[tlug] Zaurus Otaku Kurabu

["Ulrich Plate" <plate@example.com>]

Hello,

Thank you for your hospitality yesterday, I enjoyed the Gentoo presentation
very much and was actually tempted to bid for one of the Sparcstations, even
without a Penguin attached, purely for its nostalgic value, but my wife
would have killed me, and that's never good on a weekend, is it...

As promised, I repost what I mentioned yesterday about the Zaurus Otaku
Kurabu, or ZOK. About two years ago, we started out as a group of mainly
German researchers and business people in Japan generally interested in
Sharp's Japanese Zaurus models for use as electronic dictionaries. We went
on and made electronic dictionaries like Jim Breen's EDICT and Ulrich Apel's
WadokuJT available for this platform, and over time a few people who could
do more than just an occasional Perl script dropped by and wrote code for
applications here and there. With the advent of the Linux Zaurus models,
first in the US, then in Germany and the UK, the ZOK, too, saw an influx of
developpers curious to see what we did, but the only ones that stayed were
naturally those active in development of Japanese applications for
non-Japanese Zauri, or generally i18n activists. Today we have about 50
members, and while still being somewhat dominated by Tokyo-based Germans, we
switched the official language to English a while ago, but most of us
speak/read/write fairly good Japanese, so that would be ok too.

Now, we've been approached to extend our activities to providing a forum for
developpers and users of the new SL-A300 models due to hit the shelves next
week (12 July), the first Linux Zaurus model for the Japanese market. We
would very much like to assume this responsibility, and we do know a few
things about user requirements for GUI design and applications, but are
certainly short of being knowledgeable enough about Embedded Linux and Qt
and whatnot. Which is why we would like to invite you friendly people to
join our mailing list and discuss what could be done in terms building a
community of Japanese and non-Japanese developpers, writing bilingual
Howtos, grabbing stuff on the Japanese models and making it available to
people with an international Zaurus, in short anything that serves to bridge
the gap between applications and development trends for the international
models and the Japanese ones.

Our current home is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zok, archives etc. are
open only to subscribers, and we try to protect the privacy of our members
by a moderated subscription process. If we can guess who you are just by
looking at your e-mail address or Yahoo! ID, you'll be approved right away,
otherwise you'll receive a message asking you to identify as a real person.

Grateful for all the support we can get, yours truly
Ulrich Plate