Firefox 3’s First 24 Hours

- Jhon Lilly, CEO, Mozilla.

It’s been a very busy 24 hours for Mozilla folks around the world — as our 24 hour initial period draws to a close, I wanted to put a few things into perspective. This is the first post of what will no doubt be many analysis posts, so here are a few things that have happened during the first official day of Firefox 3 life:

• A little more than 8.3 million downloads (this isn’t our official Guinness number — that will be a little lower as we weed out over counts over the next few weeks)
• Firefox 3 market share has grown to about 4% worldwide
• People in around 200 different countries have downloaded, with 16 countries north of 100k copies
• Top 10 countries so far: US, Germany, Japan, Spain, UK, France, Iran, Italy, Canada, Poland
• 757 Parties around the world

And if you’re interested in what our network has been doing over that time period:

• 83 terabytes served in total
• (that works out to nearly 8 1/2 full copies of the US Library of Congress’ print collection or a million copies of the new Coldplay album)
• At the peak, we were serving 17,000 downloads a minute (283 per second!), and saw sustained download rates in excess of 4,000/minute
• Our peak mirror throughput during the period was 20 gigabits/sec (a huge thanks goes to everyone who helped to create our unbelievably great mirror network)

So a good day’s work by everyone involved. Like everything that’s Mozilla, this involved people far beyond Mountain View, and far beyond the borders of any one company or group. More to come…

You don't still use a screen saver, do you?

- By Don Willmott , Forecast Earth Correspondent

I'm happy that at this stage in my career I often find myself writing articles about energy-efficient ways to use computers, peripherals, gadgets, and consumer electronics. It makes me feel so, you know, virtuous.

Whenever I crank out a list of helpful hints, one of the first items I include is this obvious but often overlooked gem of advice: Kill your stupid screen saver. In the good old days of tube monitors, screen savers such as those unforgettable flying toasters were invented to prevent burn-in, a permanent shadow branded into the phosphors of your monitor by a static image of, say, a spreadsheet that you left on your screen all weekend.

Well, flat-screen LCD monitors don't burn in, so if you still have flying toasters or an endlessly looping slide show of your adorable niece and nephew, you're behind the times. When you're not sitting in front of your monitor it should be off off off.

It warmed my heart to read at Green Daily that Telstra, the biggest phone company in Australia, has removed all the corporate screen savers from the 36,000 computers in its offices. What will happen? The change will cut tons of CO₂, which they claim will be the equivalent of taking 140 cars off the road for a year. Good on ya, mate. Follow Telstra's example. Let your flying toasters crash and burn.

-http://green.yahoo.com/blog/forecastearth/49/you-don-t-still-use-a-screen-saver-do-you.html

Translation memory

We have been working on Localization for more than one year. As you all know there are many many step in localization process and there are tools too. But Till today we have done all these manually...
Very recently only I came a cross the translation memory concept :
Its like this : There are lot of words always repeat in many place and each time we also need to translate those words. But using this translation memory idea, we can save time by automatically (at least partially) translating all the similar words found in our localization resource file.
More than this, there are ideas like, fuzzy translation memory. What it does is, it suggest us some words with the % of appropriateness. The tools gathers this knowledge with the existing works that we have done.
So now we also planning to move on to tools :
Some tools that may help on this - All 3 are FOSS :

• OmegaT+ - http://omegatplus.sourceforge.net/
• Open Language Tools - https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/
• Transolution - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=132322

Firefox 3.0

I am working with Mozilla in the area of localization. The Firefox 3.0 is going to be released on 17^th. On that day there are many celebrations and parties in all over the world.

Also there is another important effort to make a Guinness record. All are trying to make the Firefox 3.0 as the software which hits the highest downloads in 24 hours. So please participate in it by clicking on this link : http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Punycode

Very recently I got to know about this.
Punycode is a simple and efficient transfer encoding syntax designed for use with Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). It uniquely and reversibly transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII string. ASCII characters in the Unicode string are represented literally, and non-ASCII characters are represented by ASCII characters that are allowed in host name labels (letters, digits, and hyphens).
Punycode is an instance of a more general algorithm called Bootstring, which allows strings composed from a small set of "basic" code points to uniquely represent any string of code points drawn from a larger set.  Punycode is Bootstring with particular parameter values appropriate for IDNA.
-http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3492.html

Basically the idea is to have the domain names in local languages. The current naming conventions allow us to have ASCII characters only. But to have the names in Unicode, Unicode should be mapped to ASCII. The punycode does the job.
For example : www.தமிழ்.com, to have this we may need to enter the punycode of this on DNS. This may look like : www.xn--rlcus7b3d.com. You can notice that, Punycode starts with "xn--".
There are converters, using which we can get punycode of out domain names (http://www.nameisp.com/puny.asp).

I think there are conventions to transform the top level domains too. But I didnt study about them yet.

Progress Tracking - GSoC

This time my proposal on Progress tracking has been accepted for GSoC 2008. This is with Moodle and my mentors are Martin Dougiamas, Founder and Lead, Moodle.org and Jonathan Newman, Developer, Catalyst IT.