Statcounter and Recent Visitor Maps.

Fig 1) StatCounter: Bar Graph of last weeks visits

I have been utilising StatCounter almost since the very start of my AV Media, Anytime, Anywhere! blog back in early February 2006. I find the visitor information it provides about my blog to be very interesting. (Even though I only make use of the free version)

It's great to add a post to your own blog, then over a few days watch how a particular post increases interest and visits too your blog. For example the peak Wednesday of last week in the fig 1 image above, was the day after my post about the Iphone

Fig 2) StatCounter: Recent visitor map, zoomed into a visitor of interest.

Over the last few weeks, using the Google visitor map facilities of StatCounter, I have been enjoying the visual mapping conformation of just where my visitors come from wherever they be around the world.

I have taken special notice of a regular visit to my blog from somewhere in the South Atlantic and I am inquisitive to who this is and wonder, is this an oil or gas rig in the ocean or what exactly?

Fig 3) StatCounter: Recent Visitor Activity sample.

There are many different ways to review visitors to your website with StatCounter, where I have very quickly skimmed the surface with this particular blog post.

---Edit 01/18/2007 21:00:00 PM---

Fig 4) My mysterious visitor? Reading my blog post about StatCounter today.

Using Nokia 770 to Surf & blog on the Internet

I have recently become a little disheartened by all the talk that the Nokia Internet Tablets are not a good for general Internet surfing using the provided Opera 8 Browser. So last Night whilst lying in bed I quickly fired up my Nokia 770, connected to my Wi-Fi network and the Internet and visited a few sites.

Below are some captured Nokia 770 screen grabs to illustrate the ability to open various sites and work within site almost completely normally and as you would expect to on a typical PC.

1a) Google Maps: Location 28027 Madrid, normal view. (Full 800x480 view on Nokia 770)
1b) Google Maps: Location 28027 Madrid, Satellite view. (Full 800x480 view on Nokia 770)
2a) Blogger2: Dashboard.

2b) Blogger2: New post where using Opera 8, I am unable to enter the Title & Link fields.

2c) We are able to clearly see and edit the HTML of the post, although the edit html, compose and preview options do not display correctly? (Like Title and Link options above)

2d) Adding multiple images from Nokia's Internal or external memory works great.

2e) Images uploaded to the draft Blog post.

2f) Saving the draft blog post with the uploaded images.

3) Gmail. (Full 800x480 view on Nokia 770)

4) BBC World. (Full 800x480 view on Nokia 770)

5a) Editing text using the virtual keyboard designed for the stylus. (Earlier screen capture from a few days ago when using old blogger)

5a) Editing text using the Finger & Thumb keyboard.


I am well aware and I do agree that there are real issues using the Opera 8 browser on the Nokia 770 and Nokia N800. With regard to sites with heavy Flash usage, there are definitely problems with the Nokia 770 which uses Flash 6; but even the new Nokia N800 with Flash 7 and more onboard memory, the problems have not been fully resolved.

However to say that the Nokia Internet tablets are not a good Internet Surfing device when on the move is just plain wrong !

How to Translate Canola GUI into your language

I recently heard the call made by the Canola Media player development team, to in their words...... " Guys, if you want to contribute with canola, here's an opportunity! Translate canola into your own language! "

So over that last couple of weeks in my spare time I have learnt from scratch how to go about creating French and Spanish translations of the Canola Media Player Interface.

This was my first attempt at any GUI translation, I was a complete beginner at the start of the task. Hopefully this overview "How to" will provide guidance on how to create the necessary translation files for the Canola GUI into your own mother language. (This method can be used by anyone to provide international translations of various Linux GUI applications)

Follow me, as I gradually understand (step by step?) how to edit, update and save the required translation files.

1) First I download the originating Canola i18n files (POT) of the Canola interface from maemo.org then unzipped them where thanks to M$ Windows they were immediately associated with M$ Powerpoint as templates. Grrrrrrrr


2) Because I am normally a windows XP user in the home (and although my Nokia 770 OS is Linux) the first thing I did, was to take a quick look at the content of one of them with the trusty old windows notepad application.

Urrrghh, what's the congealed mess I said to myself.

3) I then fired up firstobject XML Editor to see if it presented the text in a more clear and formatted manner.

That's much better, it's now easy on the eye and I can look at the editing task ahead. Initially I thought that this XML editor was ideal with it's small footprint on the PC (Just an exe and no registry changes etc) I do like it's simplicity and ability to open and tile/work with multiple files at a time for easy cutting and pasting i.e.

4) I then opened the Babelfish webpage in Firefox my favourite web browser to begin translating the English (msgid) strings into French (msgstr) strings.

I appreciate that is not necessarily the best way to start, but I wanted a quick feel for the task ahead, believing it's better to prepare a quick general translation, then discuss accuracy with a few friends because translating from one mother tongue to another as we all know is fraught with problems.
I calmly and methodically edited all the provided *.pot files saving them with the same extension but adding French in titles accordingly. I had no idea what elements of the file header needed modifying and was not sure how to record and change date/time accurately every time I modified the file. (using the XML editor)

5) I then dived onto the web to find out more about *.pot files and found a useful section in Free/Open source software "A guide to Localisation" which would have been very helpful before the start of my activities. "Gettext: Architectural Overview" and "The POT and PO file format" sections of the guide give an effective overview of Word Internationalisation "i18n" and *.pot and *.po files

6) OK, Now I am beginning to get it, I downloaded poedit which as I found out is a program specifically designed for creating *.po from *.pot files which runs fine on M$ Windows. I now understand that the *.pot files can be constantly updated as the GUI further develops.

The *.po files understand (with Poedit) how to take the additions/modifications from the *.pot adding them to the *.po automatically (So the person translating only needs to add translation for the added/modified items which are easy to see in the Poedit interface)

Basically you highlight a line in the file and then you are able to edit the translation and make comments etc. (The catalog, settings: window allows for modification to file header records i.e. Team and email values)



7) My understanding of completed canola translations at time of this post are

Brazilian pt_BR
Catalan ca_ES
French fr_FR
German de_DE
Italian it_IT
Polish pl_PL
Spanish es_ES

Where currently the most up-to-date list and downloads of translated *.po and also the originating *.pot can be found in the zip files held here.

8) Please be aware that currently none of the translations will work with Canola 1.0 (beta1) version as its not ready to interface with them. However the more translations that are provided by the Canola user community, the more that will be available when a version of Canola is released that supports the GUI translation *.po files.

9) Of course this "how to" is only an overview for windows users, but I would like to think that everyone who wants a little understanding of GUI translation in Linux will find it useful.

I would like to thank Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri and Hanful for their support, whilst I gained an understanding of what was required to create the Canola GUI and Config translation files.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please add them by commenting against this blog post.

New Apple iPhone videos in webjay RSS Feed

If the apple iPhone is as good as it appears in the promotional videos and images on the new iPhone web page! (Technical Specifications)

I thought I would add the mov URL's to an RSS Feed in my webjay account newappleiphone.xml

The RSS Feed and video playback works well on my TV and Philips SL300i via TVersity (Transcoded from mov to mpeg1 for my SL300i but TVersity transcodes to other formats such as wmv for the xbox360)

Alternatively you can view the videos normally on your PC via the new Apple iphone page

Let's hope the iPhone is not totally AV crippled by DRM like the MS Zune and is able to link with Media servers such as TVersity.

I thought I would prepare this post in my blog to illustrate how easily webjay can be used to create an RSS Feed playlist of Internet available AV URL's that can be shared with for example the TVersity Universal Media Player Community.

Here is a low quality video from the BBC of Steve Jobs talking about the iPhone at his 2007 Keynote speech

---Edit---Here is the full iPhone demonstration, Steve Jobs made during his 2007 Keynote speech in QT mov streaming only format!

Nokia N800 Internet Tablet on it's way

There has been increased Technical interest over the weekend at what appears to be a scoop, ahead of an official announcement of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet at CES.

I am not going to review and re-edit information from posts made by others to give the impression I know all about the Nokia N800, just provide a few useful links to blog and forum items have found talking about it's comparison for example to the earlier Nokia 770 (with pictures)

Here we go then :-

• John Tokash's Blog (Includes N800 YouTube Videos)
  
• John Tokash's N800 Pictures
  
• itT Forum News: The Nokia N800?
  
• ThoughtFix's Blog
  
• CARRYPAD Journal
• N800 Pictures, 5th Ave. Productions
• LinuxDevices.com
  

This post will be edited and updated as I find more useful information over the next few days.

Thank you to all the guys in North America taking time to provide early Nokia N800 information to all and users of a currently available Internet Tablet such as the Nokia 770. Lets hope the Nokia N800 is available soon in Europe and the rest of the world.