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)?

Last weekend the Indifex developers released the new version of Transifex, “an open service allowing people to collaboratively translate software, documentation and other types of projects.” Codenamed “Pyro" (all releases are named after a X-Men villains), Transifex 0.7 has a pretty lengthy list of new features and bug fixes to make any translator worth his/her salt cry with joy! The one feature sure to turn people’s head is the ability to do their translations online using their Lotte Translation Editor.

Just wanted to re-enforce what Zhang said earlier today about the bleeding edge GNOME Developer’s Kit, now with extra sauce! What is it? It is a continuous build of GNOME packages all bundled up into a distribution (in this case, Foresight Linux) and distributed in a few different formats, such as ISO and VMware. "What’s so special about it", you ask? Is it the fact that different image types can be generated at will?