Le skyblog de bochecha

IBus Cangjie 1.0 is out

bochecha — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:15:00 +0800

Following on the hard work we have been doing for the past few months, I released IBus Cangjie 1.0 yesterday evening.

I had been meaning to do that for a while, but kept thinking about a few details to change here and there, and constantly postponed it. Well, you know what they say: "Release early, release often". So after our discussion on Wednesday during the Free Software Hackfest at Dim Sum Labs I figured I'd just call what we have now 1.0 and go from there. We can always improve it in subsequent releases.

All in all, it is a basic implementation of Cangjie and Quick, but I'd like to highlight some of its features here:

Both Cangjie and Quick are supported in versions 3 and 5
By default you'll only get Traditional Chinese, but Simplified Chinese input can be enabled in the preferences dialog
Candidates are presented in the unoptimized but familiar Big 5 ordering, to ease the migration for Microsoft Windows users

I'm very happy about what we achieved. Many people have given me very positive feedback. It seems our strong focus on a great user experience with sensible defaults is paying off.

If you don't want to build the sources, you can get packages for your favourite distribution:

As usual, Arch Linux's AUR has the stuff a few hours after it's been released
Ubuntu 13.04 has packages too (not the release yet, it's a very recent development snapshot
It's still not available in Fedora (but you can help speeding up the review!), but I just pushed the release on my personal repo

Of course, if you can package it all for another distribution, then let us know!

Of course, this is not the end. We have a long road ahead of us to make it the best way to input Chinese with Cangjie and Quick. You're welcome to climb on the bandwagon.

Kicking off a new, recurring Free Software hackfest in Hong Kong

bochecha — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:32:00 +0800

This is a repost from the article I just published on the Dim Sum Labs blog. Go and check out the web site for more info on all the cool stuff that happens there.

Hackers know it: hacking is a lot of fun.

But what to hack on exactly? Well, we are a group of people passionate about Free Software, and, starting May 1st, we will meet regularly to hack together on various projects.

These recurring hackfests will take place every other Wednesday at the Dim Sum Labs, from 8pm to 10pm.

So come and have fun with us!

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a hard-core programmer or a “complete noob”. We’ll help you learn what you need as you go.

If you’re still wondering, here are some examples of people who might want to join us:

you are “just a user” of Free Software, and there’s this silly bug in your favourite application which has been bothering you for a while? Come and figure out how to fix it with us!
you are a programmer who enjoys hacking on Free Software projects in their spare time? Come hack with us, instead of doing it alone!
you have this brilliant idea which will change the world? Come show it to us, and we’ll hack on it together!
you are the main developer of a small project which is dear to you, and you could use some manpower to make it move forward? Come have a sprint with us!
you want to learn programming by actually doing it for Free Software? Come, and we’ll help you get started.
or any other reason, you will be welcome anyway!

And it doesn’t have to be about code! Writing documentation, designing or translating Free Software, this is all hacking too!

We only have one rule: we will only hack on Free Software projects during these meetings.

If you want to have more details, use the form below to leave a comment.

Otherwise, feel free to just come. No registration needed, just show up with your own computer, say hi and we'll start hacking together.

Remember: Wednesday May 01, from 8pm to 10pm, at the Dim Sum Labs.

Showcase your FOSS contributions with Ohloh

bochecha — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:07:00 +0800

I was talking with a friend the other day (or should I say night?) about FOSS and the various ways in which it is rewarding for someone to contribute.

One of the arguments was about how contributing to FOSS helps you build for yourself an awesome, public resume. Indeed, any potential employer can just go ahead and verify the quality and quantity of those contributions you say you have made.

That's great for employers (they can avoid the mythomaniacs, and find great candidates), but also for you, as it's a fantastic way to put your skills and experience forward!

At that point of the conversation, I mentioned Ohloh. The fact my friend had never heard about it makes me realize that other people in Hong Kong might not know about it either, and as such are missing on the opportunities it can provide.

A disclaimer first: As far as I know, Ohloh itself is not Free Software. I understand it might be a problem for some people, if that is your case do not use their service.

So how does Ohloh work?

The service revolves mostly around 2 concepts: projects and people.

If you're the maintainer of a project, you can declare it in Ohloh, as I did for IBus Cangjie. Ohloh will then fetch the whole code history (from Github in this case), and present you with some cool statistics about your project (number of contributors, activity, programming languages used, etc...). Don't forget to mark yourself as managing this project!

Now, if you have contributed to a Free Software project in the past, try searching for your name in Ohloh. For example, if you search for "benau", you will get a page listing people going by that name as well as unclaimed contributions. As you can see in this example, the awesome Benau hasn't claimed his contributions to libcangjie and IBus Cangjie. (probably because he doesn't have a profile)

If you are in such a case, and are interested in the value that Ohloh could provide you as a FOSS contributor, you could then open an account there, and claim those contributions as being yours. If you do, make sure to go back to searching your name from time to time, Ohloh sometimes doesn't seem to pick up your contributions automatically.

Other Ohloh users might declare they are using the projects you contribute to, making your contributions more visible. They might even give you kudos, to congratulate/thank you for your contributions.

Eventually, Ohloh will build for you a profile listing your contributions, the programming languages you have used, etc. Take a look at mine for an example of what it looks like.

You could add a button like this one to your website as well:

Then, the next time you are applying for a job, don't forget to add a link to your Ohloh profile on your resume. Who knows, it could be a great boost to your development career!

IBus Cangjie is in Ubuntu!

bochecha — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 16:07:00 +0800

Just a quick to let everybody know that thanks to Anthony Wong's work, IBus Cangjie is now available in the official Ubuntu 13.04 repositories.

That makes it easier to install than ever.

Thank you Anthony!

IBus Cangjie in your own language

bochecha — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:32:00 +0800

Cheng-Chia Tseng recently opened a ticket in the IBus Cangjie bug tracker, submitting a Taiwan Chinese translation.

This is itself is pretty awesome, but we didn't stop there: Cheng-Chia helped me set up a Transifex project for IBus Cangjie.

That means it should now be very easy for translators all around the world to translate IBus Cangjie into their own language.

I copy-pasted his zh_TW translation into a zh_HK one, because Taiwan and Hong Kong translations are usually very similar. So even if this is not perfect, it is still much better than nothing. Also, a zh_CN translation is being worked on.

This is fantastic. From the very beginning, IBus Cangjie was made to enable people to benefit from Free Software on their computer. But until now, they had to be able to read English.

Thanks to Cheng-Chia's efforts, this is what Hong Kong and Taiwan people will see:

Cheng-Chia, you rock!

IBus Cangjie now has a website

bochecha — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:26:00 +0800

A couple of minutes ago, I finished setting up a simple website for IBus Cangjie.

Check it out: http://ibus-cangjie.opensource.hk

Nothing fancy, it's just a bunch of static pages generated with Sphinx, but the result is not too horrible. Help to make it better is obviously welcome.

One thing missing is the features section. I'll upload a page with nice screenshots very soon.

If you package IBus Cangjie for your distribution, do let us know, and we'll add instructions for it on the appropriate page.

The website is hosted on Open Shift, which is pretty awesome to use, and Sammy was kind enough to give us the opensource.hk sub-domain.

Also, if you use Fedora, I have just uploaded new packages of the latest development snapshot of IBus Cangjie to my side repository. Be sure to update and give us feedback!

ibus-cangjie getting closer to a first release

bochecha — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 15:59:00 +0800

Two more weeks have passed since my last status update on ibus-cangjie, and we've been busy working.

Let's review the major things which happened since the last time.

First, Benau joined us and quickly fixed a bug in Quick. He's now having a look at improving the order of the candidates, which will dramatically improve the input experience, especially for Quick users. Benau, you rock!

Cangjie and Quick have a behaviour which differs from other input methods, for example they have no preedit text, and the text cursor can move while the user is typing. The latter exposed a bug in GNOME Shell (other environments do not seem to be impacted), which is being fixed for GNOME 3.8. So not only are we trying to provide a great input method engine, we're also helping others to make their projects better.

Speaking about GNOME, I've been collaborating closely with Rui Matos and Allan Day to smooth out some rough edges in both GNOME and ibus-cangjie (ok, they helped me ). The result is that we now have a much better preferences dialog which integrates natively in GNOME Control Center.

I can't stress this enough: we will try hard to work beautifully in other desktop environments too, we are not tied to GNOME. However, GNOME people care deeply about providing an amazing user experience and they have been extremely helpful. And as I'm myself a GNOME user, I worked on what was useful to me.

But please, come and help us integrate just as well in your favourite desktop environment and respect their guidelines. For example, I got in touch with the Ubuntu/Unity people, and wrote what I learned in a ticket. If you love Unity, feel free to send me patch to fix this ticket.

Now, that was a lot of boring talk. Well, here are some screenshots. First, our new slick preferences dialog, as seen on GNOME:

Next, the GNOME input menu, with our Cangjie and Quick engines. Notice how the half/full width character option is exposed there:

Finally, I worked on lowering the required minimum versions of our dependencies. This should make it easier for more distributions to provide packages for ibus-cangjie, so that more user can benefit. I'm maintaining a page showing the current status for availability in distros. As mentioned on that page, I'm already maintaining packages for Fedora >= 17 in a side-repository, and Antony Ho is providing pkgbuilds for Arch Linux in AUR. If you are a packager for another distribution, please get in touch and we'll help you package ibus-cangjie (and its dependencies).

Long story short, ibus-cangjie should run on all the following distributions:

Debian Experimental (soon on Sid, once it picks up the cython package from Experimental)
Fedora >= 16
openSUSE Factory
Ubuntu >= 13.04

There are good reasons why we can't support older releases of these distributions: they provide old versions of cython, which won't build pycangjie. I'd love to support Ubuntu 12.04 for example, as it is their current LTS. If you can help with cython, please get in touch.

We're really getting close to our first release now, so we more than ever need your help with testing, or fixing the last few remaining blocker bugs.

Before closing, I'd like to remind you that I'll be leading a usability testing lab at the next Open Source Workshop in Hong Kong. Come and join us, your feedback on the user experience will be invaluable to making ibus-cangjie a great implementation of Cangjie and Quick. I hope to see you there!

Progress in ibus-cangjie

bochecha — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 17:02:00 +0800

I recently announced ibus-cangjie, the IBus input method engine for Cangjie and Quick that I have been working on.

It is now almost two weeks later, and there is already some good progress to report on.

I have added wildcard support to the Cangjie engine, and implemented a first pass at the Quick engine.

Thanks to Wan Leung's work in libcangjie, both Cangjie and Quick will now respect the user setting for full-/half-width characters.

I've also made a bunch of changes to the documentation and the build system, which should make it easier than ever to try it out, or to package it for your favorite distribution.

On that note, I have just published a repository for Fedora 18, so if you want to try ibus-cangjie, it's as easy as the following commands (as root) :

# wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/bochecha/ibus-cangjie/fedora-ibus-cangjie.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-ibus-cangjie.repo
# yum install ibus-cangjie

Please try it, and let us know what you think!

Now, we're getting closer to a first 1.0 release, not much is missing, so if you think you can help, then we'll gladly accept the patches.

Finally, I'll be organizing a usability testing lab at the next Open Source Workshop in Hong Kong, so if you can't install ibus-cangjie on your own machine, just come and you'll try it on mine. This should allow us to get valuable feedback to make it rock.

Introducing ibus-cangjie

bochecha — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:12:00 +0800

Hong Kong people write (mostly) Traditional Chinese. On a computer, most of them use the Cangjie and Quick input methods.

In the IBus platform, these were implemented through ibus-table, with dedicated tables.

Unfortunately, this led to a suboptimal user experience for Cangjie and Quick, and as a result Hong Kong people have been turning themselves to other input method frameworks like GCIN or SCIM.

This is a problem for GNOME (starting with version 3.6), because GNOME integrates IBus out of the box. What this means is that Hong Kong people can not have an excellent user experience on GNOME out of the box, because they need to choose between a rock and a hard place:

using a poor implementation of Cangjie and Quick, provided by ibus-table
spending time fiddling with their system and installing non-default components to end up with a better inputting experience, but not properly integrated with the rest of the OS

I love GNOME, and I want Hong Kong people to love it too. And for that, GNOME (through IBus), needs a first class user experience for Cangjie and Quick.

That's what we set out to achieve with Wan Leung Wong a couple of months ago, and the result is ibus-cangjie, a dedicated IBus engine for Cangjie and Quick.

Wan Leung has been writing libcangjie, a low-level library to handle the complex mappings between English letters and Chinese characters, as defined by the Cangjie and Quick input methods.

At the same time, I've been wrapping that in a Python cangjie module, which is then reused in ibus-cangjie.

We're not yet to a point where we can get it included in Linux distributions and used by all, but I think we recently reached that sweet moment where we can be confident enough to announce it publicly. Consider this our call for testing and wider contribution. (or our Christmas / New Year gift, if you celebrate these )

Given the target audience of this announcement, here are a couple of technical highlights first:

libcangjie is a native library written in C++, as the goal was to be as portable as possible. We absolutely want other platforms to reuse libcangjie and help us improve it, be it on other OSes than Linux or with engines for other input method frameworks
both cangjie and ibus-cangjie are full Python 3 modules. I tried to keep compatibility with Python 2 for some time, but it became too hard to do so I dropped it. I'll accept patches to restore it, as long as it's not at the expense of the Python 3 code.
I wrote above that we started ibus-cangjie to make GNOME a great desktop for Hong Kong people, and our current focus is on GNOME integration, but that's only because we use GNOME ourselves. If you use another desktop and want to help us get ibus-cangjie in tip-top shape for it, we will gladly welcome your patches!

But that's all boring behind-the-scenes details, what about the user-facing features?

At the moment, here's what ibus-cangjie can do:

input Traditional Chinese (by default, but we have an option to also input Simplified Chinese) with Cangjie, both in its versions 3 and 5;
provide a user experience which is more in line with what users expect of the Cangjie input method which, we believe, is better than what ibus-table could offer.

That's not bad, but it's obviously not enough. Here's what's known to be missing, and on what we'll be hard at work:

input with Quick is still completely missing (this will be my number one priority from now on, any help is of course welcome) ;
wildcard support for Cangjie is missing (it needs to go in libcangjie, and is a pre-requisite for implementing Quick) ;
we need an icon for the settings application;
we need a way to let the user input full- and half-width punctuation and numbers;
we need to make a kickass ordering of candidates, so that the most frequently used are always on the first page (right now, stuff is ordered alphabetically by the input sequence, which is just terrible) ;
we want to provide adaptive ordering of candidates, based on some fancy frecency algorithm (in option, the default will be the static ordering) ;
we want to allow suggestions for "next possible characters" based on the whole sentence;

That's our plan, and we're hoping you will help us move things forward so that GNOME (or your favourite desktop using IBus) finally becomes a compelling operating system for Hong Kong people.

Cangjie should be in a testable state at the moment, so your general testing, as well as specific feedback on the user experience will be warmly welcome.

If you can help us with the code, get to the GitHub pages and hack away. Alternatively, if you're in Hong Kong, I'll be organizing a workshop/hackfest on ibus-cangjie in the next few weeks.

Finally, if you want to talk to us, hop on #linux-hk on Freenode, or join the Hong Kong Linux User Group mailing-list. We don't have dedicated communication media at the moment, so we'll use these for now.

GNOME Calendar preview in Fedora 18

bochecha — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 13:05:00 +0800

Calendar will be a new core application for GNOME.

It's still very early in its development, but it's starting to look pretty nice and to be usable.

If someone wants to try it out, I made a repository with the latest Git HEAD packaged, just run the following:

# wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/bochecha/gnome-calendar/fedora-gnome-calendar.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-gnome-calendar.repo
# yum install gnome-calendar

Ultimately, I'll push it to Fedora proper (unless someone beats me to it ), but for now a side-repository will do.

[WORKSHOP] Contributing to Free and Open Source Software

bochecha — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 14:52:00 +0800

Yesterday I sent the following to the Hong Kong Linux User Group mailing list.

Reposting here (slightly edited), in case somebody not subscribed there would be interested.

Hi all,

I've been thinking about doing this for some time now, and it seems to me that I now have the perfect excuse to do it.

Would anybody be interested in a "contributing to FOSS" workshop?

It would take about 2 hours (or more if attendees are interested), and we'd cover topics like how to use Git, how to build and install from sources, how to properly submit patches and interact with upstream, etc...

We wouldn't pretend to work on some dummy discartable projects like at school, instead we'd work with an existing project/community that I believe is interesting for Hong Kong people as it relates to Cangjie and Quick input methods. (also, it is a very young project with probably many simple bugs and missing features which could be implemented quickly even by novice developers, and I'm the upstream, so we wouldn't be blocked during the workshop because we're waiting for upstream to answer )

I'll try to keep it as low-entry as possible, so here are the pre-requisites if you're interested:

you have some minimal programming experience in any programming language (I will not teach you programming from the start)

you're not afraid of learning new stuff, trying stuff you don't know yet, breaking things and fixing them up again

you're motivated

you speak and understand English "well enough" to not be completely lost

That last point is unfortunate, but the reasons are very simple: I'm learning, but my Cantonese is still very poor. As such, I just won't be able to give the workshop to people who only speak Cantonese. My fault, not yours.

If there is enough demand though, we'll see if we can try figuring something out with someone who speaks both languages well.

Depending on everybody's availability, it would happen on an evening or week-end, we'll see.

I'd like to keep it in small groups of under 10 people so it's easier to manage and so attendees can actually learn something, but I don't mind repeating it if enough people want to join.

If you're interested, send me an email, either on the mailing-list or privately, and let me know the following:

when you'd prefer it to happen (evening, week-end, specific day of the week, after 9pm,...)

what is your experience as a contributor to Free and Open Source projects (what languages you know, what projects you've contributed to,...). Please note that "None" is a perfectly valid answer.

Given the scope of the workshop, priority will be given to motivated people with less experience, in order to grow a larger community of FOSS contributors in Hong Kong (existing hard-core contributors don't need me or anyone else to learn new stuff and go on contributing )

If you can host the event, let me know too. The venue needs to be quiet and have an Internet connection.

Feel free to repost this message anywhere you feel appropriate, transmit it to your friends, CS students,...

GNOME 3.6 Release Party in Hong Kong

bochecha — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:12:00 +0800

On Saturday, we will be celebrating the release of GNOME 3.6 in Hong Kong.

The program is as follows:

14:35-15:20 - GNOME, A Free Operating System for everyone (by me)
15:25-16:10 - Enlarge your GNOME (by Mart Van de Ven)
16:15-17:55 - Unconference (by everybody)

Everybody is welcome, so come and join us at 2pm, in classroom Y5-303, on the 5th floor of the Academic 1 building, City University of Hong Kong!

As usual, you can find the full details on the OpenSource.HK page.

Inputting Hong Kong Chinese with GNOME 3.6

bochecha — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 23:28:00 +0800

As I wrote previously, GNOME 3.6 will integrate tightly with IBus.

This is because GNOME takes responsibility for its users, and wants to provide to all of them a great, out of the box experience. Even those whose language requires complex inputting methods.

Many people have been involved in this integration (both on the GNOME and IBus sides), and the result is impressive when compared to what we had before. It's all incredibly straightforward to set up (my user testing indicates that non-geeky Windows users have no trouble doing it themselves), but I can't resist to show it off anyway. Plus, such a great feature deserves a lot of promotion.

Below is how Hong Kong people will be able to start inputting Traditional Chinese in GNOME 3.6. The screenshots were taken on GNOME 3.5.92, but very few should change before the final release.

We're starting with only one input source: the French keyboard layout I use on my laptop. Nothing to see here, the input status icon only appears if you have configured more than one input source:

As one would expect, input methods can be set up in the GNOME System Settings:

Yes, options related to your language are found in the Region & Language panel:

Add a new input source in the aptly named tab:

Search for chinese, and pick your input method. That's where it becomes interesting for Hong Kong people. Most of you will want to use quick3 or maybe cangjie3, but we still included quick5 and cangjie5 for those looking towards the future, and even stroke5 for the disabled and the elderly (or the 鬼佬 ):

There, your Chinese input method is available:

Observe how the input status menu now allows you to choose your input method (or use the CTRL+space keyboard shortcut) :

It really can't get any simpler.

What's really exciting, is the way input methods are presented in the same place as the simple keyboard layouts. I think this mere fact is a strong statement from GNOME: from now on, users of input methods (among which are Hong Kong people) are first class citizens in GNOME.

This is a huge first step in the right direction, but of course there are many things that will need to be improved before we get a great user experience. We have plans for making all of this much better for 3.8, and I'm very interested in feedback from Hong Kong users.

And what better time to give your feedback than the GNOME 3.6 Release Party we are organizing in Hong Kong? More details about that will come soon, stay tuned.

Explaining Chinese input methods to non-Chinese

bochecha — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 12:20:00 +0800

For the past few months, I've been concerned about the plans to integrate input methods directly into GNOME.

Not that I disagree with the goal (I am convinced that once this is done, it will provide a much better user experience than what we have now), but there are a few things that could make the life of Hong Kong GNOME users more difficult (e.g the whitelist of supported input methods, the choice of IBus as only Input Methods Framework,...).

Reading the ~~flamew~~discussions on DDL, I had the impression that two groups were talking past each other: the developers (mostly non-Chinese) and the users of Chinese Input Methods (mostly non-developers). Each group had different perspective and knowledge, and seemed to be talking about different things:

You don't use Chinese input methods, so you don't know what we need!
You focus on a limited part of the User Experience, when we want to provide a consistent, integrated, complete UX!

One thing is clear though: GNOME developers (and in fact FOSS developers, but I'm mostly interested in GNOME these days) are mostly not Chinese, can't read or write Chinese, and as such have a very limited idea of the complexity of Chinese input methods. That's something we should change (by growing stronger community of contributors in Chinese-speaking regions), but in the meantime, Chinese users will depend on non-Chinese developers to provide their inputting experience.

So, after being tired of hearing from locals who won't do anything else than complain, I decided to do something about it and start bridging that gap.

I spent the past two months (I started during GNOME.Asia in Hong Kong) studying Chinese input methods, what they are, how they work, and how people use them in Hong Kong. And as a result, I wrote a documentation about it, which I hope can be useful to developers outside of China.

Keep in mind that I'm exactly one of those who don't use Chinese input methods: I'm a French dude who moved to Hong Kong a year and a half ago and who can't read or write Chinese. In fact, I even discovered about the very existence of Chinese input methods a year ago, observing my girlfriend type on her netbook!

So of course I might have made mistakes, or missed crucial details. However, having just recently learned all this, it was probably easier to write it down in a way others like me could understand it: I didn't assume any previous knowledge.

Early feedback from GNOME developers is overwhelmingly positive:

fcrozat: bochecha: congrats for http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/
fcrozat: this is really good stuff
fcrozat: I wish we had that instead of the flames on ddl

aday: wow, this is fantastic indeed

However, some parts are still incomplete, and I'd love for people who know more than me to proof-read it and fix any mistake I might have made. Here's the link again, in case you missed it above:

http://bochecha.fedorapeople.org/chinese_ims/

Read it, and send me an email with your feedback (my email address is at the bottom of the document).

One thing I would like to add to the document is information about the situation in Taiwan and Mainland China, similar to what I wrote for Hong Kong. So if you know about that, shoot me an email!

As a final note, GNOME developers expressed they would love to have the same kind of documentation from other local communities and their specific needs for, and usage of, input methods. So if you know about Indian, Thai or other language specific input methods, just write about it! And we could even group together the parts which make sense, as I'm sure some of the stuff I wrote is generic enough to apply to other written languages (e.g sound-based vs stroke-based).

Hopefully, this will lead to an awesome user experience when it comes to inputting complex languages on Free operating systems. At least I did my part for Hong Kong people.

GNOME 3.6 and IBus for Hong Kong users

bochecha — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 10:37:00 +0800

As you may know, GNOME 3.6 (to be released in September) will feature a tight integration with IBus, in order to provide a great out of box experience for input methods users.

Unfortunately, IBus provides a "less than optimal" (to say the least) UX for Hong Kongers.

During GNOME.Asia, we sat down with Wan Leung (HKLUG member, passionate about input methods) and Anish (an IBus core developer) and identified what is in our opinion the one show-stopper bug.

I'm hopeful we'll get this fixed before GNOME 3.6 is released, which should make it a great Free Software OS for Hong Kong people too.

Of course, there are other bugs and deficiencies in IBus (as in every software really) which will remain after this one is fixed and which make for a user experience poorer than it should be (for example, the Candgie IM doesn't support wildcards, neither Candgie nor Quick adapt to the most frequently used words by the user, etc...). But those are all details which will improve the user experience, whereas the one I linked above really just makes IBus useless in Hong Kong.

I'm very excited for GNOME 3.6, for and specifically because it will be the first GNOME release we will be able to recommend to everyone here, not just tinkerers and geeks, but really anyone, no matter what language they write.

你好 Planet Open Source HK!

bochecha — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 15:45:00 +0800

It appears my first article has just been published on Planet Open Source Hong Kong and I didn't even introduce myself. How rude of me!

So for those who don't know me yet, I'm Mathieu [pronounced something like "馬吊"], better known in geek circles as bochecha. I'm French, originally from that place, and I moved to Hong Kong about a year and a half ago.

In Hong Kong, I work for Network Box, a local security company where we do some really awesome Linux-related stuff. [Ask me about it if you'd like to know more!] [We're looking for a C++ developer :-P]

When I'm not working, I'm pretty much still a geek, so in my spare time I'm a Fedora contributor and GNOME enthusiast. Back in France, I was a board member of the Borsalinux-Fr NPO (the legal entity behind the French Fedora community), and I've done all sorts of advocacy work and events organization.

I want to be more involved in the Hong Kong Linux/FOSS community. The main things I'd like to work on are the following:

Educate the population on the importance of Free Software, Open Standards and Net Neutrality, and why it's much more about strengthening democracy than it is about a bunch of geeks hacking in their garage,
Help public institutions and local companies use Free Software and Open Standards and contribute back, to save money in the long term and develop local know-how,
Grow strong GNOME and Fedora communities in Hong Kong,
Teach whatever I might know about using Linux, contributing to Free Software, programming, managing servers,...
Hack on various stuff which could make the lives of the local community easier,
Have as much fun as possible doing all those!

If you're interested in any of the above, let's get in touch. You can reach me by email (bochecha at fedoraproject dot org) or on IRC (I'm bochecha on Freenode and GimpNet). You can also leave a comment here of course.

Oh, one last thing. I'm learning Cantonese, but only oral language at the moment, so I'm not going to start writing in Chinese right away. Sorry about that.

English being the second language of Hong Kong, I hope you won't mind [I won't bore you with articles written in French :-P]. And in case someone thinks I'm writing exceptional stuff [a man can dream ^_^] and wants to translate it to Chinese, have a look at the legal disclaimer on the right of the blog and feel free to do it!

That's all for me. If you want to know more, just ask. Otherwise, see you at the next FOSS event in Hong Kong!

Gnomes in Hong Kong

bochecha — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:08:00 +0800

GNOME.Asia 2012 ended two days ago, and the event was full of awesome.

Aside from the great talks by international speakers, I could meet lots of new people and had lots of hallway chats about our favourite OS.

But that's not all, I could also get some important stuff done.

First, I started hacking on the new Hong Kong Linux User Group web site, as Wan Leung hasn't had the time to finish it yet. Hopefully, I'll send him a pull request soon, and then we'll be able to deploy it to replace our ageing wiki.

My goal is to have that done before the LUG assembly in July..

Perhaps more importantly, Wan Leung took some time to explain to me the biggest problems with IBus for Hong Kong people.

This is a fairly new topic to me, and if I'm to promote GNOME in Hong Kong, it's something I need to understand. To be honest I discovered input methods even existed less than a year ago: the few languages I'm capable to type don't need them, so I learnt what they were when I moved to Hong Kong. Thanks to Wan Leung, I now have a much better understanding of what the problems are.

After he was done getting me up to speed, I sat down with him and Anish, an IBus developer who came to the conference. We focused on only one issue, the biggest, which renders IBus completely useless to Hong Kong people, and we came up with a possible solution. A potentially very simple one.

This means that if all goes well, by the time GNOME 3.6 is released with input methods integration, the required change will have been made to IBus, enabling Hong Kong people to type with the Quick or Candgie input methods (used by around 90% of the population here). The rest (performance, suggestions adaptability, wildcards support,...) is just bugs and improvements that can be fixed in due time.

All in all, this was a great event. Haggen, Sammy and the local volunteers team did a great job of organizing it (no, I'm not self-congratulating, I joined so late I wouldn't consider myself part of it ).

From what I've been told, this was also the first big international free software event in Hong Kong. I'm thrilled it was such a success, as it will be a great base for our future work here.

A Linux user's Cybook experience

bochecha — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:13:00 +0800

EDIT Sun April 29 2012: It seems I failed at typing the article properly and the end was missing... Just fixed it.

A few days ago I received my new Cybook Odyssey, so I thought I'd share my impressions.

First of all, I've always been a bit worried about these devices, given the precedents set by other vendors: DRM, lock-in, remote access to your device,...

Reviews like Mairin's were making me anxious, and it took me a very long time to decide on buying an ebook reader.

What convinced me to go for the Cybook Odyssey was the following (in no particular order):

e-Ink: I wanted something with a long battery (the specs sa 25000 pages turned) and which would be comfortable to read.
the device is full UMS: plug it into your computer's USB port, and it appears as an external hard-drive. No stupid application I'm forced to use, I can just drag and drop ebooks with my file browser.
somewhat related to the previous point, I don't have to buy ebooks from a certain shop. I can just download ebooks from the Gutenberg Project or I can also buy them in any shop I want, from my computer, or directly from the Odyssey
unless I choose to lock myself in, there's no stupid DRM involved. The ebooks I legally obtained are stored on the ebook reader and I don't have to input my credit card number or call the hotline before I can read them.
when I asked the support whether I would have any trouble connecting it to my laptop running Linux, they actually knew what I was talking about (this has been very rare in my experience with helpdesks), and their answer was that the only thing I would lose was support for buying books with DRM since that requires some ~~cra~~software from Adobe. I mean, I was so disappointed. :-P
updates are transparent: just connect the Odyssey to a Wifi network and if an update is available, you'll be automatically asked whether you want to upgrade. Again, no need to use iTunes or something like that. I know, you don't need iTunes anymore to update your iOS device, but it took time. The point is that Bookeen chose to do things right, right from the start.
as a bonus, it comes loaded with a bit more than 100 classical (public domain) books in French, English, German, Italian and Spanish, so you can start reading right away
They advertise their screens as having a « High Speed Ink System » that they developed themselves. They answered my request for a demo with this Youtube video, if you want to judge by yourselves.

High Speed Ink System demo on the Cybook Odyssey

I can only compare with the Kindle I had in hands for about 15 minutes, 2 years ago, but the Odyssey does feel snappy enough, and the screen doesn't completely blink to black when changing pages, so reading on it is quite comfortable.

All in all, I'm really satisfied. I wholeheartedly recommend this ebook reader to anyone.

Now to read some more!

[Guest article] Now ready to promote my second favorite project.

bochecha — Tue, 10 May 2011 22:19:00 +0200

Note: This article is from Nounours, a good friend of mine. He doesn't have his own blog (yet?), so I'm letting him use mine.

For quite some time now, I had this beautiful Tshirt to promote my favorite FOSS project in the whole world, Fedora:

Well, thanks to Mathieu's awesome girlfriend, I now have this gorgeous tshirt to promote my second favorite project:

Now I'm all set for the FOSS events in Hong-Kong!

Thanks for the post Nounours, feel free to use my blog again any time you want.

A smarter way of importing a new package in Fedora?

bochecha — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:30:00 +0100

tl;dr: This post proposes a new way of importing a new package in the Fedora dist-git tree which allows to also import the whole back and forth changes made during the review request.

The recommended way to import a new package in Fedora is to do the following:

build an SRPM and submit that along with the spec file as a review request
wait for comments from a reviewer
fix the spec/srpm as per the reviewers comments
repeat steps 2 and 3 until the package gets approved
ask for the dist-git module to be created
clone the dist-git moodule once obtained:
```
$ fedpkg clone $module
```

import the approved srpm in the dist-git module:

$ fedpkg import $module-x.x.x.src.rpm
$ git commit -m "Initial import (#nnnnnn)."

push, build, submit an update,...

However, all the comment/fix process as part of the review is only available in one place: Bugzilla. The package effectively starts its life in Fedora at the moment the srpm is imported.

Wouldn't it be nice to also keep all the history from the review process as part of the Git history of the module? Fortunately that's possible thanks to Git.

First, create your module git tree:

$ mkdir $module
$ cd $module
$ git init

Here comes the trick. Once you will be working with the Fedora Git, there will be a master branch (for Rawhide). To avoid any future pain, let's rename the current branch as tmpmaster:

$ sed -i 's/master/tmpmaster/' .git/HEAD

Now is time for the second trick: to ease the rest of the process, the first commit must include the same changes as the first commit in the Fedora repository:

$ touch sources .gitignore
$ git add sources .gitignore
$ git commit -m "Initial setup of the local repo"

You can now start working on your new package as you would normally do:

write your spec file
add some patches
make the required changes as part of the review process
commit your changes all the way

Note that you must not commit the source archive, since it will be added to the lookaside cache later on.

Hopefully, at some point, the package will be approved and the Fedora Git module created. Instead of starting at step 6 above, let's do something a bit smarter.

First, make the Fedora remote tree available to your local tree:

$ git remote add origin ssh://$fas_account@pkgs.fedoraproject.org/$module
$ git fetch origin

Then apply your work to the Fedora "master" branch:

$ git checkout tmpmaster
$ git branch master -t origin/master
$ git rebase master

Finally, switch to the master branch and fast-forward it to the state of the tmpmaster branch:

$ git checkout master
$ git merge tmpmaster

Check that everything is fine with your favorite Git visualization tool, and when you're ready, just remove the tmpmaster branch:

$ git branch -D tmpmaster

At this point, everything will look like you had been working inside the Fedora Git tree since the beginning, as if it had been creating before the review. You get to keep in one place the history of your package, including the history of its life before entering Fedora.

Finally just upload your sources with fedpkg, build your package on Koji, and more generally just go on working on your package as you would normally do after a fedpkg clone (that was step 7 above).

What would really be awesome is if fedpkg could grow the capability to add new remotes and do this trick by itself. Hmmm, I wonder...