all things me

I went shopping today in order to find some summery(-ish) clothes for Australia (and in general, too). I actually did find clothes: a dark purple lightweight shirt, a red/gold striped shirt and a white shirt. Now, all I have to do is find strappy tops to wear with those. I still have to find something festive, but I have 3 weeks left.

While I was relocating myself from one clothes store to another I walked by a gamestore with big SALE signs at the door. Well, of course I had to go in. Guess what I got? Splinter Cell Double Agent! (I had to call Dad to make sure he hadn’t bought it for me.) I just installed it and luckily Twin Peaks, which is on tonight, is re-run tomorrow so I can start playing right away. Ahhhhh. Or should I wait till my birthday? Naaah.

You’d better protect yourself — by locking your computer when you leave the keyboard for even a second. If you don’t, a nasty computer virus may walk by and select you as its next victim.

(It says “Hahaa!!! Your computer’s been infected by a virus!!! You’re a dead man!!!”)

That’s not my screen, though; I always lock my computer.

Last night I installed the newest version of Firefox (2.0) and just now I noticed that it checks spelling in form fields!

What a wonderful feature! This might be a good reason to switch to using Firefox as my main browser (currently I’m preferring the good ol’ Mozilla). I had a list somewhere where I’d written reasons why I haven’t switched yet. I’ll have to look it up and see if something is still holding me back.

[edit Oct 31st]

There is at least one thing: I haven’t found a setting for “Autocomplete best match as you type” which is Mozilla’s Location Bar Autocomplete feature.

Also, why doesn’t it select a link when I search for text?

[/edit]

I work in localisation among other areas of translation and I know it’s very tempting to re-use texts that one might think are “the same”. (What a money-saver it is, too!)

If only it was that simple.

One problem is caused by the grammatical gender. Here’s a simple example from a text I was working on today (it won’t give anything away): the word “Saved” — that was the whole UI string. In English and many other languages it can easily be translated and re-used without a problem. But in for example Spanish (I pick a language I know) you need to know what has been saved because the adjective/past participle is inflected depending on whether the subject is masculine or feminine (salvado or salvada respectively). You can’t use the same 7-character string in all contexts; I suppose most of the time it would just be annoying, in worst cases it might even be confusing.

Just now I borrowed an eBook from the library and looked at the file properties in Adobe Reader 7.0. Here’s what the window looks like:

I’ve circled the word Tulostetaan (Finnish). In an English program I’m sure it would say “Printing”, that is “Printing is allowed/not allowed”. The word can also be used when you print a page and the program lets you know that it’s busy doing something by displaying “Printing” or perhaps “Printing…” with animated fullstops. The words do look the same but they don’t mean the same. The problem in Finnish (and other languages) is that, if translated correctly, the words do not look the same. “Tulostetaan” can be used in letting us know that the program is busy but not in this context. Here the word ought to be “Tulostaminen”.

Usually recycling is encourageable — not in localisation I’m afraid.

Addition, Thu 5th October

I don’t know what has “gone wrong” with the above localisation, and I don’t know if the two (or more) strings are perceived as the same (i.e. use the same resource) or if they just have been copied to save money/time/trouble. They shouldn’t be perceived as the same because they clearly aren’t. Some problems could perhaps be solved if at least words that are of different parts-of-speech would be separated from one another (noun printing vs. gerund printing). Perhaps they are. Do remember that I don’t know a thing about application development or the inner workings of Windows applications (among others) so I have no idea what’s going on under the hood.

I suppose WordPress functions similarly (“the wrong way”) because it uses GNU Gettext framework where texts are translated on message level. At closer look it does look like the context is taken into account, though, so problems like in this example on multiple meanings of “post” are avoided. Way to go!

The library website for our capital city area started offering eBooks in July this year. The collection is still quite small and seems to include only non-fiction books at the moment.

I like the idea though. Of course, I wouldn’t read a 400-500-page Stephen King on the computer screen but for example the CSS guide I test-borrowed works better than well as an eBook. (It is a silly beginner’s book but I just wanted to glance through it quickly.)

A downside is that there (currently) is no way to book an eBook (ha ha). The loan periods are 1 day and 7 days (I think I saw 3 days, too) and you see how long a loan lasts, but because the book can be returned before the loan period is over there is no way to anticipate when a book might be available. And often someone snatches it first. That happened with the CSS book. Every time I went to check, the book was loaned for 5 more days or 2 more days. With books that have more than one copy available this isn’t much of a problem.

Can’t complain though, don’t really have a reason to either, because it’s all completely free (except for the electricity) and very convenient.

or “the D’oh Moment”

As I’ve been laughing at other people’s ignorance, I have to tell about a computer-related blooper of my own: Last week I received a PDF that wouldn’t open. I tried both the Adobe Acrobat/Reader versions I have installed – no luck. Then I went to one of the other tech people and asked “Which PDF versions you have?”

…

I, like many others, have taken a liking to Sudoku puzzles. I started with some simple scanning techniques (examples 1-3) which worked with the easier puzzles. Angus Johnson’s Simple Sudoku program has a delightful Help containing many strategies to solving a puzzle. I haven’t got the hang of (or memorised) the most advanced techniques but recently I finished even the “Ultimate Challenges” in two Sudoku books (about 200 puzzles each) with the following strategies that I’ve found the most effective — and enough.

1. I always start a puzzle by looking at the smallest area possible which is the 3×3 square. I check the missing numbers starting from 1 and see if I can put a number anywhere.

2. After I’ve gone through each of the 9 small squares so many times that I can’t add numbers anymore, I check each horizontal row.

3. After horizontal rows don’t help, I check each vertical row.

4. I repeat steps 1-3 until I can’t add any numbers. Then I write down the “candidates” in each square. Often this reveals new numbers to add when a square has only one possible candidate.

When the candidates are written down it’s easy to see pairs or small groups so I can strike out candidates in other squares. In the example there are three squares that have to contain the numbers 1,4, and 5 so I can discard them in the square that is outside the group. I do this scan on horizontal and vertical rows, too.

5. With the candidates in view it’s easy to find numbers to strike out when I go through the rows horizontally and vertically and notice that a number has to be contained in one of the 3×3 squares. Then I can strike out the number in the other 3×3 squares on the same row. Also, if a number is restricted to a 3×3 square and a vertical or horizontal row, candidates can be struck out within the 3×3 square.

In the example numbers 3, 6, and 9 have to be found on the first row so they can be struck out elsewhere in the second 3×3 square.

Before I learned the strategies 4 and 5 I had trouble finishing the tougher puzzles. I suppose I had thought of checking the pairs but not the larger groups.

Perhaps next I should take on making the puzzles because I tried that on Simple Sudoku and couldn’t get a single one pass the check (= only one solution).

Disclaimer: The examples are not trying to be realistic situations or solveable puzzles, they’re just diagrams.

I had received the following spam comment which was sort of refreshing after the “Hi Jane! I like your site!”, “Best site I ever seen!”, “May we exchange links” comments that come in the dozens.

HiHi
I’m really stupid
Yestarday I’ve got married and
today Im going make money online
So stupid
O-O-_ohh Mein Gott really you can see

Mein Gott, I’m so glad to have spam blocks.

I don’t really understand what this means:

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)

What is a ‘cognitive’ site?

But this is the most idiotic of all:

I just don’t have anything to say right now.

Today our latest tech support addition (probably/hopefully just for this summer) was doing something on Adobe Framemaker. I overheard him telling our DTP specialist that the program had given a message about something like “uninstall all TrueType fonts to continue” so he was asking what to do about that. He continued “I guess I can uninstall them because the program said so.”

I was asked to provide translations for a couple of words in “tricky” languages and in the message it said “Unicode values will do.” Well, I can ask the translations from vendors but I started wondering about the Unicode values. It isn’t too difficult to search for the character values one by one this time but what if I needed to process bigger chunks of text?

FileFormat.info is a wonderful site — I use it all the time (at work). There you can find oodles of information on a character, and you can even enter a character, e.g. Devanagari as I did, in the search field and it really finds it! Of course there is the official Unicode site but I haven’t yet learnt to use it to my full advantage. Its best feature — in my opinion — is the ≡ information (a character is identical to another character or a combination of characters).

Macromedia Dreamweaver is quite handy in determining the HTML entity (decimal) behind a character. (I’m not actually sure if you could choose to convert the characters to HTML Hex instead.) You just paste the text in the design view and the entities appear in the code view. For this particular assignment the client eventually needs the HTML entities.

But the question is, if I needed to find out the Unicode value of each character for a big chunk of text, how would I do it?