blog - frasergo (Page 6)

finally finished openoffice multilang builds

Finally finished the OpenOffice.org multilanguage builds, as in we have a master CD ready. This involved doing stuff to make it add menu items to KDE and Gnome, and handling recurring bugs with wx and python expat versions clashing... also found some things like templates were missing and got

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OOo multilingual test release for Linux

There is a new multilingual build of OOo 1.1.3 available on sourceforgeAt the moment, it is only available on Linux, Windows builds will be done on the weekend. This build contains Afrikaans, Northern Sotho, Tswana and Zulu. All the languages will be installed. The translations are almost all

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Language inequality still a reality in South Africa

From an article on the Small Claims Court in the Southern Suburbs Tatler, our local freebie newspaper: The third case that afternoon involved a Xhosa-speaking man who, apparently, did some building work for a Xhosa-speaking homeowner and did not get paid for it. The two parties could not converse in

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Progress on multilingual builds

I have now fixed most of the issues with multilingual install sets for OpenOffice.org (menu items stuck in a language, needing to edit the config files after the install) so we should be able to do a test release soon...

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Ups and downs of multilingual openoffice setup

Finally worked out today how to get the OpenOffice.org setup program to display in the right language - was fairly simple, just set the Locale in Linux via LANG or in Windows via the control panel. In Windows, we need to manually edit the registry as Zulu and Sipedi

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Wireless Hotspots on Lamp Posts

An idea I mentioned to Dwayne a while ago - why not use lamp posts to hold WiFi HotSpots - and start a mesh that edges from highways into suburbs...

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Metadata for the desktop

An idea I've been thinking about for a while, so was nice to read Metadata for the desktop by Edd Dumbill. I've really been enjoying using KImDaBa to manage my photos. But it doesn't make it easy to share the photos in a categorized

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Merging OpenOffice.org setups to create multilingual installs...

Over the last few days, got a Python script going that merges the setup scripts for OpenOffice.org setups so we can create a multilingual installation with all the Southern African languages so far... Still needs a bit of tweaking but most of it is working. For some reason the

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Once in a Blue Rose

First saw on IOL that someone has managed to make a genetically modified blue rose. In the hunt for pictures, went off to Google News but alas a search for "blue rose" only turned up one other article. Both attribute the discovery to Suntory which doesn't

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Multi-language OpenOffice.org

Discovered its possible to combine multiple languages in one OpenOffice.org installation. Just no user interface at the moment to select the language. But managed to manually produce a English/Zulu version with only a few glitches. We should produce a South African version with all the languages so far

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Xhosa Childrens Bible

Met up with Mahle today who is interested in making a Xhosa Children's Bible or at least part of one. Great idea.

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upgraded to nanoblogger 2.8

nanoblogger 2.8 released - and saw it on freshmeat. Note that if you upgrade you need to carefully compare the changes made to the config files - doesn't seem documented anywhere... and made all my entries on the home page disappear :-)

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Advice on GPL businesses from MandrakeSoft

What advice would you offer to someone who is contemplating starting a GPL-based business? François Bancilhon: Where do I start? (laughs) First, clearly define a solid type of business model for the type of product or service you want to provide. Secondly, one pitfall people make is that they can

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Working through Window Managers...

OK, I am working my way through window managers, desktops etc ... currently xfce is the winner... I could personally use some of the blackbox or fvwm-style options but I think many newbie users would get confused. rox is interesting but wierd ... At least xfce gives me a basic usable panel,

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Smells of corruption...

Telkom can't explain its tarrifs. Well that's not surprising - a legislated, state-owned monopoly has been privatised and their prices are higher than prices in countries with competition. Why would they be otherwise. But at least the government seems to think its a problem. What smells

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Cutting down the bloat

Seems like I am not alone in feeling frustrated with current Linux desktop bloat when running on older machines. An article from Bob Marr that was featured on slashdot says basically the same thing. Anyway the point of this is there are a number of suggestions from the Slashdot story

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Setting up Linux lab...

Set up a Linux lab (5 machines) at Jubilee with Dwayne on Thursday and Friday. Fedora Core 2 has no boot floppy support. It's slow to boot up and OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are relatively bloated for low end machines. It still amazes me that minimo is planned

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translate 0.8b2 released

OK managed to get through most of Javier and Dwayne's reported bugs ... with the exception of how to handle jar file names and locale directories in xpi files transparently, so released translate 0.8b2 :-) :-) :-)

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Refactoring...

Rearranged the code that serves as backends to the conversion and filter commands so it shares a common class, translate.misc.optrecurse - in preparation for updates to the filter code, so now you can specify preconditions in the code e.g. don't check for whitespace if untranslated.

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World War Two Casualties

Take look at the list of casualties by country in World War Two. Changed my perception of the war - far more losses in Russia and China than I would have expected...

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Peace - at last!

The moment I've been waiting for for a long time ... See XOpenWin - a plot afoot a long time ago to use things from Wine to get native Windows programs to run on an X Server. This message recently alerted me to a program that begins to do

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Dictionaries

Did some improvements to pomerge with Dwayne on Friday. Also started at looking at integrating dictionaries - like Swahili - think I know what needs to be patched now to integrate them into the build.

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OpenOffice.org debug builds

Pavel's build system also produces debug builds which add a reference number for each string. This is really nice as we can quickly look up any untranslated/mistranslated string in the GSI file and then in the PO file (which led me to discover that the Send command

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Splash Screens forever

My OpenOffice.org patches work, we have a nice splash screen :-) (Fixed a problem with my mods to the build system where it was trying to get the patches from the wrong directory). The intro screen didn't come through though, so had to do a patch to

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Prison, Restitution and Translation

Last night at church we had the final of three training seessions on being a multi-cultural community in South Africa. Jabu spoke about his experiences in the struggle, going to prison, what God did in his life. It reminded me of The Heavenly Man. Then Charles from the Foundation for