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Wednesday, August 6 2008

Firefox fans in Romania can win cool prizes using mobile applications

By Irina Sandu (Romania) on Wednesday, August 6 2008, 02:03

mobile_ff_ad2.jpg It is really easy for Romanian Firefox fans with a bit of luck on their side to get T-shirts, caps and stickers with their favorite browser. How it goes: This last 6 weeks M(obile)fun, a local company, has been promoting Firefox 3 in their mobile applications and giving out prizes consisting of Firefox T-Shirts, caps, and stickers. Mfun provides various mobile applications, which are completely free and really easy to install. After downloading one or more of the applications on their mobile phones, users instantly get access to news, cinema schedule, football scores, TV program or other type of content, depending on the application they chose. There is available, non-intrusive ad space in each of the applications and some of this space has been taken by Firefox 3 banners and full screen ads. When using the mobile applications users view the ads and are able to take part in the “Firefox 3 – The best browser yet!” contest.

Contest mechanism: Users get a code from the “Contest” section in the application’s menu and they take part in the competition by sending the code ithrough the special “Contest” section on Mfun’s website. Every user who sends a code is taking part in the contest and each user can generate one code per day.

A computer program is used to randomly choose the lucky winners. Every Saturday Mfun users check the Mfun forum and their e-mails to see whether who is the happy receiver of cool Firefox stuff.

So far through the Firefox contest we have given away a total of 6 T-Shirts, 3 caps and 3 sticker sets. The contest is open from the 28th of June until the 27th of September. That means 3 months of Firefox 3 advertising and lots of chances for fans to get cool stuff with the Firefox logo on it. I want to thank Jane from Mozilla Europe for making this possible and I hope we can do lots of other fun things for Firefox fans and users in Romania.

Irina Sandu

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Tuesday, August 5 2008

Open Komodo first localized langpack

By Cédric Corazza (France) on Tuesday, August 5 2008, 20:32

Open Komodo LogoWe are proud to announce the first localized langpack for Open Komodo in French.

This work has been initiated a few weeks ago by Goofy, Jojaba and myself on Babelzilla. An Italian langpack will be soon available as it is in its final testing stage.

It remains some hardcoded strings here and there in the user interface, but no doubt this will be fixed soon.

For the localizers interested in localizing Open Komodo in their language, jump onto Babelzilla site! this is a matter of about 1600 strings.

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Friday, July 18 2008

Fire-French team heads out for Fire-picnic

By Mozilla Europe Interns on Friday, July 18 2008, 18:04 - Community meeting

Hi Fire-members!

The sun is shining, people in Paris are wearing sunglasses, everybody is talking about vacation, sunbathing, drinking fresh cocktails... So the French Mozilla team got tired of working and decided to go out on a Fire-picnic with the Fire-contributors! We bought some Fire-dwiches, Thunder-beers, Mozi-Sodas, and everyone was of course wearing Fire-T-Shirts. People were watching us, as if thinking " Is there any cyber-pilgrimage meeting somewhere, or what?!"

We headed for the Buttes Chaumont and spread out in the Fire-fresh grass, prepared for an afternoon of Fire-events. People from different places of Paris joined us on this Fire-meeting, waiting for The Boss (just below) to open the festivities.

the_boss.jpg

Obviously, we all ended up having animated Fire-discussions: about Firefox, The Download Day, and of course it gave us the oportunity to learn about each other. Who's who? That was difficult. We actually discovered that Fire-people had real faces and also lived in a real world! I swear, they're not virtual! And they have real names! (not strange mutant-hero nicknames like Gandalf, Omnisilver, Florifox, Krchak, etc.)

french team

At the end of the afternoon, we finally returned to the Mozilla office, where the contributors could visit the new european headquarters. They raided the goodies-cabinet, snatching T-Shirts from each other, as well as pins of various sizes, magnets, tattoos, stickers, and so on!!! WE'VE GOT PICTURES GUYS! YOU ARE FILED!

Thanks everyone for coming, we had a Fire-great time!!

Delphine & André

See more pictures here and here!!!

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Wednesday, July 16 2008

Baking a Firefox 3 Launch Party

By Nukeador (Spain) on Wednesday, July 16 2008, 19:25 - Community meeting

Here you have the recipe:

  • A nice place to meet
  • Mozilla local contributors
  • A screen to make a presentation
  • Firefox users and bloggers
  • T-Shirts and other stuff to draw
  • Desire to have fun

These were, more or less, the main ingredients of the Firefox 3 Launch Party at Madrid past 27th of June where Spanish contributors from translating project NAVE, the Spanish community Mozilla Hispano , users and also Pascal Chevrel from Mozilla Europe met for a great party.

The first problem we had to deal with was the place for the party, hopefully in Spain it's very easy to have a pub for free if the owners know you are going to be a lot of people. We also made a nice Firefox 3 presentation available later under CC-by-sa where we show what is new in this version.

The people attending were very nice and participative in all the event, talking with contributors and discussing about Mozilla. As usual, the T-Shirts draw was one of the more participative points and where the people enjoy most (thanks Mozilla for sending all the stuff).

We created a site to manage the attendees separately from Mozilla Party to be able to send confirmation emails, although the entrance was free, only the people in the list would have a number for the draw.

To sum it up, Madrid party was a great event that everybody enjoyed and also a good opportunity to meet new contributors and users ;)

Thank you all! Firefox 3 Party Madrid See all photos.

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Tuesday, July 15 2008

Meeting in Rome with Aza Raskin

By Giuliano (Italy) on Tuesday, July 15 2008, 18:46 - Community meeting

Last Friday night at 10pm, Mozilla Italia had the pleasure to host Aza Raskin of Mozilla Labs in Rome. Not only the man is a very smart and talented guy, but he is also a very kind person. We set up a pub to accommodate a large number of people, but due to the very short notice and the almost holiday period, in the end we were all sitting at the same table and maybe this wasn't as bad as we thought...

This is the presentation we had:


Aza presentation in Rome (2008/07/11)

It was actually the presentation Aza made the same morning in front of 300 people (but we didn't manage to get any other detail about it) ending with a short resume of the famous concept demo on the FF mobile interface still on the drawing board, the little genius made us salivating about some glimpses of what the future holds not just for Firefox, but for the Web in general. You can also find a small graphical appendix, but still very fascinating, which goes under the name Algorithm Ink. But the real best part of the event was the presentation, even if only partial due to internet connection, of Ubiquity.Stunned people By reading the small wiki page, you would treat it as a trifle. When you see it in action, you are simply blown away... If you have ever seen Enso, another brainchild of Aza, try to mix it with Mozilla Weave, Tamarin and to move the application space of Enso from the desktop to the whole world wide web. You'll end up having an Enso on steroids, customizable with no limit due to Tamarin, which can interact with local and remote applications or using the web, and can use web contents from different origins, and so on, and everything happens through a simple command line. A stupid example because right now I can't imagine another one: select some text and/or images on the web, open ubiquity and enter "email goofy via yahoo": et voilà, the selected text and images are emailed to goofy@email.address using Yahoo webmail... Otherwise you can write your own small action called “bug”: you open the source console, add your “bug()” function to the list of available commands using a language similar to JavaScript capable of executing many different operations. The nice thing is that Ubiquity learns what you want it to do and by using Weave everything is saved on Mozilla servers with a double encryption, so that you and only you can access those data and operations. Do you want to share the newly creates function with others? Simply make it public! It's really hard explaining in words something that must be seen with your own eyes: maybe another simile we can use are Unix pipes used to connect different applications together and manage to flow of informations. That's probably what best describes what Ubiquity is, even if it doesn't look so stunning if you don't see it working.Giacomo, Aza and Iacopo To give you a small idea about the potential of this “magic wand”, you should think of ubiquity as the tool which will enable you to customize not only web sites navigation, but also the presentation of their contents (e.g. microsummaries, microformats, etc.). Possibilities seem to be really countless. Before we forget, it looks like they are well over milestone 2 as noted on the wiki page... ;) Oh, the thing works already in local with FF3 and remotely on ubiquity site... Do you want to know how big ubiquity is in its “base” version? A few hundreds of lines of code, including empty rows and rows with only closing braces for functions... Try to be more expressive than that... Other interesting details are in our opinion the creation in the near future of some sort of a brainstorming site, similar to what already happens with Dell and Ubuntu (so that everybody can suggest ideas and discuss other peoples' ideas), and the increased attention paid to local communities which are the first think-tank Mozilla has at its disposal. In conclusion, on one hand we felt sorry about the small number of people who were present, but on the other hand it was really an exciting experience! See you next time Aza, and thank you!
(Written by Giacomo Magnini)

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Friday, July 11 2008

Libre Software Meeting 2008 in Mont de Marsan

By Cédric Corazza (France) on Friday, July 11 2008, 17:37 - Open source events

I attended for the first time to the Libre Software Meeting which took place this year in Mont de Marsan, in Les Landes (South of France), from the 1st to the 5th of July.

Monday:

Departure from Nice at 6:00 am, arrival thirteen hours later in Mont de Marsan. I quickly find the gorgeous tiny hotel Paul Rouget found for us… where I meet Damiano Albani who arrived earlier. I drop my luggage in my room, freshen myself a bit and we walk with Damiano towards downtown to get something to eat. It is rather desert. We manage to find a little restaurant with a terrace alongside the Midouze River, where we achieve to bake in the setting sun eating a "salade de gésiers avec foie gras et Serrano". Then, a little walk in the town, it is very nice (no photo, I left my camera in my room). Back to the hotel.

Tuesday:

8:00 am, breakfast and heading towards the associative village to set up the Mozilla booth. A little visit in the village to greet the acquaintance. The heat becomes unbearable under the marquee (at least 40° C). Frequent exits from the marquee and fresh bottles of water help to bear this heat a little. France 3 Aquitaine (a local TV channel) ask us for an interview. Very brave and a little wily, I tell them: The boss will be there in 10 minutes (the boss, it was Paul :-D ). Paul et Laurent Jouanneau join us around noon and Paul gives his interview. We walk downtown with Paul to buy some sandwiches and a bermuda for me who have the bad idea to attend the meeting in trousers... Back to the associative village. Laurent is interviewed by I don't remember who :-\ . Very few visitors for this first day. I am approached by representatives from the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology. They plan to localize more free software in Vietnamese, including Mozilla products. I give them some explanations and we exchange details. In the evening, restaurant then we go to the "Nocturnes" (the nightlies) in the Auberge landaise where all the geeks from the event gather to discuss while drinking some beer.

Wednesday:

Rude awakening. I arrive in the village around 10:00 am. It rained last night and the temperature is fine. Richard Stallman and Henri Emmanuelli (a local politician) visit the village and chat with people at the stands. A teenager class has been hanging there since yesterday and make a raid on the goodies from the stands (this will last until Friday...). We welcome the visitors, more numerous today. Some Debian guys come to see us and throw the troll: Firefox is not free software. It's damned irritating: we explain, but it's useless. Whatever, it was a quiet discussion. In the evening, restaurant under a heavy rain, then Nocturnes at the Auberge landaise. I meet there Marc Laporte, one of the main developers of TikiWiki, currently used for SUMO. We disagree on many things, but the discussion is constructive and Marc is a very nice guy. Besides, he will offer nothing less than 200 beers during the Nocturnes during all the event.

Thursday:

Late awakening, again :) . Arrival in the village, greetings to fellows and I head up to the Bugzilla talk animated by Emmanuel Seyman. Back to the Mozilla booth. Posters, stickers, Firefox and Don't hurt the Web badges are running short. David Marteau joined us. I'm hanging around from a stand to another, and surprise, I see a Mozilla developer teaching to a Webkit developer how to code :-D ;) (Sorry Julien :-p ) . End of the day. We go back to the hotel to drop our stuff and then head up to the Auberge landaise for the Repas du libre (Libre Meal). We are welcome in the park in front of the Auberge landaise by a banda (a local traditional music band). Then comes the dinner, very tasty :) . I meet there Konstantin Lepikhov, one of the Russian localizers for Mozilla products.

Friday:

Should I say it again? I wake up late :) . Back to the village. Holding the stand, talking with the visitors, …Paul and Julien Chaffraix are polishing up their common talk, Laurent is making his third talk. In the afternoon, interminable speech from Richard Stallman (3 hours) at the same time than the one from Paul and Julien. Laurent, David and Damiano attend their talk, I keep the stand. This allowed me to meet and talk a bit to Janina Sajka and the people with her about accessibility, and I quote her: Firefox rules!. In the evening, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry from Mont de Marsan offered us an evening buffet at the Auberge landaise, and then, the Skapsule concert began.

Saturday:

I wake up late, again ;) . The other Mozillians left at 8:00 am and I stay alone on the stand. It smells like the end of the event, many stands are empty. Nothing more to say about this day, except that the people who were working during the week could finally come and that there are no goodies left. I put in order the stand and go to the station to catch my train at 6:30 pm.

I could meet many interesting and passionnate people during this event and put some faces on many nicks from the people from April.org who came numerous. Many kudos for the organizers of this Libre Software Meeting 2008 edition for the hard work they provided and the logistics to welcome more than 2000 attendees.

See you next year in Nantes for the 2009 edition from the 7th to the 11th of July.

The full photo album.

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Thursday, July 10 2008

The European Mozilla Community blog is open!

By Pascal Chevrel (France) on Thursday, July 10 2008, 12:35

Welcome to the collaborative blog of the European Mozilla community.

This blog will be a place for people behind the Mozilla Europe website to talk about what happens in their country on mozilla

None of us are native English-speaker, English is usually our second, third or even fourth language so expect typos, grammar mistakes and barbarisms to flourish here! ;)

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