Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

I encountered a new blog from my i18n tribe today, Localization Best Practices. Their post, “Pidgins and Creoles” or “Why Machine-only Translation Will Always Fall Short”, caught my eye.  It is interesting, even if I don’t fully agree with them.

Jonathan writes that, at a recent conference on localisation:

…an audience member asked me about machine translation, and if it would ever completely take the place of human linguists in the industry. I answered “No,” although I did concede that machine translation is consistently making strides and does have a place in the localization community. He then mentioned that a scientific group in Europe recently had success with a robot performing a live human appendectomy. He believed that if something that delicate could be automated, what made something a “simple” as language beyond the scope of machines and artificial intelligence?  I thought about his question and then simply said, “Because there are no pidgins or creoles for appendectomies.” Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Today is the day. Voters in British Columbia elect a provincial Legislative Assembly. I don’t hear many people who are happy about the choices on offer.  You can vote for the candidate of major party #1 or #2, but you probably didn’t get a say in choosing either one from the pool of possible candidates. You don’t get a way to say “yes” to the party but “no” to the candidate, or vice versa. You can be pretty confident that, whichever is elected, they will go to Victoria with no particular incentive to stand up for your riding to their party leadership. They are more likely to stand up for their leadership against you. You can vote for the candidate of minor party #3 or #4, or an independent, with a sinking feeling that you are throwing away your vote — or worse yet, splitting your side of the vote so that the party you dislike the most walks away with victory.

Chances are, the number of seats elected won’t match the proportion of votes cast. Chances are, as many as 60% of voters will find out they have no-one in Victoria who got their votes and answers to them.

There are better ways to run a democracy than this. The improvement on offer now is called BC-STV. It will be easy for voters to use, and gives a way out of the problems with the current system. Today is the day when British Columbia voters can adopt it, in the Referendum on Electoral Reform being held today.

I support BC-STV. I hope that you will support it too — either by voting for it today, if you can, or by helping make a reform like BC-STV happen in your own jurisdiction.

No Comments »

Last week I gave a presentation, International and multilingual Drupal and Joomla! sites. I’ve posted my slides and handouts at that link for anyone who wants to catch up on them.

The occasion was LinuxFest Northwest 2009, held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA, USA. It was a delightful event. It’s thoroughly grassroots and volunteer, it has a friendly and accessible vibe, yet it attracts very knowledgeable people.

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

I write in opposition to the [United States Transportation Security Administration]’s proposed Large Aircraft Security Program (LASP), Docket No. TSA–2008–0021.  I am a United States citizen residing in Canada, and a private pilot licensed by Transport Canada and the FAA. I fly for fun. [Background: this blog post consists of a public comment I just submitted to the docket.]

Security is valuable, and I’m in support of sensible measures to advance security. But security measures are trade-offs, and the trade-off has to be a good one. The benefits must outweigh the costs. The TSA’s proposed LASP fails this test spectacularly.  The costs will be huge, the benefits meagre. Additionally, the TSA’s justification is based on flawed reasoning. Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Do you know a blog which is by or for people in BC, and is in some language other than English?  If so, submit it for the BC Polyglot Blog Directory!

I created this directory in honour of the 2009 Northern Voice conference, which starts tomorrow at UBC. I wanted to highlight all those minority-language bloggers in BC.  In a little bit of searching I already have blogs in French, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese. I fully expect to find blogs in simplified Chinese and Punjabi as well. After all, 18% of people BC use a language other than English at home, according to Statistics Canada and the 2006 census.

I’ve created the directory on my site, at http://jdlh.com/en/pr/bc_polyglot_blogs.html. See the Rules and Q&A there for more information. You can submit listings for the directory by leaving a comment on this post, or by sending a message using that website’s Contact form for Jim DeLaHunt. Please supply the name of the blog, the URL, the language(s) in which it publishes, where the blog is located, and what geography it addresses.

I look forward to seeing this baby grow!

No Comments »

During a high school class, my teacher interrupted his discussion of classical Greek history to say, “it’s twelve thirty-four on the fifth of June, 1978”. In other words, 12:34 5/6/78 (in the British notation). Alert people in the United States had already celebrated that moment on May 6th. If you missed that moment, you have another chance on Friday: 1234567890 day.

Humans love to find patterns, and dates have rich potential for that. For instance, I was walking through a train station on a business trip in Tokyo in February, 1990. I noticed that people were making an unusual fuss about the train tickets. 1990 was 平成２年 , or “Heisei year 2”, in the calendar based on the Japanese era name. The date was printed on the train tickets as “H2-2-2”. The symmetry made them collectors items. (I wish I could lay my hands on a ticket from that day, to convince myself I didn’t invent this memory…)

I have a fondness for finding leaks in the software engineering abstractions that represent our messy real world.  I wrote last year about POSIX time, and the limitations in its representation of modern calendars and time zones. So when a leaky abstractions turns up as a pretty pattern, it’s irresistible.  And that’s what happens this Friday.

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Recently, I remodelled a Joomla template for one of my clients.  As I was installing newer versions of the template, I noticed an error message started appearing on installation:

XML Parsing Error at 1:1. Error 4: Empty document

However, the installation seemed to be successful. And I had a valid templateDetails.xml file in my template’s .zip file. There was a Joomla! forum thread “XML Parsing Error at 1:1. Error 4: Empty document” dating from December 28, 2008 about this problem, so it wasn’t just me.

Here is my diagnosis of the problem, and my solution.  Since this is one of those problems that drove me crazy, I’m going to put my findings here in hopes that search engines will find it and bring it to others who might benefit from the tip. Hence, it’s tagged “robobait”.

The short answer: the error message comes from a metadata file named ._templateDetails.xml, which the Mac OX 10.5.x Finder inserted into the ZIP archive. This file didn’t have XML content, but the Joomla installer interpreted it as such. And the content it did have, happened to be the kind of invalid content that provoked an error message instead of silent failure. The immediate solution is to generate the ZIP file in such a way that there is no metadata file named ._templateDetails.xml . Long-term, it would be nice if Joomla! would not display an error message in this situation.

Read on for more about the problem, the diagnosis, and possible solutions. Continue Reading »

17 Comments »

I remember that Christmas was such an exciting time for me as a kid. There was such anticipation. I was thrilled to be getting something I really, really, realllly wanted. I couldn’t wait to get started with the gift-unwrapping early on Christmas morning.

The adults didn’t seem to be nearly as eager to get up and get going. And later in life, I recognised that, when I was more eager to sleep in than to open gifts on Christmas morning, it was another sign I was no longer a child.
Continue Reading »

No Comments »

Right!  I was supposed to announce this three weeks ago!

I’ve posted the slides from my Dec 10 presentation, “Expand your reach with a successful multilingual web strategy”.  I gave this talk to the  Vancouver chapter of the International Internet Marketing Association (IIMA)’s monthly meeting.

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

I gave a presentation about “International and multilingual Drupal sites” to the friendly folks at the Vancouver Drupal Users Group on November 20, 2008. Follow the link above to see the slides.

This was a great opportunity for me to investigate Drupal 6’s internationalisation (i18n). As part of the research for my paper, I set up a basic Drupal 6 site with UI strings and content translated into Japanese and English languages. I found that Drupal 6 has very good support for multilingual site hosting. However, there were some tricky aspects to installing the right modules and then setting up the system configuration. I summarise them in the presentation, but it’s probably worth writing some better documentation.

Continue Reading »

1 Comment »