A while back I was interviewed by Leonardo Fontenelle (An active Free Software l10n contributor from Brazil), it is worth mentioning here. There, I described many aspects of our work in Arabic translation and Arabeyes. Here I quote some passages:

On the open nature of the translation process:

I guess I don’t like some particular phase per see, but all in all, I very much adore the open nature of it. Right from the source code to the actual compiled message catalogues. You can’t really get much more open that this. This openness really pays off when translating weird messages, when trying to view translations live, when comparing with translations of other packages, when viewing translations of different languages, etc.

On the Technical Dictionary:

The technical dictionary is basically an English-Arabic dictionary for computing terms. At first, we started making it with .po files, but that created many problems with versioning and discussing the terms. So I had the idea of uploading the terms to our Wiki. I used some scripts to convert the .po files to Wiki xml input. The wiki, being open, allows people to edit as they see fit, discuss terms, suggest alternatives, etc. Then finally, there are some scripts that take the wiki pages and convert them back to .po files, as well as .pdf suitable for printing/reading. The experience was very rewarding to us.

On contributors:

I know that it has been a long time since I showed up here! Unfortunately, over the last months I have been way too busy. End of my final university year (I’m graduating today!), job hunting, some vacation, and going for Umra. I will be back in a few weeks inchallah.

Apologies to all concerned, and to all those who have sent me emails and comments. Rest assured that I still have your messages and that I will take the time to go through them in detail. Minbar 2.0 is missing only a few more tweaks then it will be ready. Also, salam to all those at Arabeyes! I still continue to monitor the Wiki, and I always get amazed by the ongoing participation.

Soon inchallah.

I would like to announce a new version of tclgeoip, the TCL extension for GeoIP.

Amongst the changes in 0.2:

1. Fixed a segfault when loading databases.
2. Introduced a new function to check presence of databases (db_avail)
3. Updated documentation.

Grab the .tar.gz sources here. Also, sources from SVN repository.

A debian package is being cooked.

The Gnome Arabic Team is making serious progress to complete Gnome 2.16 translation. We are a bit late due to lack of contributors, but many joined the team recently, so better late than never.

Arabic is a beautiful language, I’m sure you will agree by looking at these screenshots of translated applications. Thanks to all those who helped: Khaled Hosny, Youcef Raffah, Youssef Chahibi, Mohamed Magdy, and all those who translated previous version: Arafat Medini, Bayazidi, and a lot more. I would like to take this chance to extend my invitation to all past contributors and new members: You are always welcome, there is a lot you can do to help the effort: a lot of people are waiting for the release. If you would like to help, please have a look at this roadmap, then email me at djihed at djihed.com

Now, here are the screenshots, click to enlarge:

Gedit: Now becomes the best Arabic Linux Text editor:

Epiphany: The gorgeous Gnome Internet Browser:

Ekiga: the Internet telephony software:

Eye of Gnome: The image viewer:

And last but not least, file-roller, the archive manager:

GeoIP is a technology developed by MaxMind for geographical and organisational lookup of IP addresses and hostnames. Maxmind provides an LGPL licensed API written in C. The API pulls the data from database files. MaxMind gets its income by selling updated at frequent time intervals.

Many packages have been built on top of the C API to allow GeoIP calls from different languages, like PHP (frequently used in CMS’s) and even an Apache module.

I wrote a TCL extension on top of this C API. It has been accepted by MaxMind and is sitting here. It currently compiles without tweaking on Solaris systems. There will be an update soon to make it compile on most other UNIX system automagically.

Note that you need Tcl dev files and the GeoIP C API to compile this.

My favourite UNIX shell is bash, or the Bourne Again Shell. Its syntax is neat and clean, I find it cleaner than most other shells, and it is available on most UNIX variants. its customisability is also very good. I’ve customised the default prompt to a colourful joyful and informative message. I call it the clown prompt. Here is a screenshot of how it looks like in putty, note that I have slightly changed the blue colour on putty to make it more readable.

To make it the default prompt, copy these lines to the end of your ~/.bashrc file. If there is not one, create it.

# Term settings
TTYTEMPNAME=$(tty)
CHOMPED=${TTYTEMPNAME:5}
PS1="[33[1;33m][[33[1;32m]t[33[1;33m]]
[33[1;33m][[33[1;31m]u[33[1;33m]:
[33[1;31m]h[33[1;33m]]
[33[1;33m][[33[1;36m]$CHOMPED
[33[1;33m]:[33[1;36m]#[33[1;33m]]
[33[1;33m][[33[1;35m]w[33[1;33m]]
[33[1;34m]#[33[0m] "

The first two lines grab the name of the current tty, line 3 prints the time, lines 4,5 print the username and the name of the machine, lines 6,7 prints the name of the tty along with the command number, line 8 prints the current working directory. I find all of this information valuable offhand sometimes. To apply changes, source your ~/.bashrc file by issuing: source ~/.bashrc

For peace of mind, insert this line into your ~/.bashrc file, after the previous code. It solves a problem where long lines would wrap to the same current line.

shopt -s checkwinsize