Strainu onLine

Wikipedia e mai prietenoasă cu diacriticele cu virgulă

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Open Source, Wikipedia

De luna asta, Wikipedia în limba română a devenit și mai prietenoasă pentru diacriticele cu virgulă. Regulile au fost schimbate în așa fel încât este permisă scrierea cu diacritice corecte în paginile de discuție.

Au fost create redirectări de la numele cu diacritice corecte către articolele existente, aşa că acum utilizatorii de Vista, Win7 sau Linux pot să intre direct la pagina articolului din bara de adrese. Urmează crearea de aliasuri pentru spațiile de nume (unde depindem de administratorii serverelor) şi crearea de redirectări şi pentru paginile de discuţie.

Următorul pas, și anume trecerea definitivă la diacriticele corecte, va mai trebui să aștepte datorită cotei de piață foarte mari pe care o are IE6. Puteți participa și voi la discuția de la Wikipedia:Corectarea diacriticelor.

Tags: diacritice, Software, Wikipedia

Strainu.eu

Posted by Strainu | Filed under My Projects

Thanks to an offer from my hosting company, for the next year, the strainu.eu domain will lead you to this site. Yey!

Tags: hosting, My Projects, strainu.eu, strainu.ro

Danese Cooper is the new CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Open Source, Wikipedia

The Foundation announced yesterday that the new CTO is Danese Cooper. For those of you who were at eLiberatica in 2009, she was the one hosting the “lightning talks” session, which was a huge success. For the others, she is a FLOSS evangelist which worked for SUN, Intel and the less-known REvolution Computing.

What struck me in this choice is the change in profile from the previous CTO, Brion Vibber. Brion was the main code maintainer and submitter for Media Wiki for years. Without being totally sure, I think Danese is not very familiar with web programming, so she will likely be more of a supervisor and a coordinator than an active participant. This is somewhat normal and marks an evolution to a more organized, enterprise-like foundation.

This also means that most probably, the main code maintainer will continue to be Tim Starling, which hold the job since Brion left, last October. Good luck to both of them!

Tags: Danese Cooper, mediawiki, Wiki

Planeta Wikimedia is up!

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Open Source, Romana, Wikipedia

După mai bine de jumătate de an de probleme, Planeta comunităţii româneşti Wikimedia este în sfârşit disponibilă. Puteţi citi despre Wikipedia la http://ro.planet.wikimedia.org/ şi puteţi cere ca blogul vostru să fie adăugat punând un tichet aici la meta. Nu uitaţi să precizaţi adresa blogului şi a feedului ce conţine articoele despre Wikipedia.

Tags: planet, Romana, Wiki

Romanian Funds prices in GNUCash

Posted by Strainu | Filed under My Projects, Perl, Software

After the Bucharest Stock Exchage Module for Finance::Quote, I made another module, to retrieve the values of the Romanian Mutual Funds. The data is extracted from the Kmarket website which prooved to be a useful resource.

Here is how you can add this package to your own system:

1. Install Perl. If you’re using Linux, you probably already have it. Write perl -v to find out the version you have. If you’re using Windows, ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl should do the trick.
2. Install Finance::Quote. GNUCash offers an automated program to do that.
   1. Make sure GNUCash is not running.
   2. In Linux, open a root shell and write update-finance-quote. In Windows, go to the start menu and you will find a shortcut to a BAT file called “Install Online Price Retreival”.
3. For now, the script is not yet included in Finance::Quote and must be installed separately.
   1. Download the provided archive and extract it along with the rest of the Perl scripts for Finance::Quote (you will see the download path during the installation). Make sure the Finance folder overwrites the current folder.
   2. In the Finance folder you will find 2 files named Quotes.pm and Quotes.pm.patch. You can apply the patch by using the command
      patch Quotes.pm Quotes.pm.patch

      On Windows, just open the Quotes.pm file in Notepad, search for a line that begins with @modules = and add ROFunds to the list of modules.

4. Start GNUCash and go the the Tools->Security Editor menu. You will see a window similar to the one on the left side of Fig. 1.
5. Click on the Add button. A new window, just like the one on the right side of Fig. 1 will appear. Let’s say that you want to get the stock price for BT Index (a fund from Banca Transilvania Asset Management). You add the following information in that window:
   1. Full Name: BT Index
      
   2. Symbol: BT Index (this is very important, as this is the search criteria – you need to put the full name of the fund, without diacritics, as there are no symbols)
   3. Type: Funds (or whatever you want)
   4. Check the Get Online Quotes checkbox. Three new options will be activated.

   5. 

      Fig.2: Automatic price retreival

      Choose Type of quote source: Unknown

   6. From the drop-down choose rofunds.
   7. Click OK twice and you’re ready to test it.
6. Go to the Tools->Price Editor menu. You will see the dialog in Fig. 2. Click the Get Quotes button and you should see a new price appearing. You can notice the source is “Finance::Quote” and the price is the correct one for that date. If you wish, you can check it on the K-market website.

Tags: Finance::Quote, fonduri de investiţii, Funds, GNUCash, My Projects, Perl, Programming

openSUSE 11.2 is coming!

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Open Source, Software

Varianta în română o găsiţi aici.

On November the 12th, Novell and the openSUSE community will launch openSUSE 11.2. This calls, of course, for a celebration. Actually, there will be 2 celebrations in Bucharest:

• On November 12th, 20:00 EET, there will be a gathering at Trattoria di Bugsy, Bd. Iuliu Maniu 59, Bucharest – Map
• On November 14th, starting from 14:00 EET, we will have some presentations together with the guys from Fedora and Firefox in UPB, Room EG301 – Map

We’re waiting for as many of you as possible!

Tags: Bucharest, launch party, meetings, opensuse

Submit Word – Ajutor pentru dicţionarele româneşti

Posted by Strainu | Filed under JavaScript, Open Source, Romana

Dacă folosiţi Firefox, Flock sau Thunderbird, puteţi acum contribui la dezvoltarea dicţionarelor româneşti de la Firefox sau OpenOffice.org.

Pentru asta, trebuie să descărcaţi extensia Submit Word şi să adăugaţi cuvintele noi în dicţionarul personal (vezi imaginea de mai jos). Submit Word va încărca pe situl i18n.ro toate cuvintele pe care le adăugaţi în dicționarul dvs. personal. Dacă mai multe persoane vor sugera acelaşi cuvânt, el va fi adăugat în dicționarele româneşti.

Extensia e activată de optiunea "Adaugă în dicţionar"

Tags: dicţionare, extensii Firefox, Firefox, Open Office, Romana

Wikipedia now available for Amazon WebServices users

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Wikipedia

All the Wikimedia wikis are now available for Amazon users. The team took the decision to push the data monthly in order to allow for scholars an inexpensive way to analyze the huge amount of data that Wikipedia has to offer. Is anyone from Romania interested? Neah, didn’t think so either…

You can find more details on the AWS Blog or the Wikimedia Techblog.

Tags: Amazon Web Services, data mining, Wikipedia

MediaWiki Contributor

Posted by Strainu | Filed under PHP, Programming, Wikipedia

A while ago I submitted a patch to the New User Message extension of MediaWiki. The code was submitted in r51297, so I guess you could say I’m now a MediaWiki Contributor

Hopefully, pretty soon this extension will be activated on the Romanian Wikipedia.

Tags: contributor, mediawiki, My Projects, PHP, Software, Wikipedia

Just bragging…

Posted by Strainu | Filed under Open Source, Personal, Wikipedia

I haven’t written anything on the blog in a while, so I thought it’s time to brag a little about the latest developments

I’ve been to eLiberatica to meet people from other open-source communities. It’s been a nice experience, that you can read and see pictures about it here (in Romanian). Things are actually going pretty well with the openSUSE community. I’m going to the openSUSE conference in September, and Alex will probably come too.

On a more personal note, the last 4 months of running are beginning to show, and I’m confident that I’ll be ready to run 8 km at Tusnad Marathon.

The rest of my life isn’t going that well though. I want to post some weekend trips to the site, as well as some new (or rather old) code, but between school and work, I just don’t find the time for it. I’m also looking for some summer holiday ideas, but it seems my friend group has pretty much split apart.

I’m going through a wiki-phase, characterized by the despair of writing for the 20-30 people who participate on ro.wp actively. Therefore, I’ve decided to take a break, read their blogs and see what happens.

Anyway, I haven’t given up on any of these issues yet, so I’ll eventually write those posts and go back to Wikipedia.

Tags: bragging, opensuse, Personal, plans, updates