As Ubiquity 0.5 will be released soon (Thursday morning in Mountain View), I decided it was a good time to put together a screencast in Japanese demoing the use of the new Japanese parser and commands. If you can’t understand it, it’s probably time to start learning Japanese!
Here at Mozilla Japan Firefox 3.5 Headquarters,1 we just launched the new and improved Light of Firefox (in Japanese, tomoshibi (灯)) for Firefox 3.5. The Light of Firefox is a real-time, interactive website which shows sparks on a map of Japan for every manual download of the new Firefox from mozilla.jp.
The name tomoshibi means “torch” in Japanese. As a new Firefox brings new technologies and possibilities to all corners of the web, so too will the tomoshibi light up the night in Japan!
As many of you know, earlier this week we released a preview of version 0.5 (0.5pre). We’re going to stress test and refine this release through the weekend and push the official 0.5 out next Tuesday. This release will have fully localized commands for Danish and Japanese, as well as parser settings for a number of other languages. Read this Labs blog post to learn more about the 0.5 release and how to test it.
It’s not too late to add localizations for other languages to 0.5, though. Localizations help make Ubiquity more “natural” for more users, offering a new level of ease and familiarity to the already powerful Ubiquity. We have a new tutorial to help you localize commands.
To help encourage command localization, we now have gettext-style po template files for all the bundled command feeds in the hg repository. You can find these files in the ubiquity/localization/templates directory of the repository, or on our online hg repository.
If you complete some localizations (even incomplete) for your language and would like to submit them into the repository, for the time being, you can post them on this trac ticket.1
As many of you know, the upcoming Firefox 3.5 was code-named Shiretoko after the Shiretoko National Park on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. The Shiretoko Foundation and Mozilla Japan just launched a very cool open-web-powered promotional website, interFORest, together with a very powerful educational site, discovershiretoko.org/. I just went to interforest.org/ and registered for my own virtual tree to be planted on the virtual Shiretoko Park. This tree banner will keep track of traffic through my site to the interFORest site and will grow this tree accordingly over time. You can then go to interforest.org and see all the trees growing on the park. With your help, we can grow it into a forest!
If you are reading this through a feed reader or planet, click on the permalink to view the banner embedded below:
Place one of these personalized canvas-powered virtual tree banners on your site to spread the word on Firefox 3.5, the Shiretoko Park and Foundation, and the power of open communities. All the cool kids are doing it. ^^
As we get close to wrapping up Ubiquity 0.5 (currently planned to ship—fingers crossed—on Monday) one remaining issue is how to incorporate our cute new Cocoia-designed and community-produced icon, the Ubiquibot. The difficult decision is how to take this finely detailed icon and produce a 16 x 16 favicon.
I came up with three different options:
1. 2. 3.
Seeing them on my blog doesn’t quite compare to how they will be used, so here are some screenshots of them in context:[^1]
By now many of you have probably seen this new Microsoft Australia campaign, “Ten Grand Is Buried Here.com,”1 which calls Firefox “old” and Safari “boring”:
I’m not sure what this is saying about me, but my immediate reaction was to go check whether tengrandisburiedthere.com was available. To my surprise, Microsoft had yet to snatch it up! A few hours later, here’s the result:
Note: Not being a marketing guy, I just threw some text together to introduce Firefox. If someone has some better copy for this display, please let me know.
As of this writing, this domain actually has yet to serve anything. ↩
I recently noticed that some of my blog posts, most notably my Templates in YARPP 3 article, was producing a PHP error:
Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: unrecognized character after (?< at offset 3 in /…/html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-syntax/geshi/geshi.php on line 2132
This seemed to be coming from the version 1.0.8.4 version of Geshi I had installed. A quick google search for “geshi line 2132” gives you over a thousand errors, so this seems to be common issue. Geshi is a fabulous and popular syntax highlighter and is the core component of the WP-Syntax plugin for WordPress.
I did some digging around and realized that the issue was with the compilation of this monstrosity of a regular expression, used (as far as I can tell) to identify PHP code snippets, for example the <?php … ?> keywords:
Not knowing exactly where to start in diagnosing this crazy expression, I simply disabled those “script delimiters” in the geshi/php.php file. The sections I commented out are lines 1080-1101. Now the script delimiters like <?php don’t get highlighted nicely, but I feel that’s a small price to pay for eliminating these errors. Another solution for the WP-Syntax users seems to be to downgrade to 0.9.4. Hopefully in the near future an update to Geshi will come out which fixes this issue once and for all.
localization of standard feed commands for a few languages
Parser 2 language files for those same languages
Nongoals for 0.5
distribution/sharing of localizations
localization of nountypes
The overall goal for this release of Ubiquity is to come up with a format and standard for localization. Localizations in Ubiquity 0.5 will only apply to commands bundled with Ubiquity, and the localization files themselves will be distributed with Ubiquity. In a future release we will tackle the problem of localizations for commands in the wild and truly croud-source1 this process.
This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.
I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.
Here’s a quick screencast highlighting some of the changes to Parser 2 and the updated Parser 2 Playpen. This video should be particularly useful to people hoping to add their language to Parser 2. It’s also a good reference for Ubiquity core developers.
Yesterday I was invited to give a lecture for students the MEXTIT Specialist Program. ITSP is a partnership between Keio, Waseda, and Chuo Universities and NTT, IBM, and Mozilla to bring advanced IT training and opportunities to their Master’s students. It was a longish time slot so I decided to split it up into two different talks: one on open source and open processes (similar to one of my sessions at the recent BarCamp Tokyo) and one on the future of interfaces, internationalization and globalization, and Ubiquity. Here are the slides for posterity. (Note: the second set of slides is mostly in Japanese.)
This past weekend was Mozilla Party JP 10 here in Japan and one of the speakers was Bob Chao (趙柏強) of Creative Commons Taiwan and MozTW. We got to talking in Chinese and he got a video interview of me talking about Ubiquity and our upcoming Parser 2 and the challenges of localization. I’ve never talked about my Mozilla work in Chinese before so it was definitely a challenge and I stumbled a lot, but hopefully some of the ideas got through.
前天我參加了Mozilla Party 10，一個日本 Mozilla 社群的會議。我在 Mozilla Party 才認識台灣 Mozilla 社群的趙柏強，我們就開始講國語。因為我自己很想念用中文，所以我非常高興有這個機會跟他談話。以後他拍一端 video，我給台灣的 Mozilla fans 把 Ubiquity 介紹一下。我的中文真的亂七八糟，大家對不起喔。 ^^;
On Saturday I went to Mozilla Party 10, a community event organized by Mozilla-gumi (もじら組). Mozilla-gumi has been an active community in Japan for the past 10 years, making it one of the oldest Mozilla communities around. Despite the cloudy weather in Shinjuku and the ever-present swine flu scare, we had over 100 people attending.1
Jono’s recently been thinking about how to get users involved with aside from programming, and he decided to put the textual content of Ubiquity’s builtin commands and the new interactive tutorial on the wiki for all to edit.
Changes made to these wiki pages will be tracked and edits will be moved back into the Ubiquity codebase as early as 0.1.9.
Combined with the imminent internationalization of Ubiquity commands, allowing contributors to localize commands without digging into the JavaScript code, there will soon be lots of different ways for to get involved with the further development of Ubiquity!
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