Richard Ishida on i18n in Australia

Richard Ishida, chair of Internationalisation at W3C was in Australia for a week long talks about i18n and how web developers, content manager and designers need to think about i18n from at an earlier stage of the project.

i18n (short for internationalisation as there are 18 letters between the first and the last letter), is an area where companies need to look into providing a feature if they would like to offer their service.

For example, one of the global projects that i'm working on (details out soon), doesn't have i18n as a business case, but will be accessed by people all over the world. This is where if we as developers, technical architects, designers think about i18n from an early stage of the project, future devs on the project won't need to restructure most of code to include other languages in. As Richard says, it doesn't have to be a big detour from the normal coding to include i18n, but just doing things differently.

Russ, Lisa, Amit and I went down to the W3C/WSG-Canberra meeting (on Feb 10) and it was a great trip, a good talk, (alright food, what else do you expect from maccas and hungry jacks).

While we were there, we caught up with the Port80-Canberra as well. It was good to meet Damo and Nathanael Boehm.

You can find my WSG-Canberra pics on flickr. All WSG pics from Russ, Lisa, Amit (and obviously mine) are also available. These include the WSG meeting in Melbourne on Feb 9.

edit: Fixed link to Amit's blog (it went to mine doh!)

Four things

So i've been memed by Lisa, so now i've gotta put my brain to work. Here goes nothing..

Four jobs I’ve had

• Technical Architect
• Web developer
• System support (Unix)
• Internet/Intranet User/System support

Four movies I can watch over and over

• Lord of the Rings I II III
• Matrix I II III
• Star Wars
• Star Trek (the movies obviously)

Four places I’ve lived

• Sydney, Australia
• Auckland, New Zealand
• Hyderabad, India
• [my room]

Four TV shows I enjoy

• Simpsons (and Futurama, Family Guy, Daria, South Park)
• Anime (some types like Naruto, Bleech, Kenshin)
• The Office (UK version, I think the US version is a bit lame)
• Star Trek

Four places I’ve vacationed

• Boulder, Colorao, USA
• Berkeley, San Fransisco, USA
• All around New Zealand and Australia (while living in both countries)
• Singapore

Four of my favorite dishes

• Mum's cooking
• Fettuccine Carbonara
• Most Asian dishes (Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean)
• All types of deserts (yummm)

Four sites I visit daily

• Google (my life)
• Flickr (what can i say, i'm addicted)
• Slashdot
• SMH (gotta read the news)

Four places I would rather be right now

• In bed (hang on, i'm already in bed :p)
• Somewhere cold (I miss Colorado, maybe in Canada)
• At a BBQ (hang on, i'm going to a Australia Day BBQ Pool party in about 1hr :p)
• Did I mention my bed? (oh yea i did)

Four bloggers I am tagging

• Lindsay Evans
• Ben Bishop
• Lachlan Hardy
• Tim Lucas

GBIF MAPA Mascot - Day 1

Our mascot for the project, a collaboration between Australian Museum and Colorado University.

More Boulder, CO sets on Flickr.

Symantec - Anti-Anti-Virus Host

So Symantec NAV having problems again. Apart from being a "hog-ware", it now can help those hackers inject some serious virus into the system. Check out the details of the exploit and not just for NAV here (pdf) (exploit by Alex Wheeler).

Hello Again!

After a long absence from blogging, I’m back. Well, I haven’t actually left the net, infact, it was, and still has 99% claim on my life (gawd, I sound pathetic).

Anyhoo, nothing new happening. Still haven’t taken a break from work in a long time, and no break this chrissy either. However, I’m heading to Colorado, USA in Jan. for a meeting, so that should be good. It is a free trip, and I can’t wait for the snow. Yay.

Oh, I did buy a new car recently, about it a couple of months ago. I love it. It’s a Honda Accord 3ltr V6. Its awesome, and it’s a reddish car, metallic red, what-ever you wanna call it. Find more info about the car here.

Jeez, the last time I blogged anything was in July. I guess a few things have changed since then. Apart from the up-coming trip to Colorado, and the new car, and trips to the Capital City (Canberra for you out-of-OZ pplz), just work has been taking up most of my time. I’ll do another post regarding some cool things on the net.

Watch for more.

We Want You

Would you like to be ruled under an oppressive government?
Would you like to live under poverty?
Would you like people you know and care die needlessly?

So why should the millions of people in Africa go through that? Don’t just throw money at the problem, coz it ain’t gonna help. Individuals like us, can’t do much with just throwing money at the problem. Small groups can’t do much, well, not unless you can buy the world. Yes, that’s what Africa needs right now, the 8 (or so) powerful people from the 8 most powerful countries in the world. They as a collective can do something about it. They can erase the debt that can help Africa. Sure, it might not fix it in a blink of an eye, but it can be a great start. It definately is a long walk. They can allow us to start the crawl to make poverty a thing of the past.

So, if you haven’t done so yet, why not go to the LIVE 8 website and add your name and petition the G8 leaders to do something about it.

You know you don’t want to go through it, so why let others go through it?

Africa needs you. Listen. Be human. Care.

Work - Part I

So lets talk about me a bit more..

Life, working as a contractor for public service, is good. I tend to think i have the best of worlds. Since I work as a web-developer doing some web based mapping, I get to work with both proprietary and open-source software.

ESRI is a good piece of software, the new version allowing you to do a whole lot of stuff. But you should be ready to dish out some major dough. It includes applications for desktop and web based mapping. ArcMap for map-generating and ArcCatalog for viewing datasets. While I do use these apps for general purpose viewing, I mainly deal with ArcIMS, the main app for web-based mapping. Pretty good.

ArcIMS's open-source equivalent is MapServer. I've just started playing with it and im hoping i've a good experience with it. Working on this other project which is a collaboration of various museums across the world called BioGeomancer. We (as the group from across the globe) are working on a brand new verison, and will be interesting coz this will be my first world-wide collaborative project.

So back to MapServer, I think it is pretty cool. A lot of examples and sites that use PHP with MapServer, but not many (read none) that I know of using Java/JSP, which is what I would like to do. So lets hope for the best.

As mentioned before (or in the list), A group of NSW governments have collaborated together and have released BioNet. Though I haven't contributed my help with any major coding, i've been doing a lot of backoffice stuff, which is a major part of this project; hey, it shows data from 5 different agencies, that mean 5 different types of database schemas, lots of records. It has been soft-launched and it's Project Manager, Gary Hyde, is one heck of a guy. He has been very instrumental in talking to all the agencies involved, and bringing the project to what it is now. Now the main guy who actually did the coding was Ian Scrivener from z02. He is one heck of a Systems Architecture.

More in Part II

'greetz

Bored!

Hello World!

Watching LOST!. Kinda boring. Will probably play some Need for Speed Underground 2. Or even Midnight Club 2. I should get some work done tonight, i'll probably will give that a go.

Wondering what the rest of the world is upto at the moment...

alrite, get some stuff done.

cheers,

whois

Alrite, a quick (kinda detailed) info about me..

I work as a web developer (contractor) for 2 government agencies:

• NSW Department of Environment and Conservation, Sydney, Australia


• Australian Museum

I finished my bachelors in Infomation and Communication Technology (majoring in Software Engineering and Network Management). While studing, i've been working for the NSW DEC (ex-National Parks and Wildlife Service).

My hobbies, interest, etc are all outlined in the profile, so go ahead and check it out.

A few of the websites that i've been involved with are listed in the links section.

That's pretty much wraps it up, if you have any comments, do leave them.

cheers,
-|[me]|-

Hello World!

It's a bit late, but i've joined the blog-world. A very busy man, so i'll try to update the blog as best as i can.

laterz y'all
-|[me]|-