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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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.

Some weeks ago Mozilla Camp Europe 2008 took place in Barcelona. Indeed, most of its activities were in Cornellà's Citilab, a wonderful urban lab perfectly suited for this kind of events. There is no doubt that was a success thanks to the hard work of people such as William and helping him was a pleasure. I feel personally proud of the final outcome because I think Mozilians could discuss in person many of the hot topics in Mozilla agenda and they also enjoyed their stay in my country at the same time. I can expect some even tried to mumble a few Catalan words during their night life incursions.

But it was not only a chance for worldwide and European Mozilla Community, but also for local ones, such as the very Catalan Community. I consider events like this MozCamp help people know a bit better the insides of the whole project, the people behind, and encourage them to assume a major role in it. For a small community such as mine, that is very important, since a resulting proper organization and a defined commitment by even just a few people is likely to mean a success in the end.

Among the different topics, which were widely discussed afterwards and profusely quoted in Planet Mozilla, I would refer to 3 of them:

Silme

Mozilla localization procedures are still a high barrier compared to other open source software. On the other hand, present panorama consists of several applications which leverage users' capabilities to perform translations in their languages (spreadsheet of applications used by Mozilla l10n groups).
In this context, Zbigniew presented a new API: Silme, intended for designing and automating some common localisation tasks and creating new translation applications in a format-independent manner.
The most similar and useful stable platform is currently Translation Toolkit, actively used by several localization groups and deployed in some Mozilla projects such as Verbatim. In contrast to the former one, it's based on Gettext (the most used system in FOSS localization environment).

Community building

Mozilla is a huge initiative, with people (employed and volunteers) from all around the world involved in a plethora of issues, and not only in the very final-user programs. For that reason, even for people who have been collaborating in Mozilla for a time, it's not always easy to find out where to go and to whom address in different situations. When someone wants to start contributing, the situation is evidently worse, and a successful contact may depend on the proper knowledge of an intermediate actor, such as a local community.

For improving this, guiding newcomers and extending knowledge of Mozilla communities from the whole project, a new portal was launched: http://contribute.mozilla.org. Feedback is welcome and everyone can edit in https://contribute.mozilla.org.

In the meantime, we are also cleaning up Catalan Mozilla community wiki pages within the new Softcatalà website. If you ever thought about helping in this project we hope it's now easier to understand what we do, which tools we use and which documents we have as reference.

2010 goals

One of Mozilla sessions was devoted to discussing about 2010 goals, firstly introduced by Mitchell Baker during Whistler's summit.

Everyone attending this session seated in groups around different topic panels and suggested their own views. I got the chance to propose a few points regarding community marketing.
Concretely, despite situation in Europe seems to be better than in USA, I think Mozilla needs to improve interaction with other initiatives, both in global and local contexts, in order to focus on certain aims which could be beneficial for the different counterparts involved. Taking advantage of national, regional and local know-how is crucial for enlarging Mozilla ecosystem and for the future welfare of the project. In this aspect, locally based communities are a highly valued asset which I think Mozilla needs to take better care. I actually think 'competitors' envy having the spread human resources Mozilla has.

A few other links about Mozcamp08

• Mozcamp 08 - a gret event. As part of the local community who made the event a success, Alina Mierluș comments it and links some of the photos taken around.
• Mozilla Camp Europe 2008. Impressions by Firebug main contributor.
• SUMO slides at MozCamp08 by David Tenser and Abdulkadir Topal
• Close encounters of the Moz kind people. Babelzilla team, thanks to whom localising extensions is much easier, was also there.
• The power of meeting in person. By Jesper Kristensen in Mozilla Europe blog.
• Add-ons Takeaway from Mozilla Camp Europe 2008. Brian King's summary addons related sessions.
• Back from Mozcamp'08. Tristan's annotations after his travel back from Barcelona.

Thanks to Mozilla Hispano guys, there will be a portal for following Mozilla Camp Europe 2008 live. By now, there are 3 available channels: English, Spanish and Catalan.
For example, I have been informing myself about this morning's Mozilla Labs conference in Barcelona in Catalan with my Twitter account.

So, do not hesitate to use this amazing service during your stay!

I usually check worldwide news related to Catalan language, and a few days ago I noticed many digital media informed about FC Barcelona refusal to use Air Berlin during its tour in the USA. Some poorly informed media reported that was because it does not use Catalan language in its communications. Sadly, Air Berlin would not be the only company which ignores Catalan speakers in their own territory; but this is not actually the primary reason of all this buzz but a leading article in company's magazine against Catalan culture signed by the German airline company's CEO. As a response, many offended Catalan speakers cried out to stop flying with them.
So you can understand what is going on here, we should take into account that the person in charge of the company in Spain and Portugal, Álvaro Middelmann, is a militant of PP, a right-wing Spanish nationalist party, which has usually lead several policies against Catalan language normalization. Some years ago, that party was in Balearic Islands government and Air Berlin is said to have greatly benefited from that political situation.
But that's not the first and only case of Joachim Hunold, Air Berlin's CEO, demonstration of poor manners and sensibility; for instance, regarding to environmental issues, he was 2007 winner of a so-named Dinousaur's award.
In conclusion, so why some of these data I commented above were not introduced to readers of international media in order they could understand a bit more the polemics? Because the correspondents simply "copy-paste" in an automatic fashion the news from Spanish (essentially those based on Madrid) media, which tend to have a negative bias against Catalan language and even often join and promote reactionary campaigns against its usage.

References

• Indignació contra Air Berlin per haver atacat el català des de la seva revista
• Air Berlin i la dreta alemanya més peculiar
• German airline boss named ‘dinosaur of year’ by environmental group

We are proud to announce that Catalan community will hold 3 parties for celebrating Firefox 3 release and its successful Download Day record: in Amposta, Barcelona and Valencia.

On Thursday 26th at 7PM , Centre Comarcal Lleidatà (Plaça Universitat - Barcelona) will be the chosen meeting point for discussing what's new in Firefox 3 and from which improvements web developers and common users may take greater advantage. For exploring this, a round table is organized with:

• Pascal Chevrel (Secretary General of Mozilla Europe and Mozilla Web localization manager)
• Toni Hermoso Pulido (Member of Softcatalà and Firefox Catalan localization manager)
• eyeOS team (the young creators of a highly awarded web-based OS

After this event, atendees will enjoy a good party time with the live performance of La Carxofa i la Ceba, a local music group.

2 days later, on Saturday 28th, there will also be activities in Ca Revolta, Valencia and Bart's Café, Amposta. These will help those who get there to find out more about web browsing state of the art. In both celebrations, as in the former one, there will be some nice surprises apart from an unsurpassable environment.

You can find more details at: festa.firefox.cat.

• Parties in Spanish-speaking community
• Parties all around the world

Francesc Argemí, popularly known after his nickname Franki, is an activist from Terrassa -a Catalonian city close to Barcelona- who has been recently imprisoned with a penalty of more than two years accused of desecrating the Spanish flag.
The criminal process against this citizen was full of irregularities from the very beginning. The initial accusatory party, his very town council government, is said to have intentionally used a flag removal incident for specifically punishing an uncomfortable social leader. Some time later, they actually repented from the accusation, maybe conscious of the totalitarianism of their decision, but the Spanish Law machinery was already working pointing at the present outcome.
In response to this disproportionate and unjust decision, public outcries against the deviant Spanish system are increasing. As a sample, around 2,500 people demonstrated in Barcelona streets under a heavy rain demanding Franki's freedom. However, Catalan parties of direct Spanish obedience are still silent...
As I explained to different curious tourists in the streets, if you visit anywhere within the Kingdom of Spain, don't be fooled by official propaganda. The Spanish regime is far from a sane democracy, and both Left and Right Spanish nationalist parties, are continuistic to many aspects of Francoist legacy, if not sometimes even direct heirs, as the very monarch.