Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

One of my treats each year is to attend the Internationalization and Unicode Conference. This year was the 41st conference, or IUC41.  As I often do, I made a presentation. This year, the title was, Universal Acceptance of non-Latin email addresses and domain names: how does your framework rate? I’d like to share my slides. Continue Reading »

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I’m delighted to be presenting, once again, to the 39th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC39).  The conference is the gathering of my “tribe”, people who are as enthusiastic about language, text, and software as I am. If you like this stuff, it’s the best place in the world to be for those three days, so please register and join us there.

My presentation is, Building Localization Capacity Through Non-specialist Developers. Here’s the abstract: Continue Reading »

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A friend pointed me to a interesting blog post, Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong.) by Ted Clancy, 3. June 2015. The argument: “The Unicode committee is very clear that U+2019 (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) should represent the English apostrophe…. This is very, very wrong. The character you should use to represent the English apostrophe is U+02BC (MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE). I’m here to tell you why why….” [Emphasis in the original.]

I understand that there might be many people on this planet who actually don’t care about English language orthography concerning the apostrophe, contractions, and Unicode plain text representations thereof. Go ahead, skip this post and go on with your day. I am completely captivated by such questions. I started writing a quick reply, which grew to the point where it seemed better to host it on my blog than on Clancy’s comments page. Continue Reading »

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Our little meetup now has a name: Vancouver Globalization and Localization Users Group, or VanGLUG for short. Follow us as @VanGLUG on Twitter.  We had an outreach meeting in late January. So it’s long past time to conclude this series of thoughts about VanGLUG. Part 3 discusses “Where, When, and How”. Earlier in the series were A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (1) What, Who (Oct 31, 2014), and A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (2) Why, Naming (Dec 31, 2014).

Where

One challenge of an in-person meeting is where to hold it. The usual habit for such events is to meet in downtown Vancouver. This can be inconvenient, not to mention tedious, for those of us in Surrey or Burnaby. But I expect this is how we will start.

I would, however, be delighted if there was enough interest in other parts of the Lower Mainland to start up satellite groups in other locations as well.

Could we meet virtually?  In this day and age, it should be cheap and practical to do a simple webcast of meetings. Some may want to participate remotely. An IRC channel or Twitter “second screen” may emerge. But in my experience, the networking which I suspect will be our biggest contribution will come from in-person attendance.

When

In an era of busy schedules, finding a time to meet is likely an overconstrained problem. Our technology industry tends to hold meetings like this on weekday evenings, sometimes over beer, and I suspect that is how we will start. But it is interesting to consider breakfast or lunch meetings.

When to get started?  The arrival of Localization World 2014 in Vancouver got a dozen local localization people to attend, and provided the impetus to turn interest into concrete plans. After Localization world, we started communicating and planning. The net result was a first meeting in mid-day of Monday, December 8, 2014. Despite the holiday distraction, we were able to land a spot guest-presenting to VanDev on 6 essentials every developer should know about international. Our next opportunity to meet will likely be April 2015, perhaps March.

How

The Twitter feed @VanGLUG was our first communications channel. I encourage any Twitter user interested in monitoring this effort to follow @VanGLUG. We have 37 followers at the moment. We were using the twitter handle @IMLIG1604 before, and changed that name while keeping our followers. The present @IMLIG1604 handle is a mop-up account, to point stragglers to @VanGLUG.We created a group on LinkedIn to use as a discussion forum. This has the snappy and memorable URL https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=6805530. If you use LinkedIn, are in the Lower Mainland or nearby, and are interested in localization and related disciplines, we welcome you joining the LinkedIn Group. We are also accepting members from out of area (for instance, Washington and Oregon) in the interests of cross-group coordination. But for location-independent localization or globalization discussion, there are more appropriate groups already on LinkedIn.

Subsequent communications channels might perhaps include a Meetup group (if we want to put up the money), an email list, an outpost on a Facebook page, and other channels as there is interest.

GALA (the Globalization and Language Association) is one of our industry organisations. It has a membership and affiliate list that includes people from the Vancouver region. I spoke with one of their staff at Localization World. They are interested in encouraging local community groups. I believe this initiative is directly in line with their interest: we can be the local GALA community for here.  They have included us in a list of regional Localization User Groups. We are also on IMUG’s list of “IMUG-style” groups.
Do you want to see this meetup grow? If so, I welcome your input and participation. You can tweet to @VanGLUG, post comments on this blog, or send me email at jdlh “at” jdlh.com. Call me at +1-604-376-8953.

See you at the meetings!

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I am helping to start a regular face-to-face event series which will bring together the people in the Vancouver area who work in technology globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation (GILT) for networking and learning. This post is the second in a series where I put into words my percolating thoughts about this group.  See also, A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (1) What, Who (Oct 31, 2014).

Happily, this group has already started. We held our first meeting on Monday, Dec 8, 2014. Our placeholder Twitter feed is @imlig1604; follow that and you’ll stay connected when we pick our final name. And we have a group on LinkedIn for sharing ideas. The link isn’t very memorable, but go to LinkedIn Groups and search for “Vancouver localization”; you will find us. (We don’t yet have an account on the Meetup.com service.)  If you are in the Lower Mainland and are interested, I would welcome your participation.

Continuing with my reflections about this group, here are thoughts on why this group should exist, and what it might be named.

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The time has come, I believe, for a regular face-to-face event series which will bring together the people in the Vancouver area who work in technology globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation (GILT) for networking and learning.  The Vancouver tech community is large enough that we have a substantial GILT population. In the last few weeks, I’ve heard from several of us who are interested in making something happen. My ambition is to start this series off by mid-December 2014.

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I’m delighted and proud to have been invited back to give my tutorial to the 38th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC38) this November in Santa Clara, California.

Title: Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla 3
Date: Monday, November 3, 2014, 10:30-12:00. Track 3, tutorial morning session 2.
Here’s my abstract:

A practical look at the language and locale capabilities of Joomla! 3 and Drupal 7, two leading free software content management systems (CMSs). They let you build more powerful, more international websites faster. We look at: their core internationalisation and locale services, and localisation of UI and content. Each platform just had a major release, with advances in internationalisation. You will leave with specific tips for building your own site. We don’t assume Joomla or Drupal experience, but do include material for advanced practioners. A good tutorial for web site product managers, web designers, developers, and managers of international web teams.

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Delightful!  Last week I came home from the gathering of my trip, the 37th Internationalisation and Unicode Conference. My tutorial on Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla! 3 again went well. And I found inspiration, new knowledge, and old friends there.

Those of you looking for my slides and handouts, they are at the preceding link. You are welcome to share them, per their Creative Commons license. I’d appreciate credit when you share them. And I’d appreciate your feedback on this blog’s comments. Continue Reading »

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I can’t believe I didn’t announce this before now. I’m delighted to be asked, once again, to present a tutorial on Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla! 3, at the 37th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC37), this October in Santa Clara, California, USA.

This is my abstract, from the Unicode conference program for my talk: Continue Reading »

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I post on various forums around the net, and a few of my posts there get some very gratifying kudos. I’ve been a diligent contributor to StackOverflow, the Q-and-A site for software developers. I’m in the top 15% of contributors overall, and one of the top 25 answerers of Unicode-related questions. Here’s my second best-voted answer in StackOverflow so far.

The question, How do I get SQLAlchemy to correctly insert a unicode ellipsis into a mySQL table?,  was asked by user kvedananda in February 2012. In abbreviated form, it was:

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