Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Svenska, Japanese and French translations

OH6NT made a complete translation to Swedish (translated all 255 strings which are currently available for translation - help & option windows are not available yet)! JA7UDE and JO2VTM have translated most of the Japanese strings, and other languages have received updates too. I also installed the French translation, although it has only 35 strings translated so far.

These contributions really make me happy this Christmas. It's really nice to receive all this help. It takes a good day's work to properly translate the site to a language. Thank you, everyone.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Polish and German translations installed

Thanks to SQ6NTI, there is now a partial translation to Polish (167 of 255 strings translated). HB9TQJ has translated 101 strings to German. HB3YKO has also started a French translation. Great work, thank you!

APRS parser module used by aprs.fi released

Here's a little Christmas present for the programmers out there:

Last night the APRS parser library used by aprs.fi was uploaded to CPAN. It's written in pure Perl, and it's reasonably complete, stable and fast. It's licensed under the same open terms as Perl itself (you pick: Artistic or GPL). It is written by Tapio Sokura, OH2KKU, with some additions by myself (weather packet parsing, machine-readable return messages, unit tests). Without this module, and the time Tapio took to write it in the first place, I wouldn't have gotten this far with aprs.fi. Parsing APRS packets is not easy.

It does miss some features (like telemetry parsing, and a few other smaller things), but I believe it to be the best parser currently published as open source. It validates input packets in a rather strict way and actually tells you what is wrong with each rejected packet. It does not crash when it sees something unexpected or corrupted. It returns numeric data in SI units. It's good enough to parse the APRS-IS feed in real time on any modern computer. It might even run on Windows with Perl (cygwin?) installed.

To install it on an Unix-like system (like Linux) with Perl using CPAN (as root):

root@proge:~#> perl -MCPAN -e shell
... if you're running the CPAN client for the first time, answer the questions, and once you're in the CPAN shell: ...
cpan> install Ham::APRS::FAP

You can also download the Ham::APRS::FAP module and browse it's contents on the CPAN web site. Installation instructions can be found in the README file.

Oh yeah. FAP stands for Finnish APRS Parser (or Fabulous APRS Parser). Ham::APRS::Parser was taken.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Dutch translation

Thanks to PG1G and PA3BWE, aprs.fi now speaks Nederlands (Dutch)! Thanks guys, that was really quick.

The translation seems quite complete, only a couple of the really long strings are missing. And the Options and Help windows, which are not (yet) available in the translation tool. But this is, in my humble opinion, very cool. Japanese, anyone?

The language shown to the user is selected by the preferred languages list of the web browser (Firefox: Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Languages -> Choose, IE: Tools -> Internet Options -> General -> Languages). The default setting of a browser usually follows the operating system's language settings.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

A little community effort: Translating aprs.fi!

A certain percentage of non-English speaking users seem to have some trouble using the site. The web site's statistics show that people who prefer viewing pages in English usually stay on the site longer. Even many users who speak English well would prefer to view the site in their native language. It is now possible for anyone to participate in a little community effort and translate the site to their own language.

So, if you speak some other language than English or Finnish fluently, and if you'd like to help your fellow hams a bit, please take a look at the brand new aprs.fi Translation Tool! Please read the instructions carefully.

This is a brand new application, and hasn't been widely tested before now. Some bugs will probably be found soon, but I'll try to get them fixed quickly! Feedback is welcome, post a comment to this blog post or send an email to the address listed in my blogger profile. Thank you!