Monthly Archives: July 2008

New week – new task

The time for stats ended a little over week ago week. I added little new features, like per hour granularity and counting of active translators instead of edits and there is now a simple GUI to generate a code that can be included in pages for those who don’t care to remember the parameters.

My current task is wikipage translation. I have been waiting for this task and I’m very excuisited to see what will come from it. The basic system should already work and it is being tested on an example page. That means it is possible to mark content for translation, translate it, and changes to the content will invalidate the translation. But as you can see it is still missing a lot, like for example selection for language.

Status update: Statistics etc.

My progress on implementing nice statistics has been an on-off trip. Both MediaWiki and FreeCol are going to make releases soon. And then there is all kinds of bugs here and there I feel obligated to fix. During the weekend I managed to fix a very bad memory leak where one of our scripts was using all our memory from the server, compared to quite stable 30M after the fix. I really want to thank milian from #geshi for the help using xdebug and his nice tools to identify the cause.

Gettext and Xliff: Nothing much here. Still haven’t tested msgmerge, so it is to be seen how well it works.

Other features: Special page alias translation got a really big boom. Suddenly the number of supported extensions has grown to 23, and we have already “produced” hundreds of translations in many languages. Message formatting checks got little improvements, and now that the leak is fixed, we can update those regularly too.

So let’s go ahead to the stuff I was meant to do: Stats. Thanks to a friend who suggested using PHPlot, I have managed to make pretty good progress on this anyway with all the other stuff going on. I think I’m going to explain my progress by using few examples and eye candy. Click the images to show full size versions if they are scaled.

First we have a graph of showing the number of translation edits per day in Betawiki.

All translation edits in MediaWiki

It is also possible to compare projects:

Edits to MediaWiki and FreeCol compared

And then we have graphs in our portals:

Finnish translation edits

Or if you want to compare how your worst (best?) rival is doing much better than your language:

Comparison of Finnish and Swedish activity

Or do it only for one project:

Comparison of Finnish and Swedish activity for mobile broadband configuration assistant

We also have graphs in our project pages.

As you can see, the labels could use some polishing. There is no GUI for generating these, but it is easy if one knows the configuration parameters. It is possible to include them in pages with the special page inclusion syntax: {{Special:TranslationStats/language=xx;days=nn;group=id}} The size can also be changed with width and height parameters.

Every graph is visually about the same. I kind of like it, but YMMV. If this feature turns out to be very popular, I have to figure out how to do more aggressive caching. The data is is fetched from Betawiki recent changes table. It means that external changes are not counted—one more reason to use Betawiki.

Hei hei Amarok

Amarok on ollut lempisoittimeni amaroK-ajoista lähtien. Nyt se on kuitenkin ohi. Syy tähän ei ole Postgre-kantojen tuen pudottaminen tai kakkosen laajakuvanäytöille suunniteltu ulkoasu. Syy on ettei Amarok suoriudu olennaisesta tehtävästään – eli musiikin soittamisesta – ilman että minulla palaa hihat ja tekisi mieli heitellä asioita.

Syy numero yksi: etäkokoelmien soittaminen daapilla on epävakaata, ja kappaleista leikkaantuu välillä paljonkin lopusta pois. Syy numero kaksi: etäkokoelmien soittaminen sshfs:llä lähiverkossakin on uskomattoman vaikeata. Kun kappale vaihtuu automaattisesti, soittaa Amarok muutaman sekunnin ja hyppää sitten heti seuraavaan. Käsin kappaleen vaihtaminen voi kestää kymmeniä sekunteja.

Ja syy numero kolme sai minut lopulta luopumaan siitä. Jos Amarok on ns. jumissa jauhamassa jotain juttujansa mitä se usein tekee, sen käyttäminen esimerkiksi globaaleilla pikanäppäimillä saa koko KDE:n olemaan reagoimatta näppäinsyötteeseen. Uskomatonta, eikö olekin? Ja tämä bugi on ollut jo iät ja ajat. Mikä pahinta, myös hiiri on mahdollista saada jumiin, siten että painikkeen painaminen tuottaa vain ikkunansiirtokursorin. Mahtavaa! Siinä sitten vaihtoehtoina on 1) tapa X 2) tapa kone, eli toisin sanoen menetän istuntoni vaikka en osallistuisi arvontaan. Joskus jumitus menee ohi hetken päästä, joskus ei.

Jään varmasti kaipaamaan Amarokin mahtavaa soittolistojenhallintaa ja hyvää suomennosta (itse kun olen siihen paljon aikaa uhrannut). Välillä on kuitenkin aika siirtyä eteenpäin. Siinä missä missä toiset vaihtavat distroja useammin kuin kravatteja, olen minä alusta saakka ja edelleenkin Gentoon käyttäjä. Ja kyllä vielä toistaiseksi pysynkin vaikka ei sillä nyt loistavasti mene.

Ehdotuksia vaihtoehtoisista soittimista otetaan vastaan.

Localisation of images

Amidst of fixing bugs I remembered a old feature request for localising images. One image may be worth of thousand words, but what if those words are in a foreign language? Now it is possible to replace anglocentric images in the user interface with localised ones. I use this opportunity to add some images to my pretty boring blog entries :)

So here is the current default toolbar in MediaWiki’s edit view:

Here is the same when using Arabic as the user interface language:

And one more example, which is for Belarusian (Taraškievica orthography):

Checks and bugfixes

This is a status report again.

Possibility to translate aliases for special pages didn’t cause any mass movement. Let’s wait for a another week to see what happens. In the mean time I’ve improved the check framework. There is now own checks for FreeCol, existing checks were improved and it is easy to add checks for new types. It is also possible for translators to get list of messages tagged by the checks. The down side is that running checks is slow, so that the list doesn’t update in real time. Anyway it is better than before.

Gettext got improvements and fixes, thanks to a new testing project. Mobile Broadband Configuration Assistant is project of another Summercode Finland participant and friend of mine that is enabled for translation for testing. The same guy made me to fix one bad usability issue that was long due. It was a quick hack, but a start for better.

Xliff support is still stalled, but I managed to contact the nice pootle developer I met at FOSDEM 2008. We talked shortly in which ways we can co-operate (less in terms of code) and a little which features should be implemented. Didn’t get much out of it, as Xliff is quite a new standard, and support in other tools is also in emerging state. This confirms my thoughts that it is not worth to shoot in the dark, but do features for it when there is a need or support for those.

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