Mozilla in Asia

From: WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Mitcho‘s presentation on the localization of Ubiquity at Tokyo 2.0 last night is up on Vimeo: Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

Slides here on SlideShare

I’m attending the 2009 MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference.

See more photos at Facebook | Sumardi Shukor’s Photos – MSCOSCONF2009 – Conference Day 1

For some background on this event, Yoon Kit has a good overview of how far the Malaysian government has come but also has some good constructive criticism for the organizers of the event. I highly recommend his blog post at Open Malaysia Blog – MSCOSCONF.

In the morning of the first day, I gave a presentation in the Community Track. I was scheduled to talk about Firefox 3.5, Fennec and Bespin, but at the last minute I decided to change my presentation to focus on HTML 5 and web standards. I did not want to come off as just focusing on Mozilla software so I decided to re-do my presentation to this:

Open Source Powers the Open Web: HTML 5, JavaScript, and the importance of open web standards (download in OpenOffice Impress format or pdf format.)

In the afternoon, I was on a panel discussion about open source and innovation.

Can Open Source bring about your next Innovation Breakthrough ?

Panel Speakers
1.Dato’ Dr. Kamaljit Singh, GIRC
2. Tengku Farith Rithaudeen, SKALI
3. Gen Kanai, Mozilla Corp
4. Ang Chin Han, Bytecraft

MODERATOR: Dr. Raslan Ahmad, MOSTI

Download my presentation in OpenOffice Impress and pdf.

I sometimes use Slideshare, and if that’s what folks would prefer, I can upload the presentations to Slideshare but I spent a portion of my presentation slagging Flash so it seemed a bit strange to then go use Slideshare (which is all Flash.)

I’m happy to take questions via email or via comments to my blog.  Unfortunately the network connection at the conference was not as stable as I needed it to be to demonstrate some of the heavier open video demos, so if you came to my presentations, please download them to see the links to the demos I wanted to show.

In a recent post at Ken Kovash’s Blog of Metrics regarding Firefox in Latvia passing 50% market share, Indonesia was ranked at 63% market share. With such a love for Firefox, it’s also great to see that Indonesia has finally had it’s first Mozilla event last month.

Romi Hardiyanto, Mozilla’s localizer for Bahasa Indonesia, led an afternoon of presentations on Add-ons for Mozilla at ITS Surabaya, a university in the second-largest city in Indonesia. Romi has a great write-up of the event, Mozilla Day at ITS, at the brand new Mozilla Indonesia blog.

A photo of the students

HΛniF: Hadits, Now in Firefox

Photos from the event are available at Romi’s Flickr, Aini-san’s Picasa and Kiki’s Facebook.

I would like to take a moment to thank Romi Hardiyanto, Mozilla’s tireless Bahasa Indonesia localizer for Firefox who, in addition to localizing Firefox for Indonesians, is also working to spread Firefox farther in Indonesia. Thank you Romi!

This event would also not have happened without the support and coordination of Nur’ Aini Rakhmawati of ITS Surabaya who hosted the event. Thank you Aini-san!

Thank you also goes to Mary Colvig who provided support from Marketing/Events.

Since there has been so much interest in Add-ons in Indonesia, we would like to explore the possibility of doing a similar or related Mozilla-focused event in Jakarta later this year, after the launch of Firefox 3.5.  If you would like to have a Mozilla event in Jakarta, please feel free to comment and leave your email so we can contact you.  We are looking for people in Jakarta who would volunteer to help us with some of the organizational work to create such an event.

Here is Romi Hardiyanto’s presentation on Add-ons (in Bahasa Indonesia, not English.)

Here is Kiki Ahmadi‘s presentation on the PureZilla add-on.

Thank you Romi and Aini-san and everyone who made Mozilla’s first event in Indonesia a success!

Did you know that the Philippine government funds a Linux distribution?  I did not until today.

Chin Wong, a columnist at the Philippine national daily newspaper, the Manila Standard Today, has a blog covering technology trends called Digital Life where he recently asked,

Do we need our own Linux?

Chin wrote about Bayanihan Linux, which is a Philippine government-funded Linux distribution based on Debian. The term ‘bayanihan’ itself, “refers to a spirit of communal unity or effort to achieve a particular objective.” Chin tried installing Bayanihan 3 times and failed with the comment:

All this was unfortunate, because Bayanihan 5 looks like a promising and modern operating system, that like Ubuntu, is based on Debian Linux. Like other modern Linux distributions, Bayanihan 5 also comes with a complete set of free and open source applications, including an office productivity suite, a powerful image-editing application, a media player and a CD burner. The interface, based on KDE , is a little busy for my taste, but is slick and easy enough to navigate. But do we really need bouncing icons attached to the mouse pointer while an application loads?

There is some effort at localization. Bayanihan’s OpenOffice, for example, is packed with templates of commonly used government forms. Firefox is set up with bookmarks to government and local news sites. But are such localized touches worth the effort of developing our own Linux distribution?

Chin also mentions that Bayanihan Linux version 5 came out in 2007 and that there has been no news about any updates. The website for the OS lists a forum for users but that is closed, which is ominous. He closes the post by asking whether there is a need for a Philippine Linux distribution. I’d love to know more about the customizations of Firefox that were made and how those decisions were made.

I wanted to take a moment to recommend a 1 hour documentary, US Now, which bills itself as, “A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet.

The film is a good look at how the Internet is impacting the way people communicate and collaborate in fundamental ways and asks if and how we might have more participatory governments due to these changes in human behavior. The open source software model is discussed but is only one of many examples used.

I especially enjoyed Clay Shirky‘s time on screen as he is clearly the leading thinker in this new arena.

Us Now is viewable on the Internet for free (at vimeo).

One of the serendipitous connections I made recently in Malaysia was with Chantra Be of the KhmerOS project, who are providing a completely localized operating system and applications to computer users in Cambodia, who have never been provided a localized computer operating system in the past.

KhmerOS is based on Open Suse Linux and also ships with a Gecko-based browser called Mekhala and a Gecko-based mail client called Moyura.

Via Chantra, the KhmerOS team is considering whether they might be willing to help Mozilla with a Khmer localization for Firefox and Thunderbird as well. This would be for post 3.5. More information when I have more to share.

Last May, my colleague Doug Turner happened across some videos showing how the Gecko engine does reflow: What is a reflow? < DougT’s Blog

In fact, Doug had stumbled across the work of Satoshi Ueyama (Japanese), a programmer extraordinaire from Japan, who had presented those videos at the Mozilla 24 event in Tokyo in 2007.

Many people were rightly fascinated by watching the process by which a web page is laid out. Being an open source web page rendering engine, Gecko is one of the few platforms where one can modify the source code to do interesting applications such as this.

I asked Ueyama-san to provide additional information on how anyone could do this themselves and he’s kindly provided some instructions and updated his modified Gecko build for anyone to make such a video.

I have rewritten the animation generating program for the latest (FF3.1b3) Gecko / Shiretoko builds.

The updated video is available on YouTube:

First, build Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 with my modified layout module, which can be found under the ‘layout’ folder in the attachment.

Then run the build to output a layout progress log as C:\mozilla-build\log\out.txt.

You can change the destination with a constant in VisualizeLogger.cpp.

This time the log processing program is written in ActionScript.

Paste part of your log file in LogSource.as and compile ReflowAnimation.as with mxmlc to generate a Flash movie.

To make a movie in MPEG format, compile CaptureDump.mxml for Adobe AIR and run it.

This generates PNG files for each frame under C:\mozilla-build\log\frames.

Now you can convert them to a MPEG movie with ffmpeg.

Sorry for my rough explanation!

A big, big thank you to Satoshi for presenting on Gecko reflow back in 2007 and again for providing an update for Shiretoko as well as the files needed for anyone to do this on their own.

If you make your own Gecko reflow video, please paste a link to it in the comments of this post. Satoshi and other Mozilla developers and community members would be interested to see how Gecko reflows your website.

Mozilla’s fearless leader, John Lilly, is profiled (with his NSID beard) in the LA Times in both the Business and Technology sections.

The Stanford University-trained computer scientist is chief executive of Mozilla, maker of the Firefox Web browser, which broke Microsoft’s hold on the market so it couldn’t dominate the Internet the way it does computer operating systems. About 95% of Web surfers used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in 2004; now 20% use Firefox, and other companies are offering browsers that are smarter and faster than ever before.

Browsing the career of Mozilla CEO John Lilly

“I spend more time in my browser than I do in my car. You should spend at least as much time choosing which browser you use as which car you drive. It’s your lens onto the Web. Just like the lenses in your glasses, it affects the way the Web looks to you. As we see more and more of the world through the Web, the characteristics of the lens matter more than ever.”

HOW I MADE IT: JOHN LILLY – Mozilla chief John Lilly is fired up about making a better Web browser

The NY Times has a nice article on a recent voluntary effort to make software for vision-impaired or physically disabled people that mentions the Mozilla Foundation’s support: Entrepreneurial Edge – Software That Opens Worlds to the Disabled.

To date, Project:Possibility has operated without revenue and without pay for participants. Its programs belong to the nonprofit project and to the University of Southern California. Its sole source of financing was a $15,000 grant in early 2008 from the Mozilla Foundation, an organization that promotes the concept of the Internet as a public resource open to everyone.

Nor does Project:Possibility intend to be a commercial venture, Mr. Leung said. “We do not plan to earn revenue through a spread of our programs. In fact,” he said, “we plan to be completely open-source — our programs can be downloaded, modified and used by anyone at no cost — in hopes that similar programs will spread to other universities and around the world with or without our involvement.”

I’m sure this effort is partly due to the hard work of Frank Hecker and it’s great to see Project:Possibility get this exposure.