With the GNOME 2.30 release just around the corner, translators are feverishly working hard to get the desktop completely translated into a multitude of different languages! But unless you’re comfortable building the application you’re trying to translate on your own (or perhaps the entire desktop), you’re pretty much doing what I call “blind translations.” From Screenshots The good news is that you don’t have to do any compiling to play with the very latest GNOME applications!

Yesterday I attended my first TriZPUG meeting to check out Kurt Grandis' talk on Fabric, “a Python library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.” It was pretty cool to see a bunch of guys who share the same interests take some time on a Thursday to hang out, drink beers, and chat about python, django, zope, and other stuff. After the original talk was over and some of the other lightening talks that succeeded it was over, a couple of things became very clear to me:

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”!

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!

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.

For those of you out there who are Foresight Linux users wondering when the next major software update will hit the stable branch, your wait is almost over! We’ve been feverishly making all the latest bits to play nice with each other so that we can also release newer ISO images of what will be Foresight 2.1.2. Some of the issues we’re facing right now are: Issues with latest *goocanvas/pycairo mess [0][1][2]; Epiphany issues with latest WebKit in x86_64; Exotic side effects of kernel changes that make audio CDs not easilly playable (not a Foresight exclusive issue); Mono is somehow partly busted (part of gnome bindings) in x86_64 hits latest banshee; Getting Anaconda to play nicely with newer kernel drivers for some motherboards; Some of the cool things we’re cooking in the development branch are: latest KDE, GNOME, Chromium/Firefox/Opera web browser, gst streamer bits, latest kernel, Banshee 1.

Some time around the middle of 2008 I was asked if I would be interested in joining the very young QA department for rPath. I had already been working as a software engineer for them since late 2006, spending a larger chunk of my time working on a single project and not being able to experiment with the cool technology we were developing outside of my project. Somehow the idea of doing QA felt very appealing to me as I would then be able to see, first hand, what type of products we were publishing, as well as experience what our customers and users were going through.

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything on my blog so here are some interesting nuggets: I’ve been house hunting for the last 3-4 months and I can honestly say that it is a very intense experience! There are so many things to learn and remember and so many different things to consider! Wouldn’t be nice if you knew right up front all the costs and fees involved in purchasing a house, the same way you know how much it costs to purchase a pair of sneakers (cost of sneakers plus sales tax)?