FOSS – Page 3 – Inspiration is food for every soul!

Travel assistance application for GNOME.Asia 2010

Posted on June 18, 2010June 27, 2010 by Pockey Lam

As you may know that GNOME.Asia 2010 will be hosted in mid August in Taipei. If you are interested to join this annual GNOME event and be one of our speakers, please find below the sponsorship program. Feel free to apply if you need it. See you there!

Dear GNOME friends,

The GNOME Foundation provides travel sponsorships to individuals who want to attend GNOME.Asia 2010 and need financial assistance.

We are happy to announce the Travel Committee is ready to receive applications for sponsorships to attend to GNOME.Asia 2010. This year, GNOME.Asia is jointly held with COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) in Taipei, Taiwan on August 14 and 15, 2010.

For event detail please visit http://2010.gnome.asia/

For instruction of the travel assistance application, please visit http://live.gnome.org/Travel

Deadline: June 25 2010 14:00 UTC postponed to July 9 2010 14:00 UTC

Some additional request for GNOME.Asia:

We target to sponsor speakers (If you intend to go, why not give a talk? )
Limitation of $400 for people flying inside Asia and $800 for people from Europe/US/Other.
Only pay for transportation, not lodging cost. However, if you need help with accommodation, the GNOME.Asia Committee will book the hotel or hostel for you. Any questions, feel free to drop us an email.
Asking for sponsorship does not guarantee you will get sponsored;
A good application with good information will be processed faster;
If you are GNOME Foundation member, Google Summer of Code participants, contributor or speaker on GNOME, most likely you will get the sponsorship;
The Travel committee should reply back about receiving your application within 2-3 days. After that we would accumulate all the sponsorship requests and process them together. So please do not panic (have any butterflies in your stomach) if we take some time to reply on the status. Affirmative/Negative you would surely get a response;
No personal emails. Please keep travel-committee Cc’ed on all your replies.

Any questions, feel free to send email to the travel-committee : <travel-committee AT gnome DOT org>. Thank you!

GNOME.Asia Committee

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 🙂

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!

Tuxtype — There are over 40 exercises learning the finger position of each letter and punctuation

A productive day at “Coding for Fun”

Posted on December 12, 2009May 8, 2013 by Pockey Lam

As you may know Beijing Linux User Group has a lot of interest groups and one of the most popular groups is “Coding for fun“. The purpose is to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. It’s basically like a Hackathon, everyone hacks on their own code. Even you don’t have anything to hack on? Just look around and join anytime if you feel interested!

I personally found this group very interesting and joined numerous times already! Especially for computer science students, it’s a great place for them to learn how to get involve in FOSS projects as they can always get guidance from other experienced hackers. For other members, it’s their regular meeting place to meet and discuss about their projects. If you work alone on your own project? You can see from the pictures that the environment is very nice, it’s definitely a cool place to spend a day working there. For myself, I always work on random stuff related to BLUG, GNOME.Asia Summit, Software Freedom Day , College OSS Society and Open Source deployment in schools. My projects of the day are mainly the BLUG website news / events announcement and TuxTyping localization. Here it is, the most popular group in BLUG!

Everybody hack on their own project there

Here is a group hacking on the Linux kernel — Hacking on the Linux kernel

One of the projects is “Quadcopter Open hardware project”

All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun

First Joint Event with Beijing GNOME User Group

Posted on December 9, 2009July 22, 2010 by Pockey Lam

Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) and Beijing GNOME User Group (BGUG), two of the most active open source communities in Beijing just celebrated their anniversary in November (one day after the other)! With 7 and 1 year of services for BLUG and BGUG respectively it was about time we organized a joint event. In fact being a core member of both groups and a close friend of Emily Chen, BGUG’s President, I can recall how it all started: in 2008 we worked very closely to organize the first instance of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing, bringing passionate GNOME people from all horizons together, discussing and willing to contribute to the GNOME project here in China. The rest happened “all by itself” and it is really nice to see BGUG growing up strong with now a few core members taking over some of the group management responsibilities!

For this joint event we presented to both groups a report of the second instance of GNOME.Asia Summit which happened in Vietnam this year. Emily, Fred, Ray and myself were giving presentation there and we gave a summary of what happened, who we met, how vibrant the local Open Source scene is and showed of course many pictures of the 3 days event. In the second part of the meeting Peter Junge, core member of OpenOffice.org community, presented his experience while representing the BLUG and attending the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Italy. It was really a wonderful evening flooded with event highlights, innovative technology, travel and funny stories. After witnessing the success of GNOME.Asia Summit in Beijing and Vietnam, I can’t wait to know where it will be hosted in 2010 and of course participate again!

Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group

Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org community member — Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org expert, represented BLUG to join the OpenOffice.org Conference

First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!