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Archive for category Education

willyaranda. Status report

Mar 14

Posted by willyaranda in Education, SUMO, Support | No Comments

Do you know SUMO? Ok, that question is easy to answer, but do you know SumoMo (SUMO for Mobile? Nope? Oh, poor you! (seriously, Firefox for Mobile is awesome! And its market will grow exponentially in the next months thanks of the future releases for Android and Windows Mobile)

So maybe you haven’t heard before about SuMoMo, right? And what’s is this site about? Thunderbird support!

I’m actually coordinating the localization to Spanish (a generic one, which tries to include all es-* variants). It’s a giant effort, and we’re focusing on translate all support for Fennec (Firefox Mobile, finished) and Thunderbird (waiting for review some articles, ping myself), and the most useful articles for Firefox (>0,5% of interest).

Maybe for some of you that your native language is English you don’t see this effort but I can assure that it’s incredibly hard to sync all articles to English the way we do it.

At this point I want to give a huge thanks to Pedro (breaking_pitt on IRC and SUMO*) for his insatiable work with the articles. Withour his job we’ll be at a minimums levels.

Anyway it’s awesome that our contributions could reach thousands of people every month. And for me, that’s the better thing I can expect.

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XulTitles! update

Aug 11

Posted by willyaranda in Education, Mozilla planet, Projects | No Comments

Since my last blog post 8 days ago, I have been investigating on how will be the UI (wow, UI designers have a privileged mind!) and basic tests with JavaScript and DOM manipulation as improving my knowledge of these two technologies.

And I think it’s time not to say how is going my project, instead I prefer to share various things about the development.

Since I’m developing a XULrunner application, maybe some things don’t fit for you, but anyway, some tips:

I’m using MacOS X, and there is a problem while running XULrunner app without installation, since if you try to write in a textbox the text that you entered will be displayed on the system console (Terminal) instead in the selected/focused textbox, so I’m using Firefox 3.5 as it is capable of running standalone applications, so to have an easy shortcut to open the project, I have added this line to my 

.profile

file:

alias xulSub="/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -app /Users/willyaranda/mozilla/mmtc/xulsubtitleeditor/application.ini -jsconsole"

and when I need to open the project:

xulSub

and I’m done!

And the bolded argument: -jsconsole . It is a great way to show the Error Console to view Javascript errors, messages, alerts, XUL problems and any kind of debug information we need to know.

And about messages. I have been reading some ways to log messages to the Error Console, but the nice way (thanks FUEL!) is to put on Javascript files:

Application.console.log("foo" + barVariable);

And you will get a message!! Nice, isn’t it?

And just for you, a little screenshot! :D (comments welcomed) (the code is HERE)

xultitles1.png

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A new project: XulTitles!

Aug 3

Posted by willyaranda in Education, Projects | No Comments

Hi guys! (post intended to Mozilla Planet Education ;) )

A lot time since last blogging, but now I’m exam-free, yay!

But let me explain: from 13 to 17 of July, I went to the Mozilla Madrid Technologies Course (MMTC from now), where Pascal, Vivien and Paul explain us how to use Mozilla technologies, how to create an extension, how Gecko works and all mozilla related stuff that they could show us. (see Paul’s blogpost)

So, then we need to have a project to work on. We can choose what to do (extensions, documentation, Firefox or Fennec…), and there is a lot of nice projects (see the list).

In my case I have decided to work on a XulRunner app to create and edit subtitles with openvideo (do we love OGG/Theora, don’t we?) and right now I’m prototyping the functions and what and how to do in my app and a basic UI.

So in the next weeks I’m going to blog more often, writing about the progress I have done, I’m also crossposting to the Planet that Pascal has open to centralize all our work.

Have a nice summer!

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video tag, Dreamhost and Firefox 3.5

Mar 10

Posted by willyaranda in Education, Mozilla planet, firefox 3 | 1 Comment

I’m copy-pasting a blog post from blizzard, as we had a conversation on IRC about using the video tag on Firefox and Dreamhost hosting (due a problem with my other blog (in Spanish)):

A quick note if you’re going to be using OGG open web video hosted on web servers. There’s an important configuration change that you should make so that Firefox recognizes it as video. In my Apache configuration I’ve added this directive:

AddType application/ogg .ogg

AddType application/ogg .ogx

AddType video/ogg .ogv

AddType audio/ogg .oga

Most web servers are likely to return the mime type as “text/plain” which Mozilla will not show as video. If you don’t set it, and it’s served up as text/plain then Firefox is likely to show either an error or endless buffering. (Although I suspect that the endless buffering is actually a bug in our internal player and will likely be fixed.)

Update 2: You should look at this post from Silvia for the correct information. Thanks, Frank.

Anyway, you should follow the original post, as it could be updated since the publish of this post.

And I have sent an email to Dreamhost support to get a global support for .ogv files. I will post the decision as soon as I’m getting the answer.

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It's time to change to another browser…

Mar 3

Posted by willyaranda in Education, Firefox, Mozilla planet | 2 Comments

First of all, if you are reading me from education.mozilla.org planet, sorry for my bad english. I’m trying to improve it!

Second, thanks to David Humphrey for adding me to the planet. I will try to keep you informed about thing we are doing in Spain, more concise, in education world (as I’m currently a college student).

One of my first problems on University was to see only Windows computers on it (I’m studying computer engineering, and this is a bit depressing). You shouldn’t have only Windows-machines availables to the students if you are going to teach future computer engineers. So we (my colleagues and me) discovered that we have Linux machines in laboratories, where we can write our own code in a standard way easily and using open source software.

But the most depressing thing about having only Windows-based machines is that you have only one browser per default: Internet Explorer. Not only the bad Internet Explorer. We have Internet Explorer 6!!

Nobody doubts about Internet Explorer. It sucks, and v6 is old (not updated for 5 years) and it’s slowing the web (and developers’ brain). So I’ve thought about trying to install Firefox on all computers. Well, yeah, I can’t, users don’t have enough perms to install new things.

737A712B-A643-4BDE-AB8C-B917D5DE6CA2.jpg

I’m not yet an expert about operating systems and LANs, but I think each student has her/his user, not an “student” standard account and I don’t know how are stored documents of each student, because we usually wait about a minute from the login window to the full desktop (it seems that all is retrieved from an intranet server).

So, what do you think I should do in order to try to make Firefox as the default browser on my University?

For me, the best option is to talk with IT guys and try to explain them what is Firefox (in case they don’t know it!). And then convince it about the Fox and his friends :P

A37F3022-233C-42BF-9F92-C68327B6C395.jpg

Have you driven a similar change? If so, please, contact me on this blog post’s comments.

PS: And if you have time, please, write down my grammatical errors to improve my English. Thanks!

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