A better world

I had the pleasure to be interviewed in Dexxon Beijing office last month (February 18th) by CSDN.net journalist Mr. Zhou (周至) about our now famous OLPH program. CSDN.net, for those not familiar with the Chinese developer scene, is one of the major source of information, news and knowledge about IT on this side of the planet, combining a portal, an professional IT community, an online education platform, a recruitment site and an offline magazine (Programmer). February was just when we started to deliver those Gdiums to OLPH members in China and we have since seen quite a lot of activity. One notable effort is actually the submission of a Google Summer of Code idea from openSUSE to have it ported to MIPS. Three students from Beijing have already emailed the mentor who contacted me to know if we still had Gdiums for his project (and yes we do…). A lot of other great efforts are being carried out and one should probably read our planet to know more.

Now back to the topic, you can find both the text version of the questions and the video of the interview (in English) on CSDN live channel with a direct link right here! As usual if you have any further question don’t hesitate to post them in the comment section right below or on OLPH forum (if you’re a registered Gdium.com member).

Thanks to Freeflying, I have been involved with Software Freedom Day since August 2007. We, at the Beijing LUG organized the Beijing chapter that year, with the support of COPU, were one of the 2007 winners and I started to get involved with the great organization behind SFD. In 2008, I (and the Beijing LUG) took care and shipped all the goodies for the first 300 registered teams, and co-organized 3 events in China. This year I’ve been promoted Vice President of SFi and as such, can’t hide as being just another volunteer (though I am just ‘another volunteer’). So in order to give better support to all the teams out there making SFD happen every year, we’d like to know what kind of goodies we can send out that will help you to make a better event. Of course, we’re running on a limited budget (10,000 T-shirts won’t make it really) but it’d be really nice to get a global brainstorming going and see how SFI can provide better support. You can either get back to me by commenting on this blog or by emailing our mailing list. Looking forward to hear from everyone!

A friend of mine was telling me how she went to buy a new computer, asked to have Linux on it, and was told “Linux is not good for you at home” and that she shouldn’t worry, they’ll just install her Windows XP and all the things she really needs, “for free”. Yes this happened in China, but it probably already happened elsewhere.

Don’t worry she’ll install Linux all by herself I am sure, the real problem is no longer that consumers are not aware nor ready for Linux, sales persons are not! It’s probably harder for them to get familiar with Linux and make an effort to learn something that’s good for their customers rather than launching Norton Ghost, partitioning the disk into Nx20GiB partitions (that’s how they prepare PCs here…) and copying all the virus, spyware and malware infected bootleg versions of Windows they’ve been distributing for ages.

This friend of mine is no tech person, just uses a computer and I guess, has been hearing about Open Source, Linux and Software Freedom. So it’s nice to see that our efforts are paying off. Now how can we reach those stores in China (and elsewhere) and get them to become familiar with Linux installs, and… why not… even do Linux promotion?

Went through my n+1 installation of my preferred wiki, dokuwiki on a Debian server and for the first time run into a small error, a warning actually, that would systematically be displayed on the wiki page header:
Warning: mb_strrpos() [function.mb-strrpos]: Empty haystack in /../../inc/pageutils.php line 142
Warning: mb_strrpos() [function.mb-strrpos]: Empty haystack in /../../inc/pageutils.php line 155
The error was there whether I used aptitude or manual install and I couldn’t find anything online or in the bug tracker about it. Finally went under Dokuwiki IRC channel and with the help of “Chris–S” narrowed down the problem to either mb_string overloading or stricter error checking.

The fix? Changing:
mbstring.func_overload = 7
to
mbstring.func_overload = 0
in php.ini and restarting Apache. This is a system wide change, there is also a way to change it per site using a .htaccess file. Hope that helps someone.

I finally did it! Been talking about ditching Ubuntu for ages and never found the time (you know… backup, new install, restore, get familiar, etc.). It turns out that last Thursday while extending my /home partition with a LiveCD, for some reasons something went wrong and I ended it with my bigger partition having the same remaining free space as before being extended (I had a 20GiB unused space on the disk initially). Thinking I had been lucky not to lose anything, I backed up and installed Mandriva One. It’s a bit like going back to my first love Mandrake (second actually, started Linux with Red Hat when it was free many years ago)! Of course I preferred the name back then, but for obvious reasons they couldn’t keep it.

So Mandriva has actually a specific ISO file for Asia which can be downloaded from a Chinese mirror maintained by our good friend Funda. It includes all the necessary files to support Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Malay and a few more languages I think. Installation was almost ok, couldn’t do it in 3D mode but hey, I can live with that (the install button just wouldn’t click).

The first 6 hours using Mandriva where a bit challenging in the sense that I had to get familiar with urpmi and how to do things. They do have a great Linux Control Center (mcc) where you can find all the things to be configured in one single location. Their network manager is also very powerful and has all the options one should expect from such a tool. Had a little rendering problem with my Chinese fonts (using English desktop with Chinese enabled) which was due to a conflict with the Japanese fonts. Well in short after two days of discussion with Patrick who visit us regularly, Funda and Freeflying on #mandrivacn I got everything fixed, missing applications from the repositories backported and a service that really impressed me: Kudos to Mandriva and its community.

Now an other reason for supporting Mandriva is that they’ve been trying to build a community here, have hired people to improve Chinese support and are even building the operating system that will run on the Gdium (the Loongson based general purpose Chinese CPU). So definitely an interesting distribution worth following and encouraging.

I again extend a big thank you to Funda, Freeflying and Patrick for their help, and recommend everyone to give it a try.

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.