Category Archives: i18n

[Video 375] Heidi Waterhouse: The Seven Righteous Fights

Projects don’t always go right; that’s the nature of the world.  But sometimes, projects go wrong for reasons that you could have predicted from the start. Which means that if you see these problems taking place, you should tell the people who are running the project, so as to avoid problems later on. What problems and issues are worth fighting about? In this talk, Heidi Waterhouse tells us what she thinks. If you’re on a software project, or (even better) you’re managing one, think about these things before you start … or, as she says, you’ll be doing the equivalent of trying to push chocolate chips into an already-baked cookie.

[Video 256] Harry H. Porter III: ASCII and Unicode

If English is your native language, then ASCII makes perfect sense. Everything you would ever want to write fits within those 127 characters, and then some. But the moment other languages come onto the scene, you need more characters than ASCII alone can provide. Unicode is standard that tries to provide a unique number, or “code point,” for every character, in every language ever created.  How does Unicode work? What are the different encodings, and what are the trade-offs that they offer? In this talk, Harry H. Porter III introduces the ideas behind ASCII and Unicode, and how they work.

[Video 249] Sarina Canelake: I18N — World Domination the Easy Way

If you want your software to be used by people around the world, then you will probably want to incorporate internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n). In this talk, Sarina Canelake demonstrates how we can and should approach i18n/l10n in our Web applications, using Python and Django in her examples. Regardless of what language you use, if you’re using i18n/l10n, or thinking about doing it, then the ideas in this talk will be useful for you in the near future.