Mozilla Tagalog Localization Hackathon in Manila

Philippines has rich linguistic diversity. Through out its history Philippines was influenced by language and traditions of those who came in search of gold and other precious minerals. Today, you can hear smattering of Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, English, and Spanish in Tagalog.

Tagalog is the widely used Philippine dialect. Filipino, the National Language of the Philippines is composed primarily of Tagalog words, idioms, and phrases. Urban Filipinos are fluent in English. Traveling few hours away from Metro Manila, I noticed people preferred to speak in Tagalog.

The Mozilla Tagalog localization was kick-started by Seth Bindernagel around 2010. After a hiatus, the Tagalog localization effort now gained momentum thanks to good leadership and innovative community initiatives to encourage localization (See Help Us Translate Firefox Aurora to Tagalog & Get a Mini-Shirt). We also have new localization teams for Chavacano, Bikol and Lloko languages.

The hackathon in Manila provided me an opportunity to connect with the teams and I hope to keep this momentum going. Shared few ideas and emphasized on quality and consistence of translation. Such events are good for not only attracting new translators, but also discuss the problems in translation. The event attracted students, bloggers, technology professionals and contributors from Tagalog Wikipedia.

The Firefox Tagalog localization looks very promising. Came back from the hackathon with confidence that we can start productization very soon. And don't forget to join the next Tagalog Firefox Translation Marathon on April 9, 2013

National Open Source Conference of Afghanistan (NOSCA) 2013

This week National Open Source Conference of Afghanistan (NOSCA) starts in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The event is organized by the National ICT Alliance of Afghanistan. It will be held at Nangarhar University on February 19-21, 2013. Unfortunately I will not be able to attend this event. Please share the conference information with your friends in the region and encourage people to participate.

Building a Mozilla community in Afghanistan is on my list. During ICANN 41 Singapore I met few technologists from Afghanistan and remained in touch with them ever since. Last year we kick-started Firefox Aurora Pashto and Dari localization effort.

Communications in Afghanistan has grown considerably. Entrepreneurship is thriving despite the problems. Recently Divon Lan wrote about Afghanistan's first women technology entrepreneur on his blog.

Get in touch with me, if you want to get involved in Mozilla Afghanistan community building effort.

Firefox Responsive Design View to rescue

Here is a good example of using Firefox Responsive Design View, DOM and Style Inspector to debug web design issues. Noticed this problem with Mozilla The Den blog's site description while browsing the web with Firefox Mobile browser. Fired up my laptop to check this design issue with Firefox Responsive Design View. Then I used the DOM and Style Inspector to zero in on the CSS rule that adds this extra padding (padding-right: 340px;). Voila! It is time to send this patch to the developer.

Did a screen capture of the whole process. Don't see the embedded video, you can watch it on YouTube.

Mozilla Firefox Vietnamese Beta Released

Mozilla Firefox Vietnamese (19 Beta) was released this week. It is the culmination of my two year effort to re-animate the Mozilla Vietnamese localization team.

Building an active Mozilla community in Vietnam was the first step. Found few passionate young volunteers in the local open source community in Hanoi. Spent the next year mentoring these young volunteers into community leaders. Participation in local events attracted others to join the new Mozilla Vietnam community. Hands on Mozilla developer workshops and Mozilla localization sprints ensured that we retained most these new contributors.

Contributions to Mozilla Firefox Vietnamese localization had been stagnant since last fourteen rapid release cycles. During this period the Vietnamese Firefox had many parts of the browser untranslated thus hampering user experience of the browser. Community driven open source projects often suffer when active contributors leave. Building sustainable communities tackle this problem with new contributors stepping in to take up the reins.

I had been organizing Mozilla Localization sprints since August 2011. We met at the Hanoi community space, working on localization strings using web based translation software such Narro and Pootle.The localization sprints with small groups provided a good opportunity to develop localization skills of new contributors and improve the quality of translations as well.

Thanks to efforts of these Mozilla Vietnamese Localization (L10N) community members, We have a fully localized Firefox Vietnamese Beta release.

• Trương Anh Tuấn
• Nguyễn Hà Dương
• Đàm Tiến Long
• Nguyễn Phan Hải
• Đặng Duy Thanh
• Ngô Trung
• Nguyên Thế Hùng
• Tuan Zendf
• Hakuna Matata
• Nguyễn Vũ Hưng

Don't forget to Download Firefox Vietnamese Beta today.

Using Firefox Remote Debugger with Firefox OS Simulator

Firefox OS App developers can use Firefox Remote Debugger to quickly fix web app bugs. In this screencast Jeff Griffiths shows the current workflow of using the Firefox OS simulator and the Firefox Nightly remote debugger developer tool.

Don't see the embedded video, you can watch it on YouTube.

You can also use Firefox Remote Debugger with Firefox OS running in a desktop emulator, on a Firefox OS device and Firefox Mobile on Android mobile phone. Head over to Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) to learn more about Firefox Remote Debugging.