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Friedel, Walter and Wynand have been busy releasing new versions of the Translate Toolkit, Pootle and spoiler warning a new translation tool.

Also Wynand has been working on a OpenDocument Format converter.  I've just tested it on the OpenDocument 1.2 draft7 spec.  Nothing like taking a huge document and putting the converter through its paces.  Its early days lots of custom [[placeable_N]] in there.  Check out Wyand's branch called odf-xliff-first-try.

Here is a picture of the two together:

I attending the PanSALB terminology standardisation workshop over the last two days and gave a presentation on technology that Translate.org.za uses and has developed to assist in terminology development.  Bad timing with all the work I have to do.  I'll hopefully write more about the event and my impressions later.

GNU is 25 years old and the FSF celebrates with a video from Stephen Fry (which you can translate).  And Mako reminds us that a generation is 25-30 years thus we have a whole generation that has been birthed in the life of this software.  Perhaps my daughter's generation will wonder why people didn't see Free Software as obvious.

In a country like South Africa, famed for racial discrimination during apartheid, you would think that the Independent Electoral Commision (IEC) would be very sensitive to the issue of discrimination and exclusion.  If you're an Internet Explorer user you might want to experience the discrimination yourself (or try Google Chrome, Firefox, in fact any other browser to face exclusion)

py lib 0.9.2 has been released and I've created Fedora packages (src.rpm, debug, spec)

Manhy of you might not now but I've been a member of the South African Standards Burea committee that looked as OOXML, that's not our only job but from the work we did you wouldn't be wrong inthinking otherwise.  I've remained pretty quiet about the going's on  there, its tempting to write but honestly I think it improper. But now as the process winds its way towards OOXML actually being published, I feel I can speak more freely.

These are my thoughts on what I think is exciting for the next versions of Pootle and other tools.  Now that we are trying toget 1.2 out the door I thought it was nice to look wider.

Julen one of our Google Summer of Code students has just signed off on his work with a lovely summary of what he did and his experience. Recommended reading for anyone who wants to get the most from their GSoC experience.  Julen worked hard and got involved in our community and he says that he wants to cary on contributing which is exciting for me.

Carela Schroder summarises some interesting writings about FOSS and Windows users thus, "... Linux users are more tech-savvy and accustomed to the idea of being contributors, and Windows users are conditioned to being passive consumers with only two options for handling problems: yelling, or purchasing a different product. The foundation of Microsoft's core business plan is eliminating the second option, so Windows users get a lot of yelling practice.

Stuart, the chef, asked me to translate 'We speak English' into the official languages of South Africa.  Very funny I thought, this after all is the chef whose bakery ran a number of Robert Mugabe specials.