Leonardo Fontenelle

I just updated the translation of Gtranslator 2.0, which is about to be released. I also compiled the application from the source code, and used Gtranslator to translate itself. This way I was able to test the translation, and take a look at the new features and enhancements for version 2.0. Let’s start with a basic screenshot:

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Today I reached my commit number 1000 to the GNOME Subversion repository, in less than two years. Even if I’m an active translator, this score is mostly a result of my work as reviewer in the Brazilian GNOME translation team. Congratulations to them!

I just read Djihed Afifi’s article on Damned Lies, Vertimus, Transifex, Pootle and other translation tools, as well as Dwayne Bailey’s comment and Friedel Wolff’s reply. What a coincidence! I just posted an overview of translation web apps (in Portuguese) But then, Djihed’s focus is different; he is more concerned on how much synergy/integration can we have between all this tools.

Side comment: I can’t help noticing we’ve being discussing a large part of our infrastructure. The version control system, the translation helper, the documentation status tracker (not to mention the documentation language), the web engine, the GNOME Art infrastructure, all of them are being improved, changed or otherwise reconsidered.

According to Ken Starks, from HeliOS Solutions, an upset teacher emailed him after confiscating the CDs from a student. Among other gems, she said no software was free, and that disadvantaged people would be better served with older versions of Windows than with GNU/Linux. When I read about this story, I followed the link and was delighted to read the reply. If you enjoy long posts, read this follow-up, when Ken Starks comments on the previous post and reports a phone conversation with the teacher.

Today I tried Virtaal, the off-line translation tool from Zuza Software Foundation, the same one behind Pootle and translate-toolkit. Virtaal’s user interface is best optimized for keyboard usage than any translation tool I ever used, except maybe for advanced text editors. Thanks to translate-toolkit, Virtaal can edit many translation file formats, not only Gettext message catalogs. The application depends on GTK+ but not on GNOME, and it can be used in UNIX-like operational systems, Windows and Mac OS X.

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I’ll have to join this meme — even if Jeff Waugh won’t read me.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

The nearest book had small pages and some long sentences, and the 56th page was the last of a chapter. There’s no 5th sentence, but I’ll quote the last one instead: Hence, this book’s author’s position is, clearly, for the construction of a public health system with managed cooperation, accessible by all Brazilians.

Did I ever mention I’m a medical doctor? I’m a general practitioner (or family and community medical doctor, as we call it here), and as a graduate student I’m studying collective health at the University of São Paulo.

Today I installed Thunar, XFCE’s file manager. I love Nautilus, but it has longer start times, and the folder loading is noticeably slower since I concentrated my files in a few folders. As an example, my ~/Library/Papers folder has something like 75 PDF files; but at least I don’t have to browse a topics tree to find it. I always find non-GNOME applications a little odd, but Thunar is very similar to Nautilus’ file browser mode. Using the same GTK+ theme helps a lot, as well as sharing Gio and Project Ridley.

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Today in Brazil we are voting for city mayors and councilmen (councillors). The Brazilian elections are very interesting, because our Supreme Electoral Court is always improving the process. We were the first country to have completely electronic elections, and this year all of the new (50 thousand) voting machines are running GNU/Linux. (There still are hundreds of thousands of legacy machines based on Windows CE.) There are other initiatives to prevent fraud and to prevent bad politicians to be elected.

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I’ve always been proud of my translation team’s work, but I can’t help quoting Richard Hughes about the GNOME translators:

I’ve worked for companies who pay translators vast amounts of money, but they just don’t care about the product, and hence the translations reflect that. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you guys rock.

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We GNOME translators can preview many of the new features because, well, we translate them. But today translating Orca proved even more useful: I discovered that Alt+F6 switches the focus do daughter windows. Now, that’s how you can focus a dialog after switching to another application and back to the application with the open dialog. (By the way, this keybinding is editable in the System→Preferences menu.) I just feel like when I read from Ross Burton how useful is middle-clicking a scroll bar.

Thank you, Orca developers. Besides writing well recognized software and excellent translator comments, you proved to be very instructive