Today, photo-uploader just got it's new maintainer. I've basically lost interest in maintaining it two years ago, what resulted in dropping package from Debian year ago. I thought this is end of the software, but I seem to be wrong.
As a consequence of Debian bug #677220 Andrew Shadura stepped up as an upstream maintainer. At least Imageshack support is now working in git and maybe some new features will come or the package will be reintroduced to Debian. But that's all up to Andrew. Good luck!
To continue in photography blog posts, let's document part of our last week trip around Slovakia. We've visited many nice places, starting at Muraňská planina, going trhough Slovenský ráj and ending in Nizke Tatry.
All pictures are taken in Slovenský ráj (Slovakian paradise), where I've really enjoyed taking photos of waterfalls and wonderful streams:
Finally I've found time to look back at vacation in Rome and post some pictures. It has been great time there and I've really enjoyed that.
I would like to thank to Luigi Gangitano for showing us some interesting places in the city.
And now back to pictures:
I'm participating on organizing this year's openSUSE conference and as we've finally finalized place and time and CFP is open, it's time to share some information.
This will be special - there is not a single conference, but four of them are sharing same space and the motto - Bootstrapping awesome!!!. The 4th openSUSE conference will be held together with LinuxDays, Czech conference following tradition of canceled LinuxExpo, what should be the biggest free software event in Czech republic. In addition there will be also 12th SUSE Labs conference (so you can meet quite a lot of kernel hackers and other strange guys) and first Gentoo mini summit (the website is empty so far).
All that will happen on weekend from 20th October to 21st October, the SUSE conferences will then continue for 22nd and 23rd October.
I believe it will be great mixture of conferences and I hope to meet lot of people there.
Android support in Gammu is one of frequently requested features. I don't have neither time to motivation to do that, so unless somebody else will step up, it won't be done.
Recently, I got offer from MyPhoneExplorer author to share it's applet for communicating with Android phones. It basically provides protocol similar to Sony-Ericsson phones Gammu already supports, just over TCP/IP. So all what would have to be done is glue layer for using TCP/IP and possibly some minor adjustments to Sony-Ericsson code. Both of these should be quite easy tasks and I'm willing to guide you through this process.
In case anybody would be interested in this challenge, just let me know :-).
Just set up Synology Audio Station for music playback at home. I originally thought about some more open solution, but this was the easiest choice which might still change. Main motivation was that I got really cheaply Synology Remote, what is wireless remote and USB sound card and I was too lazy to set it up with something else.
It works quite nicely but now I'd like to control it from my N950 phone. Synology provide app for iPhone and Android, but others are left in the dark (there is also no documentation about the protocol). The options for me are to write native client or emulate some well know protocol, where I could use existing clients.
Quick googling have shown me python-mpd-server, what looks exactly as half of program I need, so I would have to implement only bindings to (not documented) Audio Station protocol (there is open-syno, which seems to implement this protocol, so at least there will be some hints).
As Weblate 1.0 is out, it's time to compare it to existing solutions. As first I've chosen Pootle as this is tool which we have been using for quite some time and I used it as an inspiration for Weblate.
First of all, both Weblate and Pootle use same backend for manipulating with translation files - Translate Toolkit. On the way I've learned that I've chosen different way of manipulating with backend files, what seem to lead to much smaller changes (no more reformatting of whole po file as Pootle does). Also Weblate does not suffer from some Pootle issues like not properly handling changes to fuzzy flag, which has bitten us several times at phpMyAdmin.
Another shared thing is web framework Django. For me it was obvious choice as I like writing application with it. The biggest difference here is that Weblate relies on Django admin interface for maintenance, while Pootle has everything in it's interface. Pootle has great advantage here for having consistent interface for everything, what was sacrificed in Weblate for less code to maintain (while having powerful Django admin interface). Also sharing same framework allows quite easy migration of user accounts.
Now let's functional side of things - this is where I've tried to take all good things I've seen in Pootle, while adding features I've missed there. What makes biggest difference here are project/subproject classification in Weblate, which was originally started as way to handle more project branches, but proved to be useful for translating related projects as well. This allows automatic propagation of changes across project, what is really great for translating more branches of same program or different interfaces to same functionality (eg. GUI application and command line tool).
The other big difference (and I would say key feature of Weblate) is Git integration - all changes are commited to Git with correct authorship, it can help in merging po files or automatically pull upstream changes (eg. from GitHub). This all makes integration into (Git based) development process really easy.
Other features like consistency checks or dictionary (terminology) are quite similar, though different. There is more consistency checks in Pootle, but the main reason was that I found some of them too annoying. User dictionaries are still pretty basic in Weblate and that's definitely something what should improve in future versions.
On configuration side, Pootle is much more flexible. The main reason here is that I've never used most of the options there. So there are no per project settings of checks or privileges. There is also no way to add language from Weblate - usually adding translation is not just matter of adding appropriate po file, but also other steps, which anyway had to be done manually. So Weblate leaves this up to user. On the other side as soon as new language pops up in Git repository, it is shown in the interface.
Both projects have quite good documentation - Pootle has most things covered on wiki while Weblate relies on separate documentation. However there are definitely some bits missing on both sides.
PS: If you want to want to have more "facts" in comparison, you can check Ohloh :-).
After few weeks of heavy testing, Weblate 1.0 has been released today.
Compared to 0.9 there are just minor changes and bug fixes. The most important thing is that Weblate should be now really ready to use :-).
Full list of changes for 1.0:
You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances can be found in SUSE Studio Gallery.
Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.
If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you (this will be decided case by case as my hosting space is limited).
I think Weblate is really ready to be released as 1.0 release. It runs pretty stable on https://l10n.cihar.com, I got some bug reports from others, but these were quickly fixed and now nobody complains.
The issue tracker lists few improvements which I plan after 1.0 which will help in user experience and performance, but I see nothing what would be needed right now. So I'm ready to release (even before deadline I have set to this milestone).
Anyway you're welcome to give it some testing and complain if anything is broken. One area where I desperately need feedback are checks, which probably still miss variations for some languages.
I've enjoyed past extended weekend in Sächsische Schweiz. I really like this area and we've again seen there wonderful nature and climbed thousands of steps :-).
The weather was not that nice for taking photos, but still I can show few of them:
