blog - frasergo (Page 5)

Free Software Magazine

It's really worth taking a look through the Free Software Magazine. Makes so much sense to have a magazine focussed on free software rather than some particular operating system. Now it would be nice to have regionally variant versions (say an African / Southern African one that adds locally

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Simplifying RedHat Enterprise testing

Today packaging some stuff up for a client who runs RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0 Encountered the problem that although RedHat is built up of lots of packages, its virtually impossibile to determine what they are - there's no simple list of packages per distribution version. Although there&

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Debbie and Jonny's Wedding

My sister Debbie got married yesterday! What a fantastic wedding, on Oudekraal beach in Cape Town, with the mountains and the sea ... the wedding just seemed to reflect Debbie and Jonny so well. Celebration, Worship, Community, Joy. they danced by the light of the moon and hand in hand, on

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Christmas

Having had many deadlines with my St James Software work, I haven't had a chance to respond to many Pootle / translate enquiries as I would have liked to. (Fortunately I've been making progress there, it's been nice to get things finished off). Anyway I

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Pootle Test Installation Live

We've put up a live version of Pootle at pootle.wordforge.org, kindly hosted by my employer, St James Software More details in the press release. What's been fun has been trying to maximize the number of projects and languages - so far we've

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The Free Software Platform

Aaron J. Siego thinks that porting too much open source software to Windows will kill open source on the desktop. The fear reminded me of a conversation I had with Dwayne and Alberto in Tanzania. I said, I don't think we should define the platform in terms of

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Preached at Jubilee on Building the Church with Gold, Silver and Precious Stones

Preached at Jubilee last Sunday night on building with gold, silver and precious stones - how we build the church. Included this great version of the three little pigs ("Wolf-Side story"?) and a picture of the Taj Mahal, contrasted with the Cardboard House mentioned last week on Slashdot.

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Strategy for guessing encodings

Came across this in comp.lang.python, fairly useful for localization work as you often have to guess what encoding something is in: Re: character encoding conversion Now, how should you guess the encoding? Here is a strategy: 1. use the encoding that was sent through the HTTP header. Be

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OpenOffice.org splash screens for 2.0

Design a new splash screen for the upcoming 2.0 release - I like these ideas so far: simple clean clean with a photo round buttoned splash bands classic mouette fantasy seascape dark vertical band Funny how its easier to keep this list on my blog than in my bookmarks

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Classic Microsoft quote

According to Microsoft Australia's managing director, "There are plenty of products out there with features we don't have. We have plenty of features that our customers don't use."

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KiLinux training camp progress

In Tanzania for the training camp. Has been pretty interesting discovering how the Swahili Localization Project works. They have a pretty thorough team incorporating top experts on Swahili from Universities and research institutions and tehnical people. They have worked hard on generating a glossary first before translating software which is

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Off to Arusha, Tanzania

Just leaving to go to a training camp for the Swahili Localization Project in Arusha, Tanzania ... should be fun but already missing Danielle and James and I haven't left yet! Will be quite a comprehensive training camp and I'll be doing a session on using the

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Started development on Pootle

Over the last week I've started development on Pootle, a simple web portal for localization... named after a Flumps character thanks to Danielle's suggestion. Its been really fun and the progress has been quick. Once its workable we'll try get a public implementation somewhere.

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Firefox and Thunderbird extensions I'm using

Looked through Firefox and Thunderbird extensions and have a setup I like now... Firefox * Web Developer - indispensible for hacking around with sites. * JavaScript debugger Venkman - fantastic, always used this in Mozilla and now I can use it from Firefox. Now if only I could plug it into IE

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xfce upgrade to 4.1.90 for jubilee lab: kiosk mode

Did some work at the Jubilee Linux lab (5 old slow computers each with their own version of Fedora - 4 at the moment because one of the power supplies has died...) upgraded to xfce-4.1.90 This is the latest version of xfce (the lightweight desktop environment we use)

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OOo 2.x building :-)

Worked quite a bit on ooo-build stuff the last two days. Got cvs access sorted out so I can add my patches directly. Got a full + complete build working on Fedora using src680-m55 with ooo-build head. Started trying to get it going with mingw. Realised I was messing up passing

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Building OOo 2.x branch using ooo-build

Well I've been trying to build OOo 680 (2.x series) using ooo-build, which doesn't quite work yet. I'm putting the patches I'm using at http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/ooo-2.x-patches/ along with a patch to apply to say what to

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Evidence of ties between al-Qaeda and USA

Interesting logic from Mr Rumsfeld: Several hours after his appearance, Mr Rumsfeld issued a statement saying his comments had been "regrettably misunderstood" and that he had acknowledged there were ties between Osama Bin Laden and Iraq based upon CIA intelligence. This included "solid evidence of the presence

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OpenOffice.org Conference Summary

I didn't have a laptop at OOoCon 2004 and didn't manage to write anything in detail then, and have been busy since, so this is my executive summary... Was fantastic meeting loads of different people, lots of whom I've been in contact with before

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Automixing sounds from different programs through ALSA

Found this really helpful article describing how to mix sounds automatically with ALSA (linked from a review of Fedora Core 2) and so now mpd can play in the background and other programs can still make sounds ... yay :-)

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upgrading dev->udev made my fedora system totally unusable

Beware! I apt-get dist-upgraded my system to the latest fedora development rpms, and part of that upgraded dev to udev. All very nice. Except I couldn't open a terminal. So I rebooted. And then it wouldn't even boot up properly because it couldn't allocate

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Going to OOoCon 2004

God answers prayer. Going to OOoCon 2004 despite it initially seeming unlikely. Brief summary of information I gathered in the process of booking lots of different flights over a few days: The German Embassy / Consulate in Cape Town has moved. Their new address details are as follows: 19th floor Safmarine

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Classic Ballmer Quote

Steve Ballmer explains: Microsoft's platforms offer better interoperability with the company's other technology, such as .NET, reducing the total cost of ownership of Windows compared with Linux Aha! It works better with their own stuff! That's what interoperability means, doesn't it?

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testing screenshots plugin for nanoblogger

We've moved our translate.org.za site to run on nanoblogger which is a great improvement. So now I'm writing a plugin to handle screenshots. It's working pretty well now...

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Lack of logic may shape psychologist's thinking about language

slashdot mentioned an article entitled Language may shape human thought in which a psychologist argues for a variant of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the basis of a study of the Pirahã tribe. On closer examination his logic is fairly interesting ... extracts from the article illustrate this: * "There are not