Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Someday two years ago I submitted a translation for an opensource project, gmail-notifier. It is a very nice notifier for Gmail accounts written in Python. I never received a response from the authors , neither I saw my translation appear in the project source, which seemed to be dead.
It was my first attempt to actively help a free software project, and I also felt demoralized because of the absent feedback.
Today I surprisingly noticed that the project is active again, and the authors cited my work and also included my translation in the source code. They "forced" me to forgive them because they released this version just for including the translations! They even published the list of the translators on their home page, telling:
In the last two years many people have contributed with the project by sending to me translations that I have never posted. The development of Gmail Notifier 1.7 is now starting, so I'm releasing this version just to include those translations and to say thank you to all the people that have supported the project.
The new translations are:
- Svenska
- Italiano (Daniel Graziotin)
- Nederlands (Dennis van der Staal)
- Deutsch (Marc Philipp, Eric Franco)
-Portuguese (Brazil) (Yguaratã C. Cavalcanti)
- Français (Thibault Martin-Lagardette)
- Czech (Václav Cermák)
- Russian (Aleksandr Chekanov)
- Polish
- Latvian (Kaspars Krampis)
- Esperanto (Abel Johannes)
- Arabic (Youssef Chahibi)
- Japanese (Satoshi Tanabe)
I took a screenshot as memory

They also included some thanks in the sourcecode.
A contribute to opensource projects is really rewarding, even if your work consists in modifying a handful of XML lines.
If you've got the time to do it, then make it!
I wish good luck to gmail-notifier team for the development of the 1.7 release, which will be written from scratch. I wish I had the time to contribute to the sourcecode, too, now that I'm able to handle some Python, but I believe I will help them to translate the program in Italian again
Tags: free software, gmail, gmail notifier, opensource, python, sourcecode
Posted in Activism?, Free* | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
When I announced BD-incollo 6 days ago, I also mentioned that I would have launched the service today. I really did that, and I'm very proud to announce the first site that runs BD-incollo.
http://incollo.com! Very easy 
Incollo.com is a collaborative debugging tool like Pastebin or other similar services, but it's slightly different from it. And it's different from other Pastebin clones even written using Rails or Django.
Here are the most exciting features:
- It's Fast. Very Fast
- Written thinking about usability
- A very clean interface, a minimalist design that gives space to the code (as it should always be)
- It's possible to search through pastes, like in a forum
- A Paste is not deleted after 30 days or something similar. A paste is deleted after it is no more interesting! It's deleted after 60 days of no visualizations
- The system is anonymous. It won't store your information! Paste whatever you want but please use your brain! A Paste may be reported to the administrator!
- You don't really have to play with options and there are no required field other than the Paste itself. You may paste a text and directly hit the submit button
- Quite every page is XHTML 1.0 compatible
- It works well and has nice urls, thanks to Django
- Compatible with every browser (tested with Internet Explorer 6,7,8, Mozilla Firefox 3, Apple Safari, Google Chrome)
- Resolution friendly! Liquid design that adapts to every monitor resolution (tests from 1024x768)
- Developer friendly! Every functionality of incollo.com can be used with max 2 mouse clicks and without a mouse scroll!
- Tested with lots of pastes, quite every source code should be perfectly viewed (this does not happen with every pastebin clones I've tried)
- Uses Pygments for code highlighting
- Languages supported: ActionScript, Assembly (various), Boo, Befunge, BrainFuck, C, C++, C#, Common Lisp, D, Delphi, Dylan, Erlang, Haskell (incl. Literate Haskell), Java, JavaScript, Lua, MiniD, MooCode, MuPad, OCaml, PHP, Perl, Python (incl. console sessions and tracebacks), Redcode, Ruby (incl. irb sessions), Scheme, Visual Basic.NET, Django/Jinja templates, ERB (Ruby templating), Genshi (the Trac template language), Myghty (the HTML::Mason based framework), Mako (the Myghty successor), Smarty templates (PHP templating), JSP (Java Server Pages), , Other markup, , Apache config files, Bash shell scripts, BBCode, CSS, Debian control files, Diff files, Gettext catalogs, Groff markup, HTML, INI-style config files, IRC logs (irssi style), Makefiles, MoinMoin/Trac Wiki markup, Redcode, ReST, SQL, also MySQL, Squid configuration, TeX, Vim Script, Windows batch files, XML
This is an example of Paste with Incollo.com:
http://incollo.com/7dca5011
You are really welcome to report any bugs or leave a feedback! Remember that this is my very first Django project, and I created it in about 6 days!
Of course, I'm already beginning to think about new features
Tags: apple safari, bd, BD-incollo, BD-thing, BD-things, beginning, browser, bugs, Chrome, code, configuration, debian, debugging, Design, django, Explorer, Firefox, functionality, google, Internet, java, javascript, language, list, minimalist design, mozilla, page, pastebin, php, project, Pygments, python, shell, site, source code, templates, url, usability, XHTML
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Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
As I promised, BD-incollo 0.1 is finished and the source code is available in the project page under the GPL 3 license.
Every MUST requirement has been done and just two MAY requirements could not be developed in just 6 days. But They will surely be in the next releases.
Sourcecode is well commented using xP standards and there are few comments where necessary, but is should be clear. If not, drop me a mail.
I will write a map that describes the source code tree tomorrow!
The conclusions of this experiment are that Django is really a web framework for perfectionists with deadlines! I spent more time playing with templates and CSS than with the whole python coding! It's a valid alternative to Ruby on Rails, and built on a programming language I really like.
Go and grab the code!
Tags: alternative, bd, BD-incollo, BD-thing, BD-things, bodom_lx free software, code, django, Experiment, gpl, gpl 3, language, page, perfectionists with deadlines, Programming, project, promise, python, release, source code, sourcecode, standard, templates, web
Posted in Activism?, Free*, Programming | 4 Comments »