Thursday, January 27, 2005
Getting Horde Translated
For a while now, I've been interested in getting the Horde framework and in particular IMP translated into South African
languages.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Horde/IMP is a widely used and
very popular web-based e-mail client. A quick Google search
reveals over 900 hits within South Africa, including Rhodes, Stellenbosch University, University of Pretoria and several
corporates.
The need is clearly there. At Rhodes we try and encourage our ground and
cleaning staff to become familiar with e-mail, for example. It'd be really
useful if the e-mail client we gave them was in their first language, which
is usually Xhosa. There are also quite a few first language Afrikaans
speakers here, so having the three languages of the province available would
be a big plus. The same applies to many of the local schools in
Grahamstown.
There have been some massive strides towards internationalization recently.
Google now speaks Afrikaans and Xhosa, as does Firefox and Open Office. The latter two are a
result of the translate.org.za
project.
This gave me an idea and so I've just e-mailed translate.org.za to see if
they'll consider including Horde in their list of projects. Being PO-based
application it fits right into what translate.org.za are doing with Pootle.
Since I'm in the unfortunate position that I don't speak either Xhosa or
Afrikaans I feel somewhat dis-empowered. I see the potential of this, but I
can actively do anything to make it happen. So this is what I'm looking for
&mdash first language Xhosa and Afrikaans speakers who speak English,
understand enough about e-mail and would be willing to donate some time to
translating bits of Horde. This could happen either through Pootle (if
translate.org.za show some interest) or via some equivalent that I set up
(if they don't). If there is anyone at Rhodes who fits this bill (or anyone
outside who doesn't mind helping out), please give me a shout.
We will, of course, contribute any language files we develop back to the
Horde project so that others may benefit from them ... If we get to that
stage.
posted by guy at: 15:37 SAST |
path: /issues |
permanent link
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Wireless networks and policy documents
This week has been policy writing week. In particular policy governing the
use of wireless networking at Rhodes.
I find myself facing an interesting conundrum. On the one hand I'm all for
community wireless
networks and open access — the Internet wants to be
shared; on the other hand I'm responsible for cost justifying the
University's use of Internet access and maintaining the security and
integrity of the University's network. Lets face it, these are two very
conflicting interests.
Rhodes has a history of producing very realistic, down to earth policies relating to its
information and communications technologies. We're often been seen as the
anomaly in the South African tertiary education scene because we're the only
ones who seem to realise that universities are places to experiment, learn
and generally push boundaries. Our policies tend to take the form of social
contracts. They define a set of norms by which users are expected to abide
as well as attempting to explain the reasons for those norms. Academic
freedom is a priority with most policies allowing the freedom to experiment
provided you don't do anything too stupid. We're also one of the only
places that solicits the opinions of our entire user community (including
our students) before implementing policy.
While I've been on the periphery of the development of some of these
policies they are, by and large, written by my boss who seems to have a knack for
these things. I feel like I've got some big shoes to fulfill in trying to
put together a policy that matches the Rhodes style.
How do we put together a policy governing wireless networking that addresses
the inherent security concerns that come with the technology but isn't
overly restrictive? Our experience is that overly restrictive policies
encourage transgression whereas more liberal policies seem to encourage
compliance. Of course if they're too liberal they may as well not exist.
Step one was to have a look around and see what other people had done.
Several US universities and colleges have developed wireless
policies, either as a whole or
relating to specific
departments. SecurityFocus
and a few others have interesting articles on the
subject. Armed with some ideas I started writing. Actually scribbling on
the whiteboard came first — David
and I put down our ideas on the board and the I fleshed it out into a real
document.
My first draft erred too much on the cautious side. As is typical of
Rhodes, Barry and Jody soon set me straight. Draft
two was way too liberal but John soon set me straight on that front. I'm
now working on the compromise :-) I've discovered this is how the Rhodes
style develops. It is all about the balancing act that comes from
soliciting a wide range of opinions. The result is (I hope) a document that
takes into consideration most people's concerns and strikes a nice balance.
posted by guy at: 20:17 SAST |
path: /systems |
permanent link
Monday, January 03, 2005
How to get a Zimbabwean passport
Having just recently spent an extraordinary amount of time over three days
in various queues at Harare passport office trying to renew my passport I
thought I'd share some of the information that it would have been useful if
I'd known before starting :-)
See more ...
posted by guy at: 18:52 SAST |
path: /general |
permanent link
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Patches, etc.
This subdirectory contains patches that I've written and posted about. It's
not really part of the blog, it's more a collection of
useful source that people might like to look at and perhaps download and
use. It's also not neatly indexed — you'll find links and full
descriptions elsewhere in this blog and Google
can probably help you find what you're looking for.
For a full directory listing, please visit http://blog.mombe.org/data/systems/patches/.
posted by root at: 00:00 SAST |
path: /systems/patches |
permanent link
