Pockey Lam – Page 23 – Inspiration is food for every soul!

COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 Call For Participants

Posted on May 30, 2010June 2, 2010 by Pockey Lam

As part of the organizing team of GNOME.Asia Summit, I would like to post the Call for participants of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 here and let all the communities in Asia know that we are looking for speakers, exhibitors and participants this year. Please find below the announcement and don’t hesitate to pass the message along!

Dear GNOME friends,

For this third edition of the GNOME.Asia Summit we’re delighted to partner with the organizers of the largest annual community-based Open Source conference in Taiwan, COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters). The event will be held on August 14th and 15th at the International Conference Hall, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica in Taipei (Taiwan).

Right now the joint conference of COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 is calling for papers. With a tagline of “Open Web and Mobile Technologies”, it emphasizes the exciting development in these two areas as well as the GNOME desktop environment, and leverages the world-leading hardware industry in Taiwan.

Call for Paper
Submit a Talk!

Important Information

The deadlines:

Submission: June 25th 2010
Notification of acceptance: July 4th 2010

Conference:

Conference Date: August 14th – 15th 2010
Venue: International Conference Hall, Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Main Topics
Possible topics include, but not limited to:

1. The latest GNOME 3.0
The three big things about GNOME 3 are user experience, accessibility, and apps. The most coolest apps on GNOME 3.0 etc.

2. GNOME library and application development
Development involves many different projects, on the GNOME Desktop Environment and the GNOME applications.

3. Desktop deployments and customization
Deploy and customize GNOME desktop in your country

4. Mobile platforms and thin clients
GNOME desktop on mobile platform, like on phone, thin clients like Sun Ray

5. Localization & Internationalization
Translation, Input Method, Dictionary, anything related to L10n and I18n is welcome

6. GNOME Communities
Organize local Users Group, spreading the knowledge of GNOME and building a vibrant, thriving community around GNOME

7. GNOME Accessibility
Accessibility enables people with disabilities to participate in activities such as work and the use of services, products, and information.

8. Testing
Automation testing framework, test cases developement, bug management and all kings of topic related to QA.

9. HTML 5 and the Web Technologies
Topics around web technologies including demonstrations, tips and applications etc. It would be best if it was related to HTML 5 and front-end technologies but is not a requirement.

10. FOSS & Hardware
Hack your devices using FOSS! The term “devices” include embedded systems, home electronics, set-top boxes, wireless base stations, e-book readers, automotive electronics, mobile phones, and PDA/MIDs etc.

11. FOSS Business, legally
FOSS legal issues which include standard processes on FOSS commercial usage, FOSS business model research, and reverse engineering for GPL compliance check.

12. Other topics
Any FOSS related topic which not listed above is still welcome. Your participation can help us make the conference better, and that’s how Open Source communities work!

13. Lightning talks
A five-minutes presentation to demonstrate your work or promote an interesting topic. Reservation and on-site application are both accepted.

The sessions at the COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010 will be scheduled for two time blocks:

A: 45mins talk + 15 mins Q&A

B: 25mins talk + 5 mins Q&A

Please take into consideration any time you will need for preparation. The session could be a technical talk, panel discussion, or BOF.

If you’d like to share your knowledge, experience, or opinion at COSCUP 2010, please fill in the form here before June 25th, 2010. The program committee will contact you before July 4th, 2010 to inform you whether your submission has been accepted or not.

All interested contributors are highly encouraged to send in their talks. Please help us to spread the invitation to other potential participants. Even you do not plan to be a speaker, please consider joining COSCUP / GNOME.Asia 2010. This is going to be a great event!

Sincerely,

GNOME.Asia
Organization Team

Hello Planet GNOME

Posted on March 5, 2010May 8, 2013 by Pockey Lam

As a new poster on Planet GNOME I suppose presentations are in order: my main contributions to GNOME are to try to grow the Asian community and I do this by taking part in the GNOME.Asia Summit organization since its inception in 2008 in Beijing. Last year I actually even gave some talks at the Vietnamese chapter in Ho Chi Minh. Together with my friend Emily Chen we also started a GNOME User Group in Beijing after the first Summit end of 2008 and we do a lot of advocacy to get young Chinese students to take over some Gnome projects.

We’re actually in the middle of the call for host for the 2010 edition and you can find my post about the topic right here. So if anyone in Asia is interested to take up the challenge and be the lead organizer of a great Open Source technical conference showcasing GNOME technologies this is the chance. Note that the whole GNOME.Asia Summit committee will be behind you and we’re now strong of two successful years experience. So please do help spread the word.

I am also part of the localization team of a few GNOME projects especially the educational ones like GComrpis and Rur-ple. I spent a lot of time building a total FOSS solution for schools that included the OS with different educational apps for teaching and learning, tutorials for teachers, training and textbook for students. Of course we use a lot of GNOME and GNOME apps in the solution.

And when not doing GNOME things, I actually also happen to be the President of the (famous!) Beijing LUG (should you be in town please do contact me), on the board of Software Freedom International and very much involved with women in technology and students open source groups.

I hope that by now you have a better idea of who I am and should you have any idea on how to strengthen the Asian GNOME community please do get in touch. Also feel free to browse my previous post to get a better idea of the other things I’m involved with.

Basic rules for FOSS Localization

Posted on February 2, 2010March 5, 2010 by Pockey Lam

I have been spending some time reviewing a few FOSS educational software translations over the last months. Localization is a commitment if you want to do a good job; badly localized software leads to poor experience (people simply won’t use the software) and gives the wrong message that FOSS applications are just bad software. So if you thought localization was just pure translation, then you need to think again! Hopefully my experience will help more people to start a localization effort well prepared and be proud of the work they did.

Cultural adaptation and knowing who that software was written for are paramount in the process. I’ve put up a few rules together hoping it will help newcomers, if I missed anything please feel free to add yours in the comment section!

Know your audience (the people using the software) and pick words that they can easily understand
Have some knowledge in software terminology (if not, web search is your buddy)
Be familiar with the software (try it out before translating it and don’t hesitate to use that software when you are doing the translation)
Be more than fluent in the target language and good enough in the original language (not the other way round)
Don’t be afraid to change the meaning in order to fit cultural differences (e.g. for Rur-ple, we picked a meaningful Chinese robot name rather than doing a phonetic conversion: names must have meaning in Chinese for people and more specifically children to remember)
Use the same terms across the whole software (either by proof reading or with the help of localization tools like Poedit and OmegaT)
Have someone good enough in both languages to review your work and hopefully familiar with the software (he needs to use the software not just read the text)
Fixes, typo corrections and improvements from the source language need to be fed back to the original project in order to help improve the overall quality of the software and all its translation
Keep track of changes and reasons behind so that can be useful for other languages
Have the passion and the time to commit to do a good work 🙂

GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 – Call for Host

Posted on January 27, 2010January 27, 2010 by Pockey Lam

As part of the GNOME.Asia Summit Committee, I would like to post the Call for Host of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 here and let all the communities in Asia know that we are looking for potential host this year. Please find below the announcement and don’t hesitate to pass the message along!

Dear GNOME friends,

We are call for the host of GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 now !

GNOME.Asia Summit is the yearly GNOME Users and Developers Asian Conference. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technology and future developments.

GNOME.Asia Summit was held in Beijing, China during 2008 and in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam during 2009. We would like to continue finding new national locations as we spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and delivery of the event.

You can learn more about GNOME.Asia Summit at our official website: http://gnome.asia

The following two links are “must read items” for organizing the GNOME.Asia Summit:

If you are interested in hosting the summit please submit a formal proposal to the GNOME.Asia Committee at asia-summit-list [at] gnome.org. The deadline for proposals is 31st March 2010. You are encouraged to ask questions before writing the formal proposal.

GNOME.Asia is much like a few trees just planted and we want to grow a forest in Asia. We are looking for local organizers in any Asian country with the desire to take on and succeed in the challenges of organizing an excellent GNOME event. We know that you will need all the time you can get to prepare a proposal but we hope we have inspired you to get started.

We are looking forward to hear from you on or before 31st March 2010.

Sincerely,

GNOME.Asia Summit committee

Wende School Project – Part 5 (Localized TuxTyping)

Posted on December 30, 2009May 8, 2013 by Pockey Lam

We have been looking for a Free and Open Source typing application for kids for quite some time. We found TuxTyping appealing and decided to localize the interface and the 43 typing exercises that come with it into Chinese. TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin. This educational game comes with two different games for practicing typing, and allows you to create exercises according to students needs. Of course we already brought this good news to Wende School. After two hours of training, Miss Liu was already mastering TuxTyping. She will incorporate it into the school program starting from 2010.

Fred is now submitting the Chinese version upstream to make it available for everybody. The TuxTyping developers have been very responsive and helpful with our translation problems and fixing minor bugs we found. We are now even working with them to make it workable for Chinese input method, as only pinyin typing is available currently. Hopefully we will have something ready to test soon.

In no time thanks to volunteers and passionate people like us, we went from nothing available in Chinese to a great looking software that will even deal with the Chinese language specificities. That’s the reason why I love Open Source; its community and its spirit definitely ROCK!

TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin! — TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin.

There are four different kinds of typing games for kids to practise typing. — There are four different kids of typing games for kids to practise typing.

This is "Feeding Tux with fish" — Tux the penguin is hungry, and loves to eat fish. But Tux can only catch the fish if you type the right letters in time!