A Blog About Tech and Other Things
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The (pre)history of Mozilla’s localization repository infrastructure
With many new faces joining Mozilla, as either staff or volunteer localizers, most are only familiar with the current, more streamlined localization infrastructure. I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at the technical evolution of Mozilla’s localization systems. Having personally navigated every version — first as a community localizer from 2004…
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Benefits of Intermittent Fasting in COVID-19 Times
Quite a deviation from the technology focused articles that I usually post on this blog, but I have been thinking about this for a while, thanks also to COVID-19 lock-downs, and wanted to write down a few thoughts and notes. Premise: I’ve been obese or overweight for most of my life. My best guess is…
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Why Fluent Matters for Localization
In case you don’t know what Fluent is, it’s a localization system designed and developed by Mozilla to overcome the limitations of the existing localization technologies. If you have been around Mozilla Localization for a while, and you’re wondering what happened to L20n, you can read this explanation about the relation between these two projects.…
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Goodbye Jooliaan
Today is a sad day for Mozilla, not just for the Italian community but for the Mozilla Community as a whole. We just learned that Giuliano Masseroni, aka jooliaan, passed away last night. jooliaan, even if he hasn’t been active for a few years, had a crucial role in the growth of the Italian community…
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Test of PHP 7 Performances
PHP might not be hugely popular these days, but it’s a fundamental part of the tools I use everyday to manage localization of web parts at Mozilla (e.g. mozilla.org). Today I’ve decided to give PHP 7 a try on my local virtual machine: it’s a pretty light VM running Debian 8 (2 GB ram, 2…
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Localizing BBCodeXtra
If you never noticed the menu item in this blog, I’m the developer of a small add-on for Firefox called BBCodeXtra: it’s an extension, started about 10 years ago, that makes posting on forums and other places (e.g. GitHub) a little less painful. This extension, currently at version 0.4.1, is localized in 16 languages: de,…
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Video Subtitles and Localization
Let’s talk about localization and subtitles – not captions. From Wikipedia: “Subtitles” assume the viewer can hear but cannot understand the language or accent, or the speech is not entirely clear, so they only transcribe dialogue and some on-screen text. “Captions” aim to describe to the deaf and hard of hearing all significant audio content—spoken…
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2014 – My Q4 [:flod]
One of my many resolutions for 2015 is to blog more, both here in English and on my Italian blog, which just turned 10 last September. Keeping a diary of what happened in the last months can be useful, and it’s definitely a good exercise for me, so I’ll try to make a habit of…
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l10n: String Length and Verbosity across Languages
A few months ago I was discussing with @kaze about the truncation plague on Firefox OS, and he came out with a sentence that left me doubtful: according to the desktop metrics I had, French is the least compact locale and Chinese is the most compact one So I had to check it somehow 😉…
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Summit 2013 planning assembly: a wonderful begin
Note: this is a guest post from Iacopo Benesperi, a fellow Mozillian from the Italian community. This week-end took place in Mozilla’s Paris office the Summit 2013 planning assembly: a gathering of about 65 people from all around the world and representing all areas of the Mozilla project, with both paid staff and volunteers, aimed…