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Happy Holi
I learned today that Holi is the Hindu Spring Festival of Colors. Happy Holi to everyone, especially our friends in India and to our community members who launched this site. I was passed this to me by Tanmay, who is one of our great campus reps contributors from India.
So, why blog about Holi? In addition to it being a fun holiday, I was impressed to see the Firefox/Holi site using the Mozilla Communities logo. Gandalf and I have been seeing the new MCS community logo spreading to new sites and being used in new ways. This was really one of our goals and hopes for the project….to have a unifying element that our community could use.
Tanmay, thanks for the heads up.
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Lipikaar
I just had to point some attention toward the good folks at Lipikaar. To get a sense of their technology, just click that link and you’ll see the tool immediately on their website.
Here’s a link to their Firefox extension.
You don’t have to speak Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Konkani, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Oriya, Assamese, Kannada, Malayalam, Arabic or Urdu to see how cool or powerful this is. But, if you do speak one of those 18 languages, now you’ve got a tool to help create content your constituents can read. And, that’s thanks to Lipikaar.
I’m blogging about projects like Lipikaar and Heredict because I want to see how we can impact the web in new markets. Localization is just one small piece. With website evangelism and the ability to create content, users will start to see dramatic increases in what’s available to them on Firefox and on the Web more generally.
Please help spread this project around if you are in India or speak one of the languages listed above.
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MCS Theme on my blog
I have no idea how many people read my blog by visiting my actual website, but if you can see the Wordpress theme, you’ll see that I changed my blog to Gandalf’s new Mozilla Community Site design.
I hope anyone interest will contribute or change their theme. We can help with that if you’d like.
Lastly, I posted this entry about GNUnify09 in India. But, I am afraid that it didn’t hit planet since I recently converted all the categories on my blog to tags. We upgraded our blogging software to Wordpress 2.7 and that was one of the new features I used.
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GNUnify09
Arun and I spent the past two days at the GNUnify conference in Pune, India. This conference was especially important for me because it was the first time I was able to meet all of our Indian localizers. We had a great dinner at a local restaurant and I got to know many of them on a more personal level and that was great. Thanks to Krishna (Telugu), Shankar (Kannada), Sandeep (Marathi), Ahmed (Assamese), and Manoj (Oriya) for coming to the dinner. Ani (Malayalam), Ankit (Gujurati), Runa (Bengali), and Rajesh (Hindi) couldn’t make it due to prior obligations. We chatted a lot about localizing Mozilla and all its challenges. Dinner was straight after Arun and I presented our web standards/evangelism/localization routine at GNUnify. If I could sum up the remarks from the day/evening, this is what I captured:
- The localizers may not face the same complexity of plural forms that we see in other languages in other regions. But, they are craving *more* transparency and clarity for our process. It’s my belief that we have made it very clear just what needs to be done to get a localization official. So, it might require me to do a summary email or reblog post to highlight a few places to look when wondering what checklist exists for localizing.
- Again and again, I heard people asking me what Mozilla is going to do to get content localized on the Web. A common remark I heard was that it’s very nice to have the browser chrome and UI translated into so many languages, but what are we going to do for translation of content on the web. Frankly, I am not sure what stance Mozilla should take here. I can see the obvious point that a translated browser is a good step, but what good is it if all the content on the Web is in English. But, I also know that we are developing client application software in addition to fighting for standards on the Web. My first thought is to keep a close watch to see where we can enter to help promote a healthier Web that includes content for everyone. One response that I provided to a lot of people is that we do our best to work with localizers to find the best local content that exists on the web that we then feature on our “Getting Started” page.
- Fonts are an issue in India and some of the creators of most highly used fonts have only designed them to work on IE. Arun took particular passion in this field and we plan to follow up with a few folks to start the evangelism on making fonts work on the Web, regardless of a users browser.
- Web developers we met found Arun’s presentations and demos terrific and we seemed to gather a lot of questions about SVG, OGG and theora.
- HTML5 is a hot topic with a lot of curiosity. A lot of excellent questions arose about the specs of HTML5. Arun did a really nice job illustrating canvas and video tags with relevant examples demoed in Firefox 3.1.
It’s my opinion that we had a really successful trip through India. Our localizers are a close team who are dedicated to helping Mozilla. Our campus reps program is taking off and everywhere we went we met at least two or three new reps. Web developers we met had a sincere interest in the open Web and Arun made lots of friends with that topic. Without question, there is a lot of interest in the Mozilla here and I think we’ll benefit by offering continued support and helping those inspired Indians to become the leaders of the large, diverse, and complex community.
I am now leaving India and “stopping through” Beijing to see Li Gong and meet the localizers and community there for the first time.
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IIT Kanpur developer workshop using Bespin
We’ve wrapped up our stop at IIT Kanpur. Arun and I did a developer workshop last night…well, Arun led the workshop and I assisted. Nearly 150 people attended an we were there until after midnight, working with students for over three hours. The enthusiasm of the students was inspiring to see, and Arun and I felt very at home with this crew of young Mozillans. But, what made this workshop so special was that it was the first time the the web-based IDE, Bespin, was used by such a large group. All things considered, it was a big success. We found a few bugs, but used Bespin to edit an HTML and JS file using <canvas> to have the students draw an Indian Flag.
One quick bug to report for the Bespin guys. It seems that there is a limit on the number of people who can login with a project of the same name. Initially, everyone named their project “IndiaFlag”. Only a few were able to start and everyone else was locked out. A sharp student realized the potential bug and made the suggestion to have everyone try to rename their project to a unique name. That did the trick and the room applauded his fix. Also, the copy/paste function didn’t seem to work. Not sure if this is just a limitation of cut/paste with <canvas> or not.
Today, Arun gave a talk on the open web. I met many of the campus reps here and got a few testimonials on video about their passion for Mozilla. As I write this, Arun is meeting with a professor interested in the semantic Web. We are now heading to Mumbai en route to Pune for the GNUify conference where we’ll both speak.
If you attended either of our sessions, please comment here, leaving your name and what you thought. Arun and I (and Jay and Mary in California) would love to keep in touch.
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