and effort in the coming 3.3 release. I believe that Oracle should treat the community better and should think how to motivate the individuals in it instead of demotivating them which things like this. In cases like this, I m happy the project was fork into LibreOffice by the The Document Foundation.
Filed under: Openoffice.org

Today, Oracle have uploaded version 1.0.4 of its PDF Import Extension to the OpenOffice.org extension repository. The repository have had version 1.0.1 for the last year under Sun s branding. The extension is the 3rd most popular in the extension repository with just over 3,000,000 downloads in 2010. An improvised changelog would be issues #90800, #106853, #109406 and #110871. The major change for me is the addition of Hebrew support (and probably other RTL languages). With the new version, Hebrew is imported correctly and not in a reversed order. The Hebrew support was done by Tk Open Systems which sent the original patch, later to be improved by Philipp Lohmann from Oracle (see #90800 for more info). More work is still needed (see #115184), but this version is a big step forward. After doing some QA and checks for Philipp s code fixes back in October, it s nice to see the results released and to have others enjoy them.
Filed under: Openoffice.org Tagged: openoffice

With today regular update from unstable an update to desktop-base package has brought the SpaceFun theme to Debian. This change made my feel like a child with a new shiny toy (: Take you Valessio Brito for this theme it looks great. p.s. As Rapha l mentioned, help is needed to integrated the rest of the theme to other packages.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux

Well, kinda. Just follow the comments on this bug report regarding a sound problem in Fedora 14. A user reported about not being able to get mp3 play smoothly and a few other confirmed the issue with Fedora 14. Tests pointed at the kernel or sound driver. A user (Michael Young) and the Linus him self proved this wrong. and Michael found out it caused by a feature in glibc. From there Linus provided a work around till the glibc guys will fix the issue (and as for now they claim it s not a bug). I m sure the user who opened the bug reported didn t expect this whole chain of events it s quite amazing.
Filed under: Fedora

It seems that during a daily upgrade for packages in Debian unstable gave me the ability to recognize the apt-get output with just glimpsing on screen. That was exactly what happened to me when I watched Bits in pieces on you tube. In one of the scenes there s a text running up on the screen, and new rows are added at the bottom. After about two seconds after the scene I had to jump back and pause to verify if I spotted the output correctly. And it seems I was right. You re welcome to watch the movie, and notice the output at 3:06. I wonder what else does Debian puts in my subconscious
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux

As a follow up on my report from last month about bidi status in openoffice.org 3.3, today was a very good day for bidi in openoffice.org. The short story: two important bugs were fixed for 3.3, and we now have the bidi keyword for IssueZilla system. It began with the fix to a cosmetic bug in the openoffice.org main screen which caused the icons to repaint improperly. While this isn t critical at all, it just looks really bad to have it on the main screen. And I don t want people to get the wrong impression. Thanks you Philipp Lohmann for fixing #97556. The second bug was that AutoFilter isn t working for RTL sheets (regards whether the UI is LTR or RTL). This issue was reported yesterday and got fixed in 24 hours. Thank you Niklas Nebel for fixing #114944. It took us longer to isolate the bug than to get a patch for it. I wish this will happen more (: For closing, and in response to the bidi meta issue, a new keyword was created in the issuezilla: bidi. Till now, there was a bidi sub component in the UI, but this isn t always helpful as sometimes it s better to report against the actual component. The keyword will help us to better tag the issues for easy listing. The thank you list is long, as there were more than a few people behind the scenes today. I ll only mention Netanel, my partner to the Hebrew l10n team.
Filed under: Israeli Community, LibreOffice, Openoffice.org Tagged: bidi, openoffice

It has been 12 hours since the LibreOffice announcement, and the projects starts to do its first steps.

1. Neil Brown had submitted the first patch to LibreOffice, after waiting for 3 years (!) while the patch was available at the openoffice.org issues system (#80637).
2. Michael Meeks had published Minutes of first LibreOffice technical group call . The general plan is to accept patches ( no large / risky / de-stabilising (new) feature work ) from the community and also merge the changes already done to openoffice.org (existing CWS).
3. The public is welcome to help cleaning the existing code, Gil Forcada already started. see the EasyHacks list for the tasks to be done.
4. LibreOffice mirrors now also contain the source code for the beta release done in the morning.
5. Patches are welcome at libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org or using the Bugzilla. See Get Involved Developing LibreOffice for more info.

You re welcome to join us
Filed under: LibreOffice, Openoffice.org Tagged: LibreOffice

For those who haven t heard: OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

The community of volunteers developing and promoting OpenOffice.org sets up an independent Foundation to drive the further growth of the project The Internet, September 28, 2010 The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the project s structure. After ten years successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principle sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called The Document Foundation , to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter. The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organisations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as The Document Foundation . Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand LibreOffice has been chosen for the software going forward. The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading independent members of the OpenOffice.org community, including several project leads and key members of the Community Council. It will be led initially by a Steering Committee of developers and national language projects managers. The Foundation aims to lower the barrier of adoption for both users and developers, to make LibreOffice the most accessible office suite ever. The Foundation will coordinate and oversee the development of LibreOffice, which is available in beta version at the placeholder site: http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software. Speaking for the group of volunteers, Sophie Gautier a veteran of the community and the former maintainer of the French speaking language project has declared: We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company. Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS . [...]

So welcome The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. I already can see how does the community benefits from this due to the merge with go-oo:

Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.

(from http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/) So, will Oracle contribute the OpenOffice.org trademark to the community ? Time will tell
Filed under: LibreOffice, Openoffice.org, Proud to use free software

I read today that Adobe re-released its 64-bit Flash player (although a preview version) after a 3 months without supporting Linux 64-bit. Although these are good news, I think I ll thank Adobe for forcing me into using the free software replacements and stick to them. They might not be perfect, but they are free (as in speech).

I m using Swfdec on Ubuntu 10.04 & Gnash 0.8.8 on Debian unstable, and I m quite happy with both. Gnash 0.8.8 and the fix for YouTube was a big issue which had caused me to not selecting it as a flash player in the past, and Swfdec is dead for two years, but still does most of the work (although it works better on Ubuntu than on Debian, no idea why).
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu

In the last few years the Israeli government founded some work on openoffice.org by Tk Open Systems Ltd. During the years, the work has resulted with an Israeli version , released after the official release and includes a lot of patches to improve support for Bidi and Hebrew specifically. Although most patches were submitted to the hamburg , a lot of them weren t used and are still waiting for inclusion. The funding the that projects stopped a year ago (9/2009), and the last release of the Israeli version is 3.1.1. Since then we had a quiet period in which 3.2 and 3.2.1 were released. While still enjoying the fruits of the projects in these version, it seems that it s time for the community to take over, as we lost hopes for yet another funds from the government. In may Netanel and I started talking about taking over the Hebrew translation, and in June we got Hebrew added to the openoffice.org pootle server. We started with about 80%, and got to 86% in time to get to the list of languages getting a language pack built for. This was a first achievement as Hebrew didn t have a language pack since early on the 2.x versions. I believe that working as part of the openoffice.org l10n group and with openoffice.org release schedule will only benefit for the Hebrew translation process. We used the language pack to test the translation and improve it. We also were able to get to 89% with the help of more volunteers.I believe it s now much more consistent than before. In the process with manually checked Writer thoroughly, while Calc and Impress got less attention due to the time frame. But we fixed some major translation issues in all of the three components. While testing the translation we also started to report Bidi issues we saw in 3.3 beta, hoping they will be fixed for the final release. For example, the main openoffice.org screen on windows has is getting repainted wrongly when moving the mouse over the options (text, spreadsheet..). This looks very badly as this is the main screen! See issue #97556 for details In addition to report new issues, we also started to keep track of the already opened issues regarding Bidi and Hebrew. I m following the issue system for a few years now, but seeing the list of issues organized in the wiki gave me a better orientation in the problems we have. E.g. finding some related or similar issues and mention each other in the comments, when someone goes to first one, he could also fixed the other as the problem is similar and probably comes from the same code. Organizing also the already closed bugs in 3.x, gave me a some kind of a changelog for the Bidi and Hebrew related issues. In that manner, version 3.1 was a very good for Bidi, thanks for a lot of efforts and work with the Bidi meta issue #79434. The wiki page is in Hebrew, but looks quite OK with Google translate (see here). Hoping to have 3.4 a major release (Bidi wise), I ve opened issue #114236 as another meta issue for Bidi related issues. I ve kept Hebrew specific issues out, as to get it more general and also relevant for Bidi users in other languages. Any help of those issues will be more than welcome (starting with votes and ending with patches).
Filed under: i18n & l10n, Israeli Community, Openoffice.org

This year I couldn t attend Debconf, making it the third in a row Debian conference I miss. I watched Aigars group photo carefully to see who do I recognize, and just thought to myself that I just miss too many of the people. Especially ones I met in 2005 and 2006 which were years I had the chance to see some of the members twice a year. I hope to see you all next year!
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux

In an business open source conference held today (June 10th) in Tel Aviv, Michael Eitan, Minister of Improvement of Government Services, said that projects under his responsibility will go open source to improve transparency. More info at TheMarker (in Hebrew, English version by Google translate). A pilot with a focus group should begin soon for testing the changes.
Filed under: Israeli Community

582784 It s been a long time since my last upload to the archive. Actually more than a year and a half. This weekend I tried to get back to packaging, hoping to catch up with some of the needed work. The beginning was very weird, forcing me to review the developer references, the policy and the new maintainer guide for information I already forgot. After a few hours of hacking, it felt like I wasn t MIA at all. After 72 hours, I quite happy with the results:

• catching up with gphpedit s last snapshot (Feb. 2010) which helps with the removal of libgtkhtml2.
• fixing a FTBFS with hdate-applet due to missing build dependency.
• catching up with efax-gtk upstream.
• upload of a new php-doc package which fixes two FTBFS.

Another issue I started and not sure how to continue is finding programs who lost their bidi support due to the last upgrade of libfribidi-dev. In the last version (0.19.x), the fribidi-config utility was dropped by upstream and pkg-config should be used instead. The problem is that programs which build against libfribidi-dev, look for fribidi-config and FTBFS (see #571351) or ignore it s disappearance and stop providing bidi support (see #582784).
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux

The jury has announced that Wikimania 2011, the 7th annual Wikimedia Conference will be held in Haifa, Israel. See you next year (:
Filed under: Wikipedia