Just wanted to tease you guys out there about a new feature that the Transifex guys are working on these days: Translation Reviews! Have you ever wandered if your translations conform to the standard vocabulary that your team uses? Have you ever wanted someone to take a look at what you’ve done before sending in your final work for commit approval? From Transifex v8.0 featutes Now, mind you this is still very alpha code but that is probably a good thing since you can play with it and give your feedback on how to improve it.

In case you’ve missed it, the Xfce project has been using their own installation of Transifex to manage their translations online! Translators can now visit http://translations.xfce.org and keep up with the action! From Transifex v8.0 featutes I’ve been contributing with translations for the Brazilian Portuguese language for quite some time now, and have been a strong supporter for the Transifex project as well, so I was thrilled to learn they were “working together”!

On his latest post titled “Foresight Linux is dead?”, Thilo Pfennigs rightly asks the question that many of the current Foresight Linux users may be asking themselves. With the current stable release dated as of May 2009 and no explicit roadmap stating when the next release will be published, is it really safe to say that Foresight Linux is indeed dead? In order to properly answer this question, one must first take a look at what the year of 2009 reserved for this young distribution.

In order to better follow what the Transifex guys are doing with their development and deployment of Transifex.net, I have finally made the switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL for the Transifex Appliance. Luckly I was able to corral diegobz during my lunch break and together we worked out the necessary changes to get things to work (and caught and fixed a minor issue along the way too!). In the meantime, the appliance seems to be getting some nice and steady traffic, which I suspect will only increase, specially when a new version of Transifex hits the streets.

I’ve already mentioned on my Twitter account about our latest feat here at rPath, namely, “rPath Expands Operating System Coverage with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5.” But the more I play with our technology, the more gaga I get at how simple we can make things! So today I built a plain vanilla appliance based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 withjust enough operating system and launched it on VMware vSphere 4.

Had some time today during lunch to work on the Transifex Appliance and decided to play with the newly added feature of supporting subversion over https. So I launched thedevel EC2 instance on Amazon Web Service and proceeded to add PCMan File Manager so that I could translate it online. Before you ask, yes: I do have commit access to the project and could have checked out the code locally and done the work as I usually do, but that’s not fun!

If you still remember my pet project BillReminder and want to learn what’s going on with it, go check the project’s latest post! [caption id=“attachment_58” align=“alignnone” width=“385” caption=“BillReminder with charting support”][/caption] A huge thanks to nosklo, Patryk, and Toms for their help, and if you’re looking for a young python project to help out, please consider looking at BillReminder!

Interesting: I’ve heard that when the Red Hat developers present new open-source packages to their local Linux User-Group, before the meeting is over one of the Foresight people will have downloaded the source, created a Foresight package, uploaded it to the repository for folks to get, and it will be available for anyone to use. It’s explicitly designed as a package management system with very little overhead to creating new packages.

Just to follow up on one of my earlier messages to Twitter/Identi.ca today, here’s a little trivia for you: "What do Moblin, Xfce, Fedora plus a few other projects have in common? They all use Transifex for their translations!" There’s quite a few other projects out there already toying with Transifex to see if it fits their needs too, which goes to show that the word is getting out about the benefits of using it as a platform for managing translations.

I was extremely thrilled to learn that my good friend Pete Savagedecided to publish his novel “Emblem Divide" online! I had the honor of getting a copy of his work last month and have enjoyed reading it a lot! The novel will be available completely free of charge, no strings attached! To top it off, being the nice guy that he is, he’s also setting up a donation system to take advantage of the traffic that his web site will most like generate so that you can support a charity of your choice!