My article on how to install Gears on 64-bit Linux continues to see quite a bit of traffic. I even host a copy of Gears, even though it’s likely out of date. Also in the Linux vein, my articles on how to buy DRM-free music online with Amazon MP3 on Linux and Android were moderately popular. I wrote an article on how to add CACert root certificates to Chromium on Linux and it sees more traffic than most of my other posts combined.

I wasn’t as active in the open source community as I would have liked, but I did make some contributions to Gwibber, Astrid, Celtx, and Lernid. I mentioned the first three in my Launchpad activity update. The latter is a newer development by Jono Bacon. I contributed the entire Esperanto translation less than two days after it was available on Launchpad. I have no way of verifying it, but I think that the Esperanto translation was the first complete non-English variant translation available.

I recently wrote two brief articles on how to automate some tasks on Facebook. One was how to rapidly expunge friend suggestions, and the other was how to select all friends in a friend select dialog.

I met Tom Dickson of Will It Blend? fame at CES last year. He was really cool and friendly.

I also wrote a few articles on politics, my favorite being A Comment on Socialism Defined, a comment left on a friend’s blog, Strike the Root!. I’ll not go into how much I think Obama and his friends have screwed up the country already (it’s not all been bad—he has done some good things). That’s something for another article.

A new hobby this year for me has been stock trading. I’d saved up some money and decided to use some skills I learned in middle school to make a buck or two on the stock market. Ironically, not 12 hours after I blogged about my flagship stock being up near 200%, that stock, SPNG, dropped 27.66% in one day, costing me $23,000 of value on a $10,000 investment in 65 minutes. It recovered, and I still made out with a profit, but I learned a very, very valuable set of lessons. I still kick myself occasionally because of this and probably will for a long time. My goal of getting into stocks was to generate enough money that I could pay off my student loans really quickly. I could have paid off more than 2/3 and I didn’t cash out when I should have.

I did meet many, many new people in the stock world, especially Stockguy22 and the Bulls on Wall Street crew. I said goodbye to StockTwits after I was temporarily banned for cheering on Vonage (VG) when it was less than 50 cents, riding it to 80 cents, and cashing out. They called it a worthless, crappy penny stock. A few weeks later, it spiked to ~2.20 and has been above a dollar since. HA!

I got some neat advice from friends while considering the purchase of a MacBook Pro (which I got and love) and the acquisition of a PS3 (which I did get).

The biggest changes in my life were in my location and work. I got a new job in March at Vivísimo, a search platform maker in Pittsburgh–I even wrote a post on the corporate blog! I moved in with some friends in May, but realizing we were a little cramped, I moved into a new apartment in July (I didn’t write about that!).

I wrote more than 28 articles for Bob Buskirk‘s ThinkComputers. My favorites were the Masscool MP-1371RS Media Player and QNAP TS-809 Pro network attached storage device. I use the former alongside my PS3 for video formats my PS3 can’t stream from the latter. The NAS has become the central storage hub for all of my computers, replacing the QNAP TS-109 Pro I reviewed two years ago.

BIOS LEVEL was fairly inactive this year, largely because of a major server outage from May to August. I did write an article on the Orbita Mouse, which I still use to this day at work. I did record and post several videos from Ohio Linuxfest 2009, including Linux Journal editor Shawn Powers’s keynote, Jorge Castro‘s talk on building a community around an open source project, and more on licensing, making money from open source, democratized design, and talking to policymakers and legislators about open source. All Ohio Linuxfest videos with a write-up are available on BIOS LEVEL, or on BIOS LEVEL’s Blip.tv channel.

Jon Daniel and I spend most of November cranking out a beta version of Profyle.at, a personal profile directory service. We’re not entirely finished yet, but sign up for our Profyle.at beta and you’ll likely get in! We want to help people find you on the Internet so your friends and family can follow you on whatever sites and networks you like the most. We pitched for funding and didn’t get it, but were cordially invited to present again during the next round in a month.

Brigette and I are still together, and going strong. We’ve spent most of her winter break together, driving throughout western PA to be with friends and family, too. She’s been working on her web site for her beagle and vizsla show dogs, Glade Mill Sporting & Hound. She’s come a long way, from using a completely WYSIWYG editor to redoing it with a mix of code and WYSIWYG with Adobe Dreamweaver. I’m eager to see what she’s planning for it.

I’ve done some Esperanto translations on Launchpad prior to this week. I translated a large portion of Akregator (RSS/Atom feed aggregation for KDE) and a few others. I’ve also filed and added to a bunch of bugs, many of which were cleaned up by the recent One Hundred Paper Cuts bugfixing effort by the Ubuntu development team.

This week, I was abnormally active. I had some downtime here and there at work, plus some open nights, so I took advantage of this time to make significant contributions to three projects: Gwibber, Astrid, and Celtx.

Gwibber

Gwibber is a microblogging client for microblogging services such as Twitter, Identi.ca, and Jaiku. It also supports Flickr, BrightKite, FriendFeed, Facebook, and more, including generic RSS and Atom feeds. It’s written in Python by Ryan Paul (@segphault) of Ars Technica fame.

I had two and a half contributions this week. One is a patch addressing bug #364303, to add linkification of stock ticker symbols, denoted by a dollar sign followed by the ticker symbol, e.g. $GOOG. Clicking on a linked symbol will launch the browser and point it to Google Finance. Originally, it linked to StockTwits, but that site refuses to support OTC stocks.

The second contribution is a complete Esperanto translation of the program. I have mixed feelings on translating programs since most Esperantists would be using their computer in their native language. I decided to do it because, well, Gwibber has just a few more than 115 strings, so why not? It took me approximately an hour and a half, and it was well spent.

That half contribution is a committed, but as-of-yet unproposed/merged patch to fix bug #364322, wherein Gwibber doesn’t load Identi.ca/Laconi.ca groups at all. The problem is that the constructors for identica.SearchResult and laconica.SearchResult expect a TwitterAPI-compatible dictionary, but are passed a standard RSS feed dictionary instead. identica.Client.get_group() hits an RSS feed instead of an API function, because the Groups API in Laconica is not yet finalized. This causes Gwibber to throw an Exception–it’s caught and displayed, but the results aren’t loaded. I modified identica.Client.group(), which calls get_group(), to instead call identica.Client.get_search() and load the search results for the group name. It’s not a clean result set, though, because Laconia while searching strips the “!” used to denote the group name.

Hopefully the API will make it into Laconica 0.8.1 (the next release, mid-to-late September if they release on their typical schedule), I’ll modify the functionality to use the API instead and it’ll be much cleaner and yield more accurate results.

Astrid

Astrid is a TODO list manager for Google Android. It synchronizes with the excellent Remember The Milk TODO list service and provides task reminders and such. I use it on my T-Mobile G1 and would certainly miss it if it were suddenly gone.

My contribution to Astrid was another (nearly) complete Esperanto translation. I left about 10% untranslated because, well, I needed to go to bed! Unfortunately, I realized approximately 3/4 through my translation that Astrid is unlikely ever to be on a platform which supports Esperanto. The chances of there ever being an Esperanto translation of Android are atomically small.

However, my work was not wasted. Launchpad’s Rosetta translation system permits projects to share their translation with other Launchpad projects, using a essentially a central database of translations. This enables projects to speed up internationalization by using existing translations which exactly match internationalize-able strings. While it’s unlikely that anyone will ever use Astrid in Esperanto, it is likely that another TODO list project hosted on Launchpad could benefit from my work in the future.

Celtx

Celtx is an integrated media pre-production and screenwriting utility. I’ve used it for writing short plays for classes and such. I’m using it now for a forthcoming project which I’ll eventually let out of the bag.

My contribution for Celtx, as the link above shows, has not been code or a translation, but a package for Ubuntu. This was the first time I’d ever build a Debian package (Debian packages are what Ubuntu, a Debian Linux derivative, uses to distribute programs).

A long-existing bug, #99965, requested that someone package Celtx from the source on its main web site. I took interest in it in November 2007, but my initial attempts to package it for Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04, released April 2008) were unsuccessful due to my inexperience with build systems and a lack of time/concentration. I revisited the task for Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10, October 2008) and Jaunty (9.04, April 2009), but was too busy with my new job and other life happenings.

I painstakingly built Celtx from source manually several times before building a binary package myself without any help from the Debian packaging system’s helper scripts (debhelper, dh_make). It’s a pain in the ass because Celtx is based on Mozilla, the build process of which is not as straightforward as a ./configure && make && make install. However, once I had a working knowledge of the build process, I delved into debhelper and its kin and built a source package. I did it for Jaunty first, as that’s what version I’m running right now, but then I made some modifications here and there to convince Celtx to build on Karmic (9.10, due October 2009).

I’ve learned a ton about deb packages and about make, and I think I can consider myself a “packager” now, having done so.

I’m hoping that Celtx Studios, the company that produces Celtx, releases the source for version 2.0.2 soon. The 2.0.1 source is available, but out-of-date. I’d like to get 2.0.2 into Karmic, but it’s looking like 2.0.1 will have to do for now.

So, if you have an interest in media production and/or screenwriting, or wish to help test a new package for inclusion in the next version of Ubuntu, please, by all means, install my Celtx PPA for Ubuntu Jaunty or Karmic and test the crap out of the package. There are a few known issues on Karmic, but I’m not a C++ coder, so I don’t know what I’d even try to fix.

Moving Forward

I look forward to participating more in the development of Gwibber. Because of my fiddlings with it, I’ve come to know the DVCS tool Bazaar (bzr) pretty well, as Launchpad and it are heavily integrated (hint: Canonical, developer of Ubuntu, also developed Launchpad and Bazaar!).

I know that I’ll keep translating. I’ve noticed that my vocabulary has grown a bit and I’m not using the vortaro (dictionary) as much. I still reference Traduku.net, Lernu!, and Komputeko frequently to get technology terminology and infrequently-seen words.

LAŬDU MIN SUR ĈI TIU GLORA DATREVENO DE MIA NASKIĜO 24 JAROJ ANTAŬ!

One item I decided to include for the hell of it was language, through the HTTP request Accept-Language header. Tired of seeing the standard en-us displayed every time I loaded it, I decided to add Esperanto to the fore of the header. I did this by adding it in Firefox’s language options chooser in the Content option panel.

Lo and behold, the language code eo appeared before en-us on my script and I was happy. It was the end of the day, though, so I shutdown shortly thereafter and went home.

The next day, I was startled when the two sites I almost always open first, Google and Meebo, displayed text to me in Esperanto! I had totally forgotten that I had altered my Accept-Language header.

I haven’t changed it back. “Why?” a perplexed reader may ask. I continue to use Esperanto as my main browser language for a few reasons.

1. Immersion. When a site appears in Esperanto, I’m forced to translate. I don’t let myself change it unless I am in a rush. So far, I have not changed it.
2. Internationalization. I fancy myself a proponent of software i18n and l10n, so it is educational to me to see how other sites have performed their i18n. I assume that most use either gettext or defines, wherein every string is set in a file with a series of global constants.
3. Obscurity. It keeps people off of my computer

So, in there interests of determining the penetration of Esperanto as an internationalized and automatically-detected language for the web, I’ve compiled a list of sites which I often visit that have Esperanto strings shown when visiting with a browser which specifies that Esperanto is the preferred language.

• Google (just search, from what I’ve seen)
• Meebo (still missing a few strings, though)
• Twitter (largely untranslated, though)

Some sites surprisingly lacked Esperanto internalization, but it’s not a problem: Esperanto was never meant to be anyone’s first language!

• Yahoo!
• Flickr
• Zooomr
• YouTube
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Digg
• Twerq
• WordPress
• Revver, Livejournal, Blogspot, and most others I visited

Some readers may be surprised that Wikipedia is omitted from these lists. Wikipedia does not internationalize its main page because all of the languages are listed as a links to the main page (cxefpagxo) of the language’s subdomain itself.

I’m neither surprised nor miffed that there number of sites that do have it are so few. As I stated previously, Esperanto isn’t meant to be anyone’s first language. It’s a quick, intermediary language. I assume that the aforementioned sites with Esperanto internationalization have someone one staff who speaks it fluently, and the translation process for it was effortless.

I hope to integrate i18n into a few projects I’m developing currently. By “hope”, I mean “will.”

Se vi parolas esperantan linvgon, bonvolu helpas traduki btnx-on ĉe Launchpad! Iru kaj traduku btnx-config! Mi komencis traduki, sed ĝi estas granda projekto por unu persono.

I originally posted instructions on how to compile from source in the article HOWTO Install btnx for better mouse control in Ubuntu Hardy. If you want to continue to compile it yourself, simply switch to the newest tag using subversion and recompile.

cd btnx-0.4.9
svn sw http://svn.ollisalonen.com/btnx/tags/btnx-0.4.10/
./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ../btnx-config-0.4.8
svn sw http://svn.ollisalonen.com/btnx-config/tags/btnx-config-0.4.9/
./configure && make && sudo make install

Now might be a good time to rename those directories, dropping the version numbers, or check out the source to a different directory.

I’m going to share my professional goals for 2008 with you, interested reader, but before I do so, I need to revisit last year’s list.

• Graduate
  • Mission accomplished. I graduated in May with a Bachelors’ Degree in Computer Science and a minor in Writing, focusing on journalism.
• Go to grad school.
  • I’ve got one semester remaining at Robert Morris University before I finish my Masters’ Degree in Business Education, and another year before I finish the teachers’ certification.
• Keep writing
  • I haven’t written as much as I would have liked, but I did keep momentum on this blog. Actually, I’ve been doing more reading than writing, mostly on political things. I read Lew Rockwell columns daily and find myself on Wikipedia and other sites researching politics. I’ve written a number of letters to my senators and congresspeople regarding various bills and whatnot.
  • I’m still writing for ThinkComputers.org and other sites operated by Bob Buskirk. I’m going to CES under the ThinkComputers banner on Sunday.
  • Obsidian and I got BIOS LEVEL off the ground, and we’ve had a lot of traffic as a result of the review of the OLPC XO and the articles on uShare and the Xbox 360 and extending uShare.
• Keep coding
  • I did not code as much as I would have liked. I worked heavily on a web site design one night this month, but even then it was just modifying someone else’s design and implementing a few small WordPress plugins. I did, however, learn a lot about MVC from Jon, so I hope to use that this year. Hopefully, Jon and Zack and I will get back into development when we work on our replacement for Autonomous LAN Party, a once-great GPL project which recently went Qt-licensed and is a terrible mess of coupled and incohesive code.
• Learn more Esperanto and German
  • My Esperanto vocabulary is growing, and I’ve joined Esperanto-USA, a group which fosters Esperanto advocacy in the United States. As for German, I’ve picked up a little bit here and there. I’m not able to speak much of it, but I can read a little. I may be headed to Germany, Norway, or Sweden for a part of my student teaching in May 2009, so I’m sure that I’ll pick up even more if that becomes a reality.

Now, this year’s list.

• Keep writing
  • I love writing for ThinkComputers and BIOS LEVEL. I’d like to get back into fiction writing, but we’ll see where that goes. I’ve also had a little bit of interest in playwriting, but I’ll have to hold off on that until I make a Debian package of Celtx, an open-source screen/play-writing package.
• Get move involved in the open source community
  • I recently joined the ubiquity team for Ubuntu. Ubiquity is the live CD’s installer tool. I don’t like it very much, mostly because of its network usage and silly crashes without decent error messages. I’ve also said that I’d package a few things (celtx, firefox-sqlitemanager). I’ve been using Ubuntu nearly full-time since the end of October—I never realized the awesomeness of the product which I’ve been pushing for years.
  • Hopefully, Jon, Zack, and I will resume work on the Pittco LAN Administration System, which will be open-sourced.
• Improve social networking
  • CES will be a great opportunity for me to network within the computer and consumer electronics field. While I don’t intend to make my career in this field, I do plan to keep writing about it and maintain my enthusiasm for it. Perhaps if teaching isn’t what I thought it would be, I could make it my career.
  • Grad classes at RMU have built my professional educator network, and I’m sure it will continue to grow as I meet more people.
  • Unfortunately, the New Castle/Youngstown area isn’t wonderful for this, so I may consider moving toward Pittsburgh if I can find a roommate or a job which pays enough for me to afford it without affecting my graduate studies.
• Lose weight
  • I lost 30 pounds in the spring of 2006. I’ve regained 10 of that, and I hope to lose 25 this spring, putting me at an even 200 pounds. Living at home hasn’t helped, but I’ve advised my parents of my wish to lose weight, and they pledged their help.
• Read more
• I need to read more often. I have a book list longer than I’d like to admit.

OCCT Perestroika tests power supply units for stability. I use it in my power supply reviews for ThinkComputers.

Esperante:

La aŭtoro de OCCT Perestroika akceptis mian Esperantan tradukon, la prima traduko de ajna tuta programo. Mi tradukis ĝin antaŭ kelke daj monatoj. Mia traduko estas en la sekvanta versio. OCCT ekzamenas PSUs por stabilo. Mi uzas ĝin por miaj recenzoj por PensuKomputiloj.

WWL needs to add Esperanto, too.

Esperante:

Ĉar mi imagas min esti lingvisto iom, mi aldonis la «Tutmonda Leksikono» kromsoftvaron al mia Vortpresilo instalaĵo. Ĝi aldonas malgrandan, rultempan trajton antaŭ afiŝoj permesi uzantoj traduki ĝin aŭ legi version de afiŝo en ilia lingvo. Mi ŝatus vidi uzantojn povas agordi ĉi tiun kromsoftvaron ĉar mi ne zorgas por loko aŭ apero de ĝin. Substanco >> stilo.

TL (WWL) bezonas aldoni Esperantan lingvon, ankaŭ.

I’ve learned something, though: Esperanto music is weird.

Especially when it’s Danish ska with accordion and flute.

Even more scary, though, is that I can actually understand some of it

Virino = woman
Ĵus nokto nokto kun vi = just a night, a night with you