J. O'Conner Consulting

This job sounds fantastic to me. If you enjoy the i18n business and are ready for what sounds like a great opportunity, check out Symantec in Mountain View, CA. I’m not affiliated with Symantec in any way, nor do I know anyone that works there. It just looks like a great opportunity for someone. If I weren’t comitted to the Ventura/LA area, I’d be there in a heartbeat!

Here are some of the details and a link directly to the their job search site. Type “internationalization” into their search engine.

Internationalization Technical Manager
Job id: 587240

Shared Engineering Services – US Internationalization
The International Engineering & Tools Services (IETS) group is responsible for making Symantec products ready for the worldwide market such as EMEA and Asia Pacific & Japan regions. The group provides specialized services to product engineering groups, from software design to verification, and also leads engineering directions and standards on product development for international deployments

Responsibilities

• Manage a team of highly technical Internationalization developers and engineers responsible for providing specialized development services to all Symantec product development groups and establish strong work relationship with all product development groups.
• Take a leadership to standardize company wide software design for use of International environments.
• Work with the product development groups to set their engineering plan aligned with Internationalization standard and best practices for the international customers.
• Take a responsibility of having Symantec software products achieve Symantec standard quality before the releases for the international customers.
• Ensure that the world wide Internationalization development group members are following a defined development process throughout the product lifecycle to achieve goals for the international customers.
• Cooperate with the regional managers to prioritize and make work assignments and tasks based on members’ skills and availabilities.
• Set clear objectives for direct reports and keep track of deliverables and qualities. * Manages day-to-day technical decisions with the team members on the internationalization development activities.
• Be responsible for the technical development and improvement of the internationalization development functions.
• Interface with senior management and senior engineers in the group to report on operational goals and technical directions.
• Direct an Internationalization development area by acting as a project team lead.
• Mentor less experienced team members in advanced technologies, and develop and perform technical skill development plans.

One important strength of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) has always been its internationalization and localization support. The platform continues to evolve, and Java SE 6 provides developers even more control over how they access and use locale-sensitive resources in their applications. Java SE 6 provides the following major enhancements to its internationalization support:

• Resource control and access
• Locale-sensitive service
• Text normalization
• International domain names
• Japanese calendars
• New supported locales

Read more about this in the article:

International Enhancements in Java SE 6

Language and geographic environment are two important influences on our culture. They create the system in which we interpret other people and events in our life. They also affect, even define, proper form for presenting ourselves and our thoughts to others. To communicate
effectively with another person, we must consider and use that person’s culture, language, and environment.

Similarly, a software system should respect its users’ language and geographic region to be effective. Language and region form a locale, which represents the target setting and context for localized software. The Java platform uses java.util.Locale objects to represent locales. This article describes the Locale object and its implications for programs written for the Java platform.

Have a look. It’s an older article, but still perfectly valid and useful: Understanding Locale in the Java Platform.

And sure to be someone’s favorite, submitted by Jon Hanna at IUC 33:

A harsh lonely night,
my Private Use Area
has no assignments

Submitted at the IUC #33 by Ken Lunde:

Beyond BMP
So many ideographs
So many Extensions

Submitted at the recent International Unicode Conference by Mark Crispin:

Unicode has planes
But not a power of two
Strangely seventeen

After once declaring that NetBeans still coughs on spaces, I’m ready to declare that NetBeans has resolved this issue.

At my current day job, I’ve been using Eclipse almost exclusively. Not of my choice really. Sometimes while in Rome, you have to do as the Romans. These particular Romans like Eclipse, so I too must use it. And really I didn’t have a lot of choice because the Eclipse projects had spaces in their names…and NetBeans just pitched a fit over this, making an easy migration to NetBeans practically impossible without changing the projects. I don’t think NB really cared that spaces where in project names, but the Eclipse migration tool itself sputtered on it. Until now.

That’s right. This week after cursing Eclipse’s support of Javascript, I longed for NetBeans. I thought I’d give it another try. Using NetBeans 6.7.1, I imported my Eclipse projects and NetBeans appears to work properly. No errors, no problems. My Eclipse projects are working in NetBeans 6.7.1 despite the spaces in their names.

And guess what….I’m going to use NetBeans again after 2 years away! Of course, you know the Java support of the IDE is amazing. But did you also know that NetBeans does JavaScript FAR BETTER than Eclipse does. Seriously. I’ve been in JavaScript hell for two years now, and I’ve wanted to scratch my eyeballs out sometimes because of Eclipse’s poor handling of JavaScript files. For example, just because I don’t create a whole “JavaScript project” in Eclipse, the Eclipse IDE doesn’t easily recognize JavaScript files. And that IDE just refused to give me method completion or even jump to a helper class if I CTRL+click the name in the IDE. But NetBeans handles this without a single problem.

I’ve always appreciated NetBeans for its excellent Java editing, but now I have another reason to use it. It works great with JavaScript too! …much better than Eclipse!

It’s just a personal poll, but it says a lot about the popularity of NetBeans as a JavaFX development platform. A full 87% of JavaFX developers prefer NetBeans over rival IDEs.

See NetBeans 6 dominates JavaFX development for more information about the other IDEs in my recent poll.

A new poll on the Learning JavaFX site asks the question:

What IDE do you use for JavaFX development?

I know what I use…NetBeans 6.7.1. How about you? Answer the question for yourself and show your support for NetBeans!

If you’re learning about JavaFX, you probably already know about some of the basic data types: String, Number, and others. But what do you know about sequences?

A JavaFX sequence looks and behaves much like a Java array. A sequence is an ordered list of objects. Unlike JavaScript, JavaFX Script requires that each item in the list share the same type. The following code shows a sequence of Strings:

var names = ["John", "Gary", "Ruby", "Nick"];

JavaFX infers the correct type, but you can be explicit:

var names: String[] = ["John", "Gary", "Ruby", "Nick"];

Above, the names variable has the “Sequence of Strings” type.

Like arrays, sequences can be accessed by content index. A sequence’s position (index) is a number from 0 through n-1, where n is the number of items in the sequence. You can use the sizeof operator to tell you how many items are in a sequence.

var size = sizeof names;
println("size of names: {size}");

The easiest way to iterate through a sequence is with the for-in loop like this:

var friends: String[] = ["Jack", "Nick", "Matthew"];
for (friend in friends) {
    println("My friend: {friend}");
}

Note that the friend variable inside the for loop does not have a var declaration.