J. O'Conner

Recently I had the opportunity to sign up for health benefits with a 3rd party site that manages these things for my employer. Sites that collect data often limit the set of characters that you must use for each field. That’s reasonable for numeric fields, date fields, etc. After all, you don’t want invalid data in a field, and you’d like to help users enter correct data wherever possible.

However, I think it’s unreasonable to limit characters that are legitimately used in a field type. For example, these characters show up all the time within perfectly valid names:

• APOSTROPHE ‘
• HYPHEN -
• ACUTE ACCENT ´
• DIAERESIS ¨

Come on…in 2010 these are not exotic characters. They exist in all kinds of unimpressive, common names….like O’Conner for example! In the figure below, the data collection form dislikes the apostrophe. Come on, it’s part of my name.

Unfortunately this is all too common. Do you have a problematic name? Share it with me…what name causes you grief in online forms?

I’ve owned a Macbook Pro before…it wasn’t a great experience, but it was acceptable. It was during a period of my career when my primary job was to communicate with other developers and to evangelize Java. The Macbook worked in that environment.

Now my needs are different, but I find myself using another Macbook Pro. Fine machine, don’t get me wrong…but I have to admit that I’m a bit lost regarding how to update the tools that were preloaded with the OS. For example, I find most of the common tools on this machine:

• perl
• php
• apache http server
• java

In all cases, these tools exist but are outdated in some way. They have newer versions that have features that I’m interested in, and I want to upgrade.

The question now is simple…what is the best way to find and upgrade these types of developer tools in a Mac OS X environment? Colleagues have mentioned “fink” and “Macports”. Are there other sources of Mac OS X software ports for these common developer tools? Do those sources place the new tools in the same locations used by the old tools, effectively replacing them in the system? Or do they place the new tools in a separate, different location?

I’ll find out the answers to these questions on my own as well, but I’m curious if you have tips and suggestions before I get too far down my own newbie path.

The submission deadline for technical sessions and tutorials for the upcoming Unicode Conference has been extended. You now have until Friday to procrastinate.

I’ve submitted my proposal, a technical session. Here’s the somewhat offbeat proposed session:

Character Conversions from Browser to Database…and Back Again

As characters travel through a typical web-based application, they must cross several boundaries and borders. These include the following:

• browser processing and JavaScript
• browser request creation
• middle-tier request processing
• database storage

Along the way, many forces conspire to transform and manipulate your noble, beautiful characters into unrecognizable, mutant forms. What causes those conversions and transformations? How do you combat destructive conversions?

This session takes you on a journey with some great characters on their travels from browser to database…and back again. Some make it back whole, and others simply never survive…

After several years away from full-time internationalization work, I’m happy to announce a significant change. I am working as the Media Globalization Architect at Yahoo. This is a dream job for me, and one that will definitely be challenging.

My primary globalization experience has been gained through developing internationalization frameworks and APIs, particularly for the Java platform. Sure, I’ve also worked to define best practices for Java EE apps as well, but never on the scale of Yahoo’s media properties! And that’s exciting.

I hope you’ll join me here in this blog from time to time as I write about some of my experiences as a Globalization Yahoo! I haven’t educated myself on Yahoo’s corporate blogging policy, but I do know that I’m tasked with developing and maintaining thought leadership in the globalization arena, particularly for web-based media. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to share some of my ideas and experiences here.

Until next time,
John O.

Yesterday a coworker complained that Excel wasn’t displaying a CSV (comma separated values) file correctly. Our application allows the user to send a report via email. The application provides the report as a CSV file. Because the report can contain multilingual text, we’ve decided to encode it in UTF-8. Unfortunately, when users click on the file to display it, usually in Excel, all of the multi-byte encoded characters display incorrectly.

The problem was immediately clear to me…Excel was opening the UTF-8 encoded files, but it was incorrectly identifying them as Latin-1 encoded files. In the absence of any charset identification, Excel must guess about a file’s content encoding. In our environment, many host PCs use en_US locales with Latin-1 as the typical charset. Excel uses that default to read and display CSV files.

My solution to the problem was to use the byte-order marker (BOM) to identify the CSV file as a Unicode file. I instructed my colleague to prepend the FEFF character to the file. The Java application that writes the file uses a FileWriter that encodes to UTF-8 to create the CSV file. It was simple to just output the BOM as the first character in the file.

Now when our customers double-click on these files, Excel opens the file, notices the BOM, and automatically selects UTF-8 as the file’s charset encoding. Now Excel displays the previously mangled characters correctly. And I was able to help resolve a problem with an easy solution.

Maybe you can give your applications a hint about plain text files as well. Writing the BOM to your file can help Unicode-enabled applications know how to decode your Unicode files.

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