Author: flod

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 😉…

  • 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…

  • Mozilla Italia at Fa’ la cosa giusta 2013

    Last weekend, March 15-17, Mozilla Italia took part in Fa’ la cosa giusta 2013 in Milan (Fa’ la cosa giusta means Do the right thing!). For our association this was the fourth time in this particular event: we participated from 2007 to 2009, then we moved to Florence for a couple of years (event called…