Mi blog lah!

Jeff’s keynote speech

Προέρχεται από τον simosx.

Jeff’s keynote speech at Guadec 6. You can see Dave Neary in the foreground.

In the keynote, Jeff talked about the direction of GNOME.

Tags: general by Simos Xenitellis
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Federico on GNOME optimisation

Προέρχεται από τον simosx.

The presentation of Federico on GNOME optimisation.
He covered issues of optimising GNOME so that the end-user experience follows a “flow”; that there are no bottlenecks or annoying delays in the duration of a desktop session.

Tags: general by Simos Xenitellis
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Τι είναι το mugshot.org;
Είναι ένας δικτυακός τόπος που επιτρέπει τη δημιουργία κοινωνικών ομάδων (social groups) με κοινά ενδιαφέροντα μέσω Διαδικτύου.

Αυτή τη στιγμή επιτρέπει το διαμοιρασμό με τα υπόλοιπα μέλη της ομάδας σας τους τίτλους της μουσικής που ακούτε αλλά και συνδέσμους που που βρίσκετε ότι έχουν ενδιαφέρον. Η διαμοίραση αυτή είναι άμεση, μέσω εφαρμογής που εγκαθιστάτε (Windows, Linux/i386 για τώρα) και ο καθένας βλέπει το στοιχείο που έχει διαμοιραστεί μέσω μιας ειδοποίησης (notification - baloon).

Ένα ενοχλητικό πρόβλημα με το mugshot είναι ότι δε χρησιμοποιεί Unicode σε αυτή τη φάση με αποτέλεσμα να μην δέχεται ελληνικά. Πιστεύω ότι θα διορθωθεί σύντομα, μιας και έχει καταγραφεί το πρόβλημα στο http://bugzilla.mugshot.org/.

Το βασικό ενδιαφέρον με το mugshot είναι ότι προέρχεται από τη δουλειά της Red Hat (χρηματοδότηση από Yahoo! και Amazon).

Έτσι, μπορείτε να φανταστείτε ότι η ομάδα σας δρα ως σμήνος (swarm) σε νέες πληροφορίες που στέλνουν τα μέλη.

Για να πάρετε λογαριασμό πρέπει να δηλώσετε το ενδιαφέρον σας στο http://www.mugshot.org/. Διαφορετικά κάποιος που έχει ήδη λογαριασμό μπορεί να σας στείλει μια πρόσκληση. Εγώ εξάντλησα τις προσκλήσεις μου, οπότε μπορείτε να ενοχλήσετε τα άτομα που κάλεσα (παίρνουν οι ίδιοι μια σειρά από προσκλήσεις).

Στείλτε εδώ σχόλιο αν θέλετε να δημιουργήσετε λογαριασμό στο mugshot.org.

Tags: general by Simos
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Ο Αλά είναι ένας Αιγύπτιος ιστολόγος που φυλακίσθηκε πριν από ενάμιση μήνες για τη συμμετοχή του σε μια διαδήλωση στο Κάιρο.

Ελευθερώθηκε σήμερα (το BoingBoing έχει και ένα σχετικό άρθρο).

Tags: general by Simos
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Inscription in the Cypriot syllabic script
Can you read what the tablet says?

Hint

Tags: language by Simos Xenitellis
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Lamp post, UK

Προέρχεται από τον simosx.

This is part of the lower part of a lamp post. The lamp post allows the easy change of the light bulb by lowering the uppper part; releasing the screw the lamp post can bend and the lamp easily comes down to ground level.

Tags: general by Simos Xenitellis
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Πρόκειται για το γραφικό περιβάλλον GNOME που θα βρείτε σε διανομές ελεύθερου λογισμικού όπως Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Linux, OpenSUSE και αλλού.

This summer, GNOME will sponsor three female students to hack on GNOME-related projects from the comfort of their own home. Each project will last two months, and each participant will each receive a stipend of 3,000 US$. You can submit your own proposal for how to improve GNOME, or choose from our list of potential projects. You don’t need to be the world’s greatest coder to take part, since several mentors will be assigned to get you up to speed and help with any problems. If you’re worried about whether you’re suitable, feel free to ask us what we think.

Πηγή: http://www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/

Tags: Linux, i18n, open-source by Simos
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My hard disk (3.5″) that I use as external storage does not power up any more.

Most probably it happened due to overheating.

Is there any way to salvage the information? Do hard disks have some sort of fuse that can get blown? I do not mind if the procedure is invasive (that is, the hard disk will get damaged while extracting the information).

Tags: security by Simos
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Ⲁⲛ ⲙⲡⲟⲣⲉ̀ⲥⲉⲧⲉ ⲛⲁ ⲧⲟ ⲇⲓⲁⲃⲁ̀ⲥⲉⲧⲉ ⲁⲩⲧⲟ̀, ⲉ̀ⲭⲉⲧⲉ ⲥⲧⲟ ⲥⲩ̀ⲥⲧⲏⲙⲁ̀ ⲥⲁⲥ ⲅⲣⲁⲙⲙⲁⲧⲟⲥⲉⲓⲣⲉ̀ⲥ ⲅⲓⲟⲩ̀ⲛⲓⲕⲟⲛⲧ ⲙⲉ ⲩⲡⲟⲥⲧⲏ̀ⲣⲓⲝⲏ ⲕⲟⲡⲧⲓⲕⲱ̀ⲛ ⲕⲁⲓ ⲝⲉ̀ⲣⲉⲧⲉ ⲉⲗⲗⲏⲛⲓⲕⲁ̀.

Ⲅⲓⲁ ⲁⲡ̀ⲟⲇⲉⲓⲝⲏ ⲟ̀ⲧⲓ ⲕⲁⲧⲁⲫⲉ̀ⲣⲁⲧⲉ ⲛⲁ ⲇⲓⲁⲃⲁ̀ⲥⲉⲧⲉ ⲧⲟ ⲕⲉⲓ̀ⲙⲉⲛⲟ ⲁⲩⲧⲟ̀, ⲅⲣⲁ̀ⲯⲧⲉ ⲱⲋ ⲥⲭⲟ̀ⲗⲓⲟ ⲧⲏ ⲫⲣⲁ̀ⲥⲏ “Ⲡⲟⲩ ⲑⲁ ⲃⲣⲓ̀ⲥⲕⲉⲥⲉ ⲥⲧⲓⲥ ⲧⲣⲓⲁ̀ⲛⲧⲁ Ⲙⲁⲓ̈̀ⲟⲩ”.

Update: The encoding of this post is UTF-8 (Unicode). You are required to have the appropriate font installed. It is left as an excersize to the reader to figure out which blog entry this post is about (hint: blog entry #553). The carefull reader should be able to check the UTF-8 encoded bytes and discern which Unicode block the post is about. Reading the post requires the knowledge of basic Greek.

Tags: i18n, language by Simos
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Coptic is the most recent phase of ancient Egyptian. It is the direct descendant of the ancient language written in Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts. The Coptic alphabet is a slightly modified form of the Greek alphabet, with some letters (which vary from dialect to dialect) deriving from demotic. As a living language of daily conversation, Coptic flourished from ca. 200 to 1100. The last record of its being spoken was during the 17th century. Coptic survives today as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Egyptian Arabic is the spoken and national language of Egypt today.

Source: Wikipedia on Coptic Language

Coptic, as used today, has signs of influence from the Greek language. If you speak Greek, you should be able to recognise every entry in the screenshot (it comes from the dictionary that is available from http://copticlang.bizhat.com/).

There is a Coptic Unicode block and there are at least three Unicode fonts available with Coptic glyphs.

I am not aware of a keyboard definition to write Unicode Coptic; Coptic uses several combining diacritical marks (accents) and appears to surpass even Ancient Greek/Polytonic in this respect. An easy way to create (easy to write with?) method would be to start from the Greek keyboard layout and replace the codepoints with the Coptic ones. For the 9 combining diacritical marks, three keys should be dedicated, accessible through 1) pressing as is, 2) pressing with shift, 3) pressing with Alt. To avoid using dead keys, there would be a requirement to type first the letter and then the diacritical mark.

In modern Greek we use the “;:” key (on the right of L) to produce the acute and the diaeresis (with Shift) accents. The second suitable key could be the ‘ ” key while the third the “/?” (debateable).

There are several efforts to convert non-Unicode fonts distributed by the Coptic Church. website. Moheb added the Coptic glyphs to the Freefonts. There is more work required to get them added by default to Linux distros. There is a discussion forum on Coptic.

Therefore, the most important task is to create a keyboard layout so that one can write in Unicode Coptic.

Then, existing (non-Unicode) text should be converted to Unicode Coptic so that there is material available. Moheb created support for this in iconv (glibc). There should be a bug report at http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/ under product glibc, component libc.

Source: Wikipedia (Coptic script)

There exist free Unicode fonts already to have the text displayed. The conversion of the Coptic Church fonts to Unicode would be beneficial as well. To have them included in Linux distros, the distribution license should be set to one of the FLOSS licenses. An option could be to add to the DejaVu fonts (allowed by the license) so that there is a general purpose open font that is easy to work with.

I, for one, would love to write Greek using a Coptic keyboard layout and a Coptic Unicode font.

Update: Screenshot that demonstrates how well Unicode Coptic fonts behave when combining marks are used.

Update #2: You can test the above on your system by opening this OpenDocument file using OpenOffice.org or any other OpenDocument-compatible application. OpenOffice.org was verified that it can show combining marks. Your mileage may vary, your comments will be appreciated.

Get Unicode fonts with Coptic coverage.

Tags: blog, gnome, i18n, language, polytonic by Simos
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Suppose we want to change the functionality of an Ubuntu application but we do not want to go into all the trouble of finding the source code, installing in /usr/local/, breaking dependencies with original versions and so on.

Let’s change Character Map (gucharmap), and specifically change the default font size from 20pt to 14pt, so that when you start it there is more space in the character window. Currently Character Map does not offer an option to save this setting.

We get the source code of Character Map,

# apt-get source gucharmap

Then,

cd gucharmap-1.4.4/

and now we edit the file gucharmap/main.c

We know what to edit because we visited the GNOME CVS Website, at http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gucharmap/

and we examined the logs for the file http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gucharmap/gucharmap/main.c?view=log

which show that for Revision 1.69, the following change took place,

Log:

2004-02-01  Noah Levitt

* gucharmap/gucharmap-table.c: Improve square size.

* gucharmap/main.c: Increase default font size.

When we click on the link Diff to previous 1.68 of the above page, we pinpoint the change,

gint default_size = PANGO_PIXELS (1.5 * pango_font_description_get_size (window->style->font_desc));

gint default_size = PANGO_PIXELS (2.0 * pango_font_description_get_size (window->style->font_desc));

The change in the multiplier (from 1.5 to 2.0) changes the font size from 15pt to 20pt.

20pt is too big for us, therefore we edit the file gucharmap/main.c and change the 2.0 to 1.4 (14pt).
At this point we can compile the package using the command line

$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b

dpkg-buildpackage: source package is gucharmap
dpkg-buildpackage: source version is 1:1.4.4-1ubuntu1
dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by Sebastien Bacher
dpkg-buildpackage: host architecture i386
fakeroot debian/rules clean

……….

At this point it is possible that you will get an error that an essential package is missing. The above command line will name the missing files, therefore you can simply install by

# apt-get install package-name

In case you do not have the basic compiler packages, you would need to install the build-essential meta-package. Do

# apt-get install build-essential

Finally, after the dpkg-buildpackage command completes, it will create one or more .deb packages in the directory above gucharmap.

# cd ..

# ls -l *.deb

gucharmap_1.4.4-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

libgucharmap4_1.4.4-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

libgucharmap4-dev_1.4.4-1ubuntu1_i386.deb
#

You can now install them (over the original packages) by running

# dpkg -i gucharmap_1.4.4-1ubuntu1_i386.deb libgucharmap4_1.4.4-1ubuntu1_i386.deb libgucharmap4-dev_1.4.4-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

Now we start the Character Map from Applications/Accessories/ and we get the default character size of 14pt!

Is there something we should pay attention on top of this? Yes, we should investigate the GNOME Bugzilla in case there is relevant work on this issue. We visit

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/

and specifically we click on the link Browse.

There, we select the package gucharmap (how do we know that Character Map is gucharmap? We either click on Help/About in Character Map which shows the internal name, or we run ps ax at a Applications/Accessories/Terminal while Character Map is running; the name gucharmap will pop up at the end of the long list.).

gucharmap is under the Desktop heading in the Browse list; or click on this direct link of bug reports on gucharmap.
If you start perusing the gucharmap bugs list, you will notice Bug #140414, titled remember settings. This report describes a superset of the problem we tried to solve above. That is, the bug report asks to enable Character Map to use the GNOME configuration database (gconf) so that it saves/remembers the user settings. However, this specific bug report is still pending.

The correct way to solve the configuration settings issue of gucharmap is to implement what is described in Bug #140414. If you have Ubuntu 6.06, you most likely have a very recent version of the source code of gucharmap. Therefore, the differences would be rather minimal. You can give it a go and try to get the gconf functionality in place.

You compile, install and test. If it works, you can make a patch of your changes; visit another directory and download a fresh copy of the source code using the apt-get source packagename command. Rename gucharmap-1.4.4 to gucharmap-1.4.4.ORIGINAL

# mv gucharmap-1.4.4 gucharmap-1.4.4.ORIGINAL

and make sure you clean the original gucharmap-1.4.4/ directory from compiled files (enter the directory were you did the source code changes and run make clean).

Finally, create a diff file,

# diff -ur ~/tmp/gucharmap-1.4.4.ORIGINAL ~/gucharmap-1.4.4/ > remember-settings.patch

In ideal terms, it is preferable if you could produce a patch for the latest version of gucharmap. That is, the version of gucharmap you get from http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gucharmap/. By doing so, the developers will love you because they will be able to simply apply the patch and limit the burden of adding the feature. Indeed, if it is too much effort to get a build system running, you can start off with simple patches and if you feel you are doing well with it, make the extra mile to have a build system. More on this in a future post.

Tags: Linux, general, open-source by Simos
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παρωχημένος -η -ο [paroiménos] E3 : που ανήκει στο παρελθόν: O ιστορικός μελετά παρωχημένες εποχές. || (γραμμ.) Παρωχημένη λέξη / έκφραση. Παρωχημένη σημασία / χρήση μιας λέξης, που υπήρχε παλαιότερα. || (γραμμ.) ~ χρόνος, συντελεσμένος. [λόγ. < αρχ. παρῳχημένος (γραμμ.: ελνστ. σημ.)]

Πηγή: http://www.komvos.edu.gr/dictionaries/dictonline/DictOnLineTri.htm

Υπάρχει συζήτηση στη λίστα i18ngr για το αν είναι κατάλληλη η λέξη παρωχημένος για τη μετάφραση του όρου deprecated (π.χ. the use of the abort3() system call is deprecated).

Στην Πληροφορική, ο όρος deprecated έχει την έννοια της σταδιακής απόσυρσης ενός χαρακτηριστικού σε λογισμικό. Δηλαδή η λειτουργία είνα διαθέσιμη τώρα, ωστόσο στο μέλλον δεν θα είναι διαθέσιμη πια.

In computer software standards and documentation, deprecation is the gradual phasing-out of a software or programming language feature.

Πηγή: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecated

Η λέξη παρωχημένος τείνει να έχει αρνητικό connotation και σε μερικές καταστάσεις έχει χρήση ως βρισιά.

Ποιος είναι ο πιο κατάλληλος όρος για τη μετάφραση του deprecated;

Tags: i18n, language by Simos
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