insomnia bytes

Thanks to Google’s everlasting generosity, mentors from all Open Source projects that participated to the Google Summer of Code 2009 have flocked en masse to Mountain View to meet up and talk about code and drink beer. More in pictures in my Bay Area Flickr set, if you’re curious.

Sessions were organised spontaneously around various topics, and one of which, proposed by Amarok2’s Lydia/nightrose, was “Problems Audio Players face today”. Which resulted in 15-20 people from various projects (incl. Amarok2, Rockbox, Maemo, XMMS2 & others) talking about solving problems encountered by all music player developers (e.g. lyrics and cover art fetching), as well as features on our beloved users’ wishlists (portable player support, tags, musicbrainz, etc).

And if you weren’t there, don’t despair, for I just (finally) posted minutes for this session on the GSoC wiki. Some interesting ideas in there, so go and have a look, and get to work!

Granted, automatic translation from Japanese to English is a hard job, but sometimes it yields true gems:

The many user is in the midst of connecting. At present the server to be packed, we apply annoyance. It is the number of hands, but putting in place time, accessing for the second time, it can receive, the fish we ask.

I see.

Registering online (tickets, concerts, etc) is major fun when all the forms are in Japanese. The important information is usually displayed as images on buttons, which you have no way to translate. Also, you better know how to write your name in Japanese katakanas… In my case: セヴェイ セバスチャン (sebei sebasuchan)!

If you want to train your Japanese, the original text was:

多数のユーザーが接続中です。 ただ今サーバーが混み合いご迷惑をおかけしております。お手数ですが時間をおいて再度アクセスしていただけますようお願いいたします。

Now hopefully, I did not order pink skirts and successfully bought my ticket for the incredible Summer Sonic Festival!