Блогчетање

The first issue of (first) Serbian free software magazine named GNUzilla is out for January 2005.

It's written in Serbian, and we're starting with online PDFs for now (we hope to have it on paper sometime during 2005).

Congrats to everyone involved, especially Ivan Jelić and Ivan Čukić for working very hard on finishing it.

Quick contents: Ubuntu, FreeBSD 5.3, Debian intros, Firefox 1.0, E-mail clients, Sylpheed Claws, Gnome l10n, amaroK music player review, Linux gaming, CD recording, Softmodems, Digital cameras on free software systems.

DejaVu 1.5 has been released. It now has complete support for Cyrillic.

As a consequence, my Bepa fonts are now deprecated. Don't use them. At all.

Rodney, below is a function I use to test if visitor prefers Croatian (hr) over Serbian (sr) when she visits Prevod.org web pages to provide Latin transcription of the pages.

function header_language_compare($default = 'sr', $comparewith = 'hr') {
  $languages=split(',',$_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]);
  $qdefault=0;
  $qcompare=0;
  foreach ($languages as $lang) {
    if (ereg("^$default$",$lang,$regs)) {
      $qdefault=1;
    } elseif (ereg("^$comparewith$",$lang,$regs)) {
      $qcompare=1;
    } elseif (ereg("^$default;[ ]*q=([0-9.]+)$",$lang,$regs)) {
      $qdefault=$regs[1];
    } elseif (ereg("^$comparewith;[ ]*q=([0-9.]+)$",$lang,$regs)) {
      $qcompare=$regs[1];
    }
  }

  if ($qcompare>$qdefault) return 1;
  else return 0;
}

If "hr" is more desireable than "sr" (i.e. there's no "sr" at all, or it has lower "quality" than "hr") according to "Accept-Language" header, this function will return 1, otherwise 0. You might want to use something similar to compare 'en' and 'sq', letting most people default to 'en' for your blog.

Learning Spanish

I've had my second Spanish class today. I'm in a group with two girls who're way ahead of me: they follow some Spanish soap-series on TV, which poses an unfair advantage and I look like the dummest guy around :) Perhaps it's time that I buy a TV again?

I first planned to find some material on the web. So I found a couple of web sites which feature free Spanish lessons, such as Online Spanish Tutorial, Learn Spanish and Study Spanish.

Yet, first thing I noticed is that Spanish is much more similar to Serbian in terms of grammar than either of these two to English. So, I decided that it was a waste of time to use English as intermediate language. Accidentally, I ran into 3-month course organized by Belgrade Student Union (Savez studenata Beograda), so I registered.

I'm somewhat in a new territory, since the course is not as systematic as I would expect (I'm studying mathematics, so I probably expect too much :)—we have not yet been introduced any of the grammar rules, but I can already see some patterns.

So, by next 6UADEC, I'll be writing novels and poems en Español—yeah, sure :)

Free Software: Focus on Serbia

I know very little people from Belgrade who actually care about free software (instead, there're some who care about open-source, as in "good way to profit using else's work", "technical advantages" [I don't actually believe in them a priori] or "Linux RU13Z" style). I suppose this show-off and compete attitude doesn't leave room for ideas such as "help your neighbour" or "share with everybody".

OTOH, there're some people who've started the Free Software Network, and they're—interestingly—not from Belgrade (well, most of them study in Belgrade now).

They work on a whole lot of stuff, like actually writing documentation in Serbian, doing some web-based support, and organizing and helping with minor local gatherings.

They're also planning to do a Serbian free software magazine, and work is already being done on that. Like probably many others in Gnome community, I just found out about Free Software Magazine through a post on foundation-list.

It seems it should be possible to make use of their experiences there, and especially, make use of their technical achievements. One of the leaders of FSN Serbia (Ivan) is a big fan of Gnome, so I expect Gnome to be the best-covered desktop in the magazine. :)

Anyway, lets hope this takes off! Any tips from other local groups are welcome!

Thanks to GNOME Bugstermind Luis, xml2po got its own Bugzilla product, so any further xml2po bug reports should go there.

(I have some reports already sitting in my inbox: if you reported a bug which I didn't respond to, don't worry, I didn't forget about it, just didn't get to it yet; if you wish, you may report it in Bugzilla anyway, I won't mind, and it won't get lost.)

Just like many others around Serbia, I've gotten my collection of Ubuntu CD sets one of the last days.

Now, why isn't their carrier using Gnome to print out address labels?
Wonder what would happen if I actually used Cyrillic? :).

First impressions are not perfect, but it's probably due to my specific localization interests: Ubuntu uses old broken URW-CYR fonts (Debian was supposed to be fixed some time ago, but it's all fixed upstream), they ship old incorrect sr_YU locales (which have been removed from GNU libc CVS; improved locales sr_CS are available in libc bugzilla), and they don't ship DejaVu or Computer Modern Unicode fonts (I use these for my everyday desktop needs, since they have good coverage of WGL4).

Also, some parts of their modified interface are not translated to Serbian, but I hope someone else (I'm thinking of Urke :) will actually get on with Ubuntu Serbian localization, since he's already using it, and he's a member of Serbian localization team.

Next, choosing OpenOffice.org over Gnumeric/Abiword combo has its' advantages, but it's certainly not localization: OpenOffice.org requires a recompile (of at least some libraries) to suit a different locale. The similar holds for Firefox over Epiphany (uhm, anyone knows why did they go this route?). There're translations to Serbian for both of these (at least partial in case of OO.o) around web, but they're not integrated because of these "localization as an after-thought" designs.

Ok, this was mostly regarding Ubuntu localization stuff, I'll get to trying other stuff (plugging in digital camera and scanner I have lying around, seeing if the sound works, setting up my ISDN and network connection, etc.) one of these days.