A better world

Still actually working on that new project of mine, we (Pockey and I) finished Gcompris localization in Chinese last Saturday. Ok, most of the work was done with 98% completed, which shows a huge increase from 6 months ago actually where less than half was translated into Chinese. Gcompris is an educational software suite which proposes different activities to children from 2 to 10 years old. Gcompris po files are available from the Gnome website where you can find a few other languages that need completion. Coordinating the Gnome Chinese translation effort it is worth mentioning that you can find BLUG member and occasional presenter Funda Wang (Yeah BLUG again).

This being said we have also started localizing Hex-a-hop, a puzzle game with 100 levels. The internationalization process was completed last year in July by Jens Seidel, who has developed the patches for making it work with SDLPango and to support all the spectrum of Unicode characters. With debian packages, the process of getting the po file is a big more “complicated”. In fact there are two ways, one given to me by Miriam Ruiz (Hex-a-hop maintainer at debian) and one by Anthony Fok (BLUG member among so many other things, and great Linux contributor). So here we go (for those who would like to actually translate other debian projects):

miriam@miriam:~/tmp$ apt-get source hex-a-hop
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Need to get 1020kB of source archives.
Get:1 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main hex-a-hop 0.0.20070315-6 (dsc) [1004B]
Get:2 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main hex-a-hop 0.0.20070315-6 (tar) [892kB]
Get:3 http://ftp.de.debian.org sid/main hex-a-hop 0.0.20070315-6 (diff) [127kB]
Fetched 1020kB in 1s (577kB/s)
dpkg-source: extracting hex-a-hop in hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315
dpkg-source: info: unpacking hex-a-hop_0.0.20070315.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: info: applying hex-a-hop_0.0.20070315-6.diff.gz
miriam@miriam:~/tmp$ find . -name “*.po”
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/bg.po
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/ru.po
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/ja.po
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/vi.po
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/ta.po
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/pl.po
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/nl.po
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/es.po
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/de.po
miriam@miriam:~/tmp$ find . -name “*.pot”
./hex-a-hop-0.0.20070315/debian/i18n/hex-a-hop.pot

Then you just need to open the .pot file with poedit. Second method is to convert the .mo file which you can get from the binary deb file back into a .po file typing:

wget http://ftp.tw.debian.org/debian/pool/main/h/hex-a-hop/hex-a-hop_0.0.20070315-6_i386.deb
dpkg-deb -x hex-a-hop_0.0.20070315-6_i386.deb testdir
cd testdir/usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES
msgunfmt hex-a-hop.mo > hex-a-hop.po

Now there is a good explanation here on the translation process used in FOSS for those of you wanting to understand more. Should you want to join us and help, please don’t hesitate to contact me. If you want to translate other applications that you feel should be in your language but are having problems with it, I won’t mind helping out neither.

Continuing my search into internationalizing and localizing the 48 lessons for RUR-PLE and asking all around I have raised a few very meaningful feedbacks from my community: it’s a lot of work to recode HTML pages and insert language tags, it also makes authoring a lot more complicated and not for everyone. Imagine a teacher wanting to add lesson No.49, he’ll have to understand the technique behind it and thus learning a bit of HTML is probably a lot easier. So what you gain from simplifying the work for translators is lost in hindering authoring.

Well actually NO! A big THANK YOU to Elly for pointing out this great Java application to me: OmegaT. OmegaT let you open XHTML, HTML, Microsoft Office 2007 XML, OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, XLIFF (Okapi), MediaWiki and plain text files and hides the code to the translator. Translators just see what needs to be translated, can use shared memory per project (you create projects inside the application) and thus avoids you to re-translate something you already translated, and export in the same format as the original document without touching the markup. I’ve tried with HTML and presentation files and wow it just works as it should. Great gain of time, no need to internationalize anything for your project (and mine) and anyone can now generate new lessons without having to worry about the translators.

This is also going to help me in my daily work, where I get presentation files in different languages all the time and spend hours editing them slide by slide. On top of that, this is Open Source Software (GPL) and cross platform (using Java). What else could you ask for? I just regret to have discovered it so late.

Just as I am talking about my new project, last weekend, Pockey and I have already localized a great educational application called RUR-PLE. RUR-PLE is an environment designed to help kids learn computer programming using the Python language. Teaching kids algorithm are without any doubts going to enhance their problem solving abilities, analytical skills and passion to create things out of nothing.

The whole process of localizing this application took half a day as the author, André Roberge, had already internationalized its software. So basically it was just a matter of installing PoEdit, finding the po files in the right directly and just providing the Chinese version.

There are 48 lessons (not all are online, but they come with the package) bundled with RUR-PLE which are in HTML format. Now those have not been internationalized and we have so far only localized the main pages and the documentation. I am therefore starting to dive into the process of HTML internationalizing and I have much to learn. From what Freeflying told me I had to look into XML and DocBook for that. At first sight it does appear fairly complicated, so if anyone has the time to give me a crash course on the ABC’s of HTML internationalization and localization, please feel free to contact me.

What you can remember of this article however is that to port something as useful as RUR-PLE only took one afternoon! So if you want to help and join our efforts do come and visit our group.

As some of you know, I have decided to resign from the Beijing LUG presidency in order to have more time to do things that I feel more useful for Open Source in China. To continue on the topic actually, I think it will be good for the BLUG to have a new leadership. It was a very rewarding experience for me and I am really glad it happened.

So just as I feel so free I am getting myself into pushing Linux to schools, and building something useful for that purpose. I already had one opportunity last summer (July 2007) in Qingdao and unfortunately the lack of good solution in Chinese killed the project. Early this year a second opportunity arose and I have decided not to let it vanish again. Benjamin Cooperman, teacher at BISS, brought this one on a tray and we now “just need to execute”.

For those not familiar with the details, we’re collecting old PCs from schools or companies, refurbishing them, installing a light weight Linux distribution with a suite of usable educational applications in Chinese and donating those to poor schools as well as providing training to the teachers.

The project wants to be distribution agnostic and (as the OLPC project should have been - I hope you sense my disappointment now) about providing the right tools for teachers and students to be successful.

First phase will be based on PuppyLinux as we have hardware limitations but ultimately we’ll have a software stack easily installable for a few distributions. CECC, one of the main Chinese contributor to E-pup, the Chinese PuppyLinux, is helping us in our endeavor and of course a few BLUG members as well.

More information on the BLUG wiki. We will need translators and people with experience in internationalization. Should you feel interested please do join our group, or contact me.

For those of you regularly reading the Beijing LUG site (or even participating in our events) you might remember our Old PCs Refurbishing Party lead by Ben from BISS and held early March of this year. After struggling with various flavors of Ubuntu because of bad Chinese support and heavy resource usage, we settled on 256MB of ram as a minimum requirement and had to manually customize every single install we did.

Not satisfied we decided to study other options such as mastering our own light-weight derivative distribution with the right packages and good Chinese support. We did get a lot of positive supporting offers from ThizLinux, Mandriva and Novell and it’s nice to feel you’re part of a group of great people.

After a few weeks, Ben pointed out a few Puppylinux variants and I am now playing with it: IMPRESSIVE! I am testing it on an old Thinkpad X30 with 256MB of ram with a Pentium III: so fast, so flexible. All the necessary applications are available, it’s very easy to make your own build (actually 2 ways of doing it) and you can even install deb packages (experimental feature).

We still have a long way to go, but it really seems we’ve solved our first issue: small footprint and easy setup. Puppylinux has also a very active IRC channel on freenode (#puppylinux) and a fairly good documentation. I’m almost considering using it as my full time distribution!

So whatever distribution we use at the end, I’m quite pleased to have had to dive into Puppylinux. It’ll give us a base to chose the right applications and do our own customization in order to get the project rolling!

We’ve been having some renovation going on in our hutong (the alley where we live) the past few weeks. They were cleaning, redoing the walls, repainting some doors, a needed cleanup if you ask me. And I was wondering whether that was a few of our neighbors who got together and hired a construction company to do it (and save cost) or whether it was the government being kind enough to care about how we feel when going back home.

Well I got my answer last night when I got back home and had a free paint job on my front door and my window frames. Unfortunately they didn’t tell us at all, so the windows who used to be a nice green are now brown in color and the door having been painted while closed has of course the old paint all around the frame inside. Oh, and yes, they also painted the door handle! Hard to complain though, don’t you think?

For those of you reading the Beijing LUG site you already know we received an award last Saturday: the Golden Bull Award. I tend to be overly emotional in these kind of situations (no, I didn’t cry but hey, it was intense) and really felt proud to be representing our community, what we have done during the past year together and how fun it has been. It’s also a good feeling to be acknowledged by the leading Chinese IT community and developer magazine, us, a bunch of “laowai” who initially just wanted to have a couple of beers together and talk about Linux. We’re now a very mixed group of both Chinese and foreigners doing our best to continue to have fun while making a difference. On top of that there is a great article on ZDNet Asia front page where Peter blogs about Open Source and China, the direct link to this article is here and it talks about what we did in 2007 under the BLUG and basically why we got this award. I could add a lot to the article such as the Chuan committee, the openLibrary, the quadcopter group and all the guys who help us for each and every single project. It’s going to be soon a year that I am the BLUG President and I am so proud to be a member of this group - you guys are so easy to represent! I wanted to let you know that I wouldn’t have done it without all of you, all the work, passion, energy and support you showed. That really helped me to continue giving time (and money sometimes), and I truly hope you will give me more of the same this year A proud Beijing Linux User Group member.

Once in a while you meet these rare individuals who remind you where you’re coming from. Following the Linux Developer Symposium a few speakers stayed a couple of more days to visit the Great Wall, the Forbidden city and other Beijing Landmarks. I helped organized a visit into a training center for embedded Linux on Friday together with Matt and this is how it all started.

I’d say Matt is a very reserved individual at first, very serious and focused (that’s just my impression). The Friday morning visit gave me a chance to listen more closely to his presentation to a class of 50-60 Chinese students and exchange ideas about attracting more people to Linux. I would honestly say that the whole trip was very successful, the class had Jonathan Corbet book on every single desk (Jonathan was also a speaker at the conference) and Matt motivated every one of us. Afternoon was free and we met again for dinner.

The next day, Matt being into art (something I discovered), we visited 798 factory and discussed about art, Burning Man ,how Matt has been attending the event for the last 8 years, what kind of technology he uses for his art and all sorts of things. Then a bit of food shopping, famous Chinese Hot Pot, more talks between during and after, and off to bed.

Matt happens to be a vegan as well as a Linux user and contributor (and an artist, and probably many other things). Why? Because he cares. In fact the whole 2 days discussion was about caring, and how you can transform your principles into actions, how you live up to your believes and how even small contributions can make a difference.

As I mentioned in my introduction I was really glad to have these talks, re-energize myself with someone who could explain himself with passion about what he believed in and would take the time to share his views without forcing them on me.

We all believe in something, but what do we do about it? And is it enough to make that difference we were talking about? I often ask myself this question…

If you were looking for me on the BLUG website, through email or IM you probably had a hard time to see me anywhere. Well this is because the Beijing LUG helped to organize the Linux Developer Symposium held in Beijing on February 19th and 20th.

Thanks to the Linux Foundation and COPU normal people like you and me (well almost normal…) had access to guys like this for over 2 days. Attendance was exceptional, there were cool Linux devices all over the hall (including some belonging to BLUG) as well as Linux books, and Linux people. Everybody was discovering, listening to the words of wisdom from International AND local Linux Masters (some also from the BLUG ) chatting, even hacking the whole first day. The second day was more relaxed and oriented towards opening a dialog between developers and experts. Knowing a little bit of China, I was a bit afraid that the BOF session wouldn’t be so successful, I was so wrong! We talked about all kinds of topics (Linux related), developers could directly address their issues and get instant reply. I spent a lot of time at Andrew Morton’s table and topics ranged from stable kernel choice strategy for embedded devices, patches submission processes, Google Summer of Code in China and how to get the word out (and I am sure Andrew will notify Google about developers suggestions), I could event ask for a ‘Google Summer of Code for seniors’ (there was not such thing in my young age) but I don’t think we’ll see this one anytime soon (you can’t blame me for trying) .

Last but not least, Linux Foundation and COPU agreed to “give us” all the speakers for a dinner on the last night, just for our Beijing LUG members (some of us couldn’t make it to the conference because of work) and I really want to thank Jim and Angela from the Linux Foundation for being so nice to give us this opportunity and sponsoring it.

At the end of those 3 days (it actually started on Monday for us) I can see how this has helped to create bridges between communities - western and Chinese or within China - to help gurus and apprentice developers to better cooperate. On top of that the whole conference was very well organized thanks to COPU and the volunteers from AKA-Embedded Linux and Beijing LUG. I really want to thank in no specific order our members as well as Sun China who has been very supportive. Without Alex Lau, Anthony Fok, Anthony Wong, Wang Lei (Ray), Gabriel, Hou Zhengpeng (Freeflying), Sun Liantao, Annie Li, Emily Chen, Alfred Peng, Alex Peng, Coly Li, Pockey Lam, Ollo Schwan (ling yao yao ling), Poly Wang and whoever has contributed without telling me, this event would not have been what we achieved.

Also a very special thinks to Song Kewei from COPU for his devotion to open source, his sense of humor and his kindness, to Angela from the Linux Foundation for her professionalism and patience with my bad jokes, to Jim for his good jokes and the idea of maybe starting a beer fund, David Neary from the Gnome foundation for his duty-free bottle of Single Malt that we killed while waiting for Jeff Waugh Monday night (get well soon Jeff), and also his great sense of humor, Amiram Hayardeny from Sun for his fast positive response to support us if we had budget problems on the dinner we organized, and some of the staff of the Park Plaza hotel for getting us all the Yanjing beers from the other tables.

I also want to thank Professor Lu for his work behind the scene throughout the government to get Open Source where it is today in China, and his stamina at every conferences he attends. We sometimes tend to forget that Professor Lu achieves things for Open Source that none of us could ever dream of. Thanks to Professor Lu and Song Kewei’s help I have understood lots of things about China and how to get things done here and it’s been a fantastic ride!

One more time thanks to all of you!

Just back from the Beijing Zoo where we (the “reptile team”) went to install a misting system that Adrien (our Chameleon Expert) just brought back from the US. Even though they are made in China it seems impossible to buy any here. I did take a few shots with my iPhone to share. So here is all the process in images below:

The whole system, including the pump, the nozzles, the pipe, a transformer, an electronic timer and a big water container (280L).

Setting up the electronic timer.

The set up on top of the terrarium and the water starting to flow in.

The rain forest experience!

While cutting and assembling the pipe we also did take a look at the animals, especially the weak ones. So here is a shot of one of the chameleons who had no UV 2 weeks ago, and how he is feeling much better in his new environment.

This is an “old time friend” who is on her way to recovery after she had a surgery last summer (abscess removal). She almost stopped eating at one point and we had little hope. Seems she is doing much better now (she still needs a few more pounds though) and was very happy to grab the salad we offered.

Overall a good visit, the keepers also added quite a few plants, some nicer looking water bowls and cleaned the cages before CNY.