Janice Campbell's Weblog: Localization & Netbeans

I should be so lucky to have such a rich "social life". Instead, I feel overloaded and overwhelmed. First, with the social networking I need to keep up with for my job. I mean, I *am* on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, NotchUp, StumbleUpon, Ryze, mynetbeans.org. I blog; I wiki; I IM; I Gtalk; I Flickr, Frappr, and Picasa. I've tried and discarded meebo and GAIM (aka Pidgin). (Don't tell anyone, but I've also tried meetup.com, bayarealinkup, PlentyOfFish and YahooPersonals.)

I spend way too much time (personal, of course) on YouTube or netbeans.tv, or buying/selling junk I don't need on Amazon, ebay, and craigslist. I live on wikipedia and IMDB (I don't care if they are reliable sources of info or not). I subscribe to freecycle, a number of "keep in touch" career and job lists, and open source mailing lists. I've been known to even lurk around on classmates.com (oops, my ex found his new wife there).

I already feel ubiquitous.

But I don't Twitter, ICQ, IRC, or Skype. I'm not on MySpace or Orkut. (BTW, all the fun Brazilians are on the latter, so I am joining today!) No digg or del.icio.us for me. No time or money for gaming (whether play games or betting). Not even Second Life, where Sun has a pavilion.

Frankly, no one would consider me with it.

How can I keep up? Every day I get an invitation to join a new social networking tool, application, service. Recent invitations are for: Shelfari, iZimundi, Spock, ServiceBuzz, and Hoverspot.

Please, someone, tell me how to spend my time in an effective way in the social vertigo spinning out of control around me.

Secondly, I can't even keep up with the Sun apps and tools that drive the social network or are a player in them. In fact, some things I am just finding out about this week. Here are Sun "things" I didn't know about, even though they sit prominently on the sun.com home page:

• forums.sun.com
  
• wikis.sun.com.
  

Today I took a mini class in blogging. Tonight it's a conference call on how to work with communities.
That first question on the Sun wikis home sums it up for me: "Where do I start?". Or maybe I should ask: "Where do I end?"

Contributors to TranslatedFiles cover the globe; they develop applications in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. They get satisfaction from seeing their work downloaded and distributed around the world, and from knowing they are helping non-English speaking developers gain access to tools.

Of course, it's also fun to get a t-shirt for your contribution! It's not the driving force, but it gets recognition when you wear them at developer events and conferences.

I do my best to send out t-shirts to the active contributors. I also like to get back a photo of them wearing the t-shirt. I often use these photos (with permission) in my blogs or in presentations to management. Because, well, it's about the community and the people, as individuals, who make a product great.

Once in a while I run into trouble getting a t-shirt to a well-deserved contributor. There have been a number of incidents, but the oddest one has to be the first t-shirt I tried to send to Ahmet, a long-time NetBeans Albanian-language contributor. He lives in Kosovo. Until it became independent recently, it was under United Nations administration (UNMIK). We packaged up the single t-shirt and sent it by a well-known global carrier. It came back as undeliverable. They didn't know where Kosovo was. Next, we made sure to spell Pristina without the "h" this time and add "Serbia Montenegro". After a week, it came back again as undeliverable. We added "UNMIK" this time. Still came back. I was about to give up. We tried the regular postal service. Once again, it came back. Not as undeliverable, but hand-scrawled across the top of the package "Please indicate whether the recipient is Christian or Muslim". How ridiculous. I refused to play that game. Finally, we tried another global carrier" and called by phone and asked for specific instructions on how to address the package. Finally got there.

And, here is Ahmet, sporting the NetBeans 6.0 t-shirt at a robotics competition in Linz, Austria. No, this isn't the one I sent. It was sent from the Czech Republic. I guess they know where Kosovo is!

Hello NetBeans localization and translation community! Also known as TranslatedFiles community. The project was started some years back by community member and NetBeans Dreamteam member Vincent Brabant (French) and later joined by Maxym Mykhalchuk (Russian) and Manfred Riem (Dutch).

Now, we are on a mission to create a mission statement. Please join us in this effort to bring NetBeans to developers worldwide and inspire them to use the "only IDE you need".

http://wiki.netbeans.org/TFMission

Today is Independence Day in the US. Families and friends gather together to barbecue, swim, play sports, picnic in parks, eat watermelon, enjoy each other's company, and watch fireworks displays.

The founders of this country fought for people to be able to think freely and pursue their beliefs without repercussions.

Today, I honor Amaury Rodríguez Pérez, a developer and NetBeans fan from Cuba, who, because of US export laws, is unable to freely download NetBeans. My hope is that one day the political issues between our two countries will be healed. Hope for equality, liberty and justice around the world.

Amaury and his son Adrian showing off the NetBeans 6 and Translation Team tshirts.

They have finally arrived! These were designed by the NetBeans global TranslatedFiles (Localization) Community, which encompasses developers, fans, and students from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe! If you are a member of the community, you know how to contact me.