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A few weeks ago, Softcatalà (a non-profit organization devoted to bringing Internet and new technologies to Catalan speaking community in their own language) held its first open localisation session at Sagrada Família Civic Center. Our main aim was to offer to attendees the opportunity to know more closely the tools and criteria in our localisation processes and, ideally, also engage more volunteers to join our ongoing projects and share our values with them. In the past we had already organised some translation sessions (under the name of Marathons), but they were more focused to finish a huge pile of work (pending untranslated strings) rather than properly wooing potential collaborators, so only a few external people normally joined therefore.

Translation professionals and students, user support specialists and free culture/software activists, around 15 new people, came to this event.
It's still too early for evaluating whether this first effort will succeed to having more people collaborating in the localisation teams, but we can still point a few benefits after that session:

• Before, when preparing, and during the session, we became more conscious about our own actual processes. Hence we became aware of the steps where people get normally stuck (this includes our communication channels).
• By exchanging opinions between organisers and attendees, we learnt about some frequent translation errors that should be included in future versions of our existing documentation resources.
• After some pointed it to us, we discovered some of our resources were not 'correct'. This basically means material that we had lost from scope and we didn't even remember (essentially, unmaintained wiki pages).

We worked on GNOME (via Damned Lies) and Mozilla websites (via Verbatim) as session target projects.

Centring the discussion on the latter, we found Verbatim (Pootle) convenient enough since attendees did not need any other tool apart from their browser and their own skills. Although, in the end, we did not take full advantage from this, I think it is a worth asset since, for some projects, it offers the chance to check live recently submitted translations once the strings are approved (for instance, for Mozilla Addons and its stage website). A strong point was also comparing easily other language translations from within the same interface. This is very useful when the context of the string is not clear and other groups may have solved it before you (it could be tricky if they did not investigate either, though).

On the other hand, a short-come of the system, which we realised a few days after the session, is that we were missing email notifications from contributors submissions. If managers did not visit the website and contributors submissions remained unreviewed for a while, we risk they might become unmotivated and maybe not contributing anymore. As a workaround, we asked people to 'shout' at our mailing list when they considered so.

From this experience, now we have more hints about things which should work better.

Being again Mozilla-specific, we must say that many people wondered why we did not include the translation of popular applications such as Firefox and Thunderbird in the session schedule. We explained to them that the underlying processes we are following nowadays are too complex, so they do not fit as a good model and the experience could look too daunting. For Mozilla applications, Catalan contributors we are working too similarly to how program developers do (writing in terminal and pulling repositories). This is convenient if one of us ever contribute to any other part of Mozilla code, and in our technical careers, but it is at the same time an important barrier for contributors from a non-developer background. This puts the project in a high-stake situation if any of our experienced contributors ever stops or reduce his involvement. Because of this, in the following months, after all the rearrangement from the new Mozilla channels repositories (done for Firefox, but on the way for the other apps and components), we would like to move some components to a collaborative web environment and see how things work.

After summer, we expect to organise a second edition of this event. Hopefully, if by then we have managed to work out a more participatory translation process for Mozilla applications in our locale, I would share it with you.

More details

• Planning, material and aftermath notes of the session (in Catalan).
• Photos of the session

As Barcelona Laptop Orchestra, another nice initiative present in Angels Hacking space during Drumbeat Festival was Move Commons.

Following the graphical model of Creative Commons logos, it pretends to categorise the principles behind organisations in order to provide a simplified description of them, make them visible to other organisations of similar approaches and also attract contributors who could be interested in their activities. With Move Commons, they can currently state whether they are:

• for profit or non-profit
• transparent or closed
• contributors to the Commons
• horizontal or hierarchical structured
• etc. (more details here).

As with Creative Commons, after filling the appropriate fields asking for the characteristics of the organisation, they can paste in their pages a FOAF-like code, which could potentially be used for performing searches over the Net in the future.

The only drawback I can imagine is that organisations, or individuals in their organisations, might not be always sincere (or even aware) about their actual values. So, I think the challenge is that the details of organisations we could find in the Internet thanks to this system can be faithful enough about them, that is, not susceptible to purposeful or unintentional misleads —a fact that can entail frustration for arriving contributors—.

This is far more difficult than choosing one of the different CC licenses for a work, and IMHO, several actors should take part somehow in the dynamic outcome.

Last week I enjoyed the chance to discover a laptop orchestra for my first time during Drumbeat Festival 2010, which took place in the centric Plaça dels Àngels of Barcelona.

The orchestra, named Barcelona Laptop Orchestra and mostly composed of members from ESMUC (Catalonia Higher School of Music), was arranged thanks to several laptops network-linked to each other and all of them set to output to a pair of loudspeakers at the same time.

Sounds actually flowed along the network and were differentially modulated in each computer thanks to a complex in-house sampler software designed so a live network-based symphony could become a reality.

You can see some images and videos below:

The software behind the orchestra laptops

Latops are network linked

Some live laptop music

More information…

• PLOrk in Wikipedia. The first laptop orchestra.
• Stanford Laptop Orchestra, using Macs.

This morning I attended a conference of Dr. Lars Jermiin and, in order to illustrate the statistics behind evolutionary models, he introduced to the public a quotation of the former United States Secretary of Defense. I think this deserves a place in our popular cultural imaginary:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

D.H. Rumsfeld

• Reference in Wikipedia

John Mitchel to John O'Connell:

Do you think that the men who have been begging one day at the gate of an English minister will come down here next day to help you get rid of English ministers altogether?

When developing a Drupal website, you may be interested in having content specific templates, so different kind of pages do not look the same. By default, we can use list of default core templates, but we can adapt it better to meet our needs by modifying template.php file in theme folder (we are assuming we are using PHPTemplate Theme engine). In my case, using an Acquia theme, I noticed it ignored page-content_type.tpl.php templates. I found a solution in the Net, but then page-node-x.tpl.php-like templates stopped to work. An easy workaround is simply adding an extra line for these latter cases:

function phptemplate_preprocess_page(&$vars) { // Add per content type pages if (isset($vars['node'])) { // Add template naming suggestion. It should alway use hyphens. // If node type is "event", it will pick up "page-event.tpl.php". $vars['template_files'][] = 'page-'. str_replace('_', '-', $vars['node']->type); // If node number (nid) is 56, it will pick up preferentially "page-node-56.tpl.php". $vars['template_files'][] = 'page-node-'. $vars['node']->nid; } }

Hope it may help.

CustomError is an appealing module which allows customising error pages from a Drupal site with no need to create specific nodes, which could affect visiting statistics. Both 403 and 404 HTTP status codes can be handled. One hidden feature I did not find explained in the actual module documentation is that error pages can be more powerfully customised by using templates in your preferred theme folder. If you wanted to change the whole look of the page, but keeping the defined text (or code) you may have entered for each kind of error, you must create a page named page-customerror.tpl.php. As expected, $content variable will be replaced by the defined customised error content. In case we still desired further customisation, we could create a customerror.tpl.php file and write specific content regardless of the entered text. However, this way, as far as I have been able to find out, sorting out 403 from 404 error pages would not be an easy task. As a last comment, this has been tested in Drupal 6.x, and according to current CustomError issues, some of present lacking features could be added in future versions of the module.

Yesterday I had the chance to discover and interesting video about the dramatic implications of debt in people's lives.

The documentary is a recent production explaining the economical calamities of different highly indebted people living in Catalonia. This disturbing panorama helps you understand present crisis in Spain, mostly provoked by the frenzy of house owning, and tolerated by administrations as an easy way to earn money with a resulting short-time social progress, but with lasting repercussions (potentially as perdurable as a 40-years mortgage).

Very worth viewing!

More information: IN DEBT, Caugth on the spider's web. Original languages: Catalan, Spanish. Subtitles: English.

This morning a lab partner showed me a photo from a friend of him working in Anthropology department in UAB university, Catalonia. The taken picture was about a specimen which was checked for a while by people from that very department in Bellaterra Medicine faculty. A group of people offered that thing to them so they could visually and manually inspect it. However, they were not allowed to analyse it by methods such as DNA extraction. With the amount of available information they were able to gather, they considered that was a kind of malformed human foetus, unless that were not a very realistic setup. I uploaded a photo so you can wonder about it in a local newspaper.

Thanks to FIB video recording service and UPC Commons initiative, we have an online video of Mozilla Labs presentation held in Barcelona on 24th Octuber 2008, just before Mozilla Camp Europe 2008.

* How to embed this in your weblog:


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<embed src="http://upcommons.upc.edu/video/videoplayer/flvplayer.swf" width="360" height="260" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="file=http://upcommons.upc.edu/video/bitstream/2099.2/791/1/mozilla_camp_europe_VP6_1Mbps.flv" />
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I normally enable fortune application in my .basrhc file, so when I log in my remote terminals I can get a welcoming quotation. Even during the busiest times, it can help you smile for a while. That's an example:

Research, n.:
Consider Columbus:
He didn't know where he was going.
When he got there he didn't know where he was.
When he got back he didn't know where he had been.
And he did it all on someone else's money.

FASTA is one of the most commonly used formats for storing and accessing protein and nucleic acid sequences. So, if you are a bioinformaticist, you are very likely to handle this kind of files several times every day.

Vim is also one of the most common editor applications in present-day Linux distributions. This actually includes by default many scripts for detecting file content syntax, so they are more straightforward to be reviewed and modified. But sadly, at least on my Ubuntu 8.10 computer, there does not seem to be any support for detecting FASTA syntax. There is one script for enabling it, Syntax for Fasta. But, how do you install it?

Out-of-the-box scripts are stored in /usr/share/vim/vim71/syntax (or a similar location such as /usr/share/vim/syntax), but supposing you might not have admin permissions, you should create a .vim folder in your home directory ($HOME), and inside it a syntax folder, where you will place your custom scripts. Afterwards, copy /usr/share/vim/filetype.vim file in $HOME/.vim, and add the following line

" FASTA format au BufNewFile,BufRead *.fasta,*.fa call s:StarSetf('fasta')

after the last file extension definition, in my case, Z-Shell script. If necessary, you can add other typical extensions which could contain FASTA data, such as *.faa. In order to enable automatic syntax detection when opening files, you should have syntax on command enabled in your own customised .vimrc file at $HOME.

That's the name of the presentation I gave during Mozilla.ro tour in different educational centres.

During the talk I wanted to draw the difference between minority and minorised languages, and why projects such as Mozilla are an opportunity for a local culture to bloom in Internet.

I compared Catalan and Romanian situations and I talked about Softcatalà: an association born 10 years ago, like Mozilla, in order to promote Catalan language in computers and Internet. Its existence made possible the popularisation and elaboration of an own Catalan computer terminology and style guide. This step is still somewhat missing for Romanian and I suppose in other languages which may have a larger number of speakers than Catalan as well.
For Romanian localisation, we should thank the hard work of Alexandru Sasz, who has made Mozilla and several other software translations a reality. At the same time he is also the creator of Narro, a web-based tool which host not only Romanian localisations but several other ones.

I hope that with these sessions we can help Mozilla.ro community to grow and that Romanian language in Internet can have the situation it deserves in the following years.

You can also read other posts about these recent activities in Romania:

• Mozilla events in Romania
• Back from Romania
• Romanian community dinner in Bucharest
• Mozilla a fost pentru tine la Facultatea de Informatică

Whereas we were having dinner in Iași I was asked whether Catalans are rather nationalist, to what I replied that, according to my perception, they are less than Romanians look like.

As example, all class rooms in the High School I visited have a Romanian national flag and shield of arms, and also religious icons (in a non-religious centre). This is highly unusual as far as I know in public Catalan schools. Regarding the religious icons, it seems to be an ongoing polemics since a long time ago. The most important Romanian poet ever, Eminescu, is said to be one of the first personalities who suggested the removal of these symbols from lecture spaces. As Alina explained to me, if a teacher does not opt to have a religious symbol in the class, students usually decide to buy themselves one and place it in the room. The other way around, churches normally decorate their buildings with national symbology and colours.

During National Day, which commemorates the Union of all historical Romanian provinces, I could see a lot of flags hanged up in shops and stores, but not as many in residential houses. What I learned afterwards, when we actually wanted to buy one flag, is that commercial buildings are to be fined if they do not hang a flag that day. And of course they have to buy themselves it before.

I noticed that some Romanians have presently low esteem for their own culture. As I also agreed with Tristan, it's clearly patent in their language usage, which is scarcely present in computer interfaces even among home users and, in other daily situations, English loanwords and expressions are abused in my opinion. Despite Romanians might be eager to reach modernity in an accelerate pace, I do not think that sacrificing their own identity is going to offer any benefit to the country as a whole.I do not know if other former Eastern Bloc countries are in such a similar situation nowadays. I suppose the government, trying to fight somehow this, use or enforce national symbols in maybe an exaggerate way, but the actual solution would be trying to boost Romanian pride.

After Bucarest session in Politechnic University, we discussed what could be done for improving FOSS situation in Romanian administration. I suggested that implementing and ensuring respect of open standards could be a previous approach, that is, with official documents in the Net. One participant clarified that first of all people should know that they "have the rights" to access these actual documents. I think mutual cooperation, for instance within groups and initiatives such as the FOSS local groups I met (Ceata or Rosedu), are the necessary tools for making possible a promising future, so Romanians will be able to hang their flags willingly by themselves confident about the kind of society they could be accomplishing. Links

• CNCD Decision 323/2006. Wikipedia article about non-discrimination polemical law in Romania.