Mathrick no PATANKO PRESS!

A new ccharset version is out, courtesy of LaC.

The installation and everything stay the same.

Yep. It’s not my accomplishment, mind you, I was too lazy and just got used to the shortcomings. So the new version of ccharset comes courtesy of teh_LaC. Here you can get it. Readme stays the same as in the old version, but bear in mind the config file is no longer compatible, so you’ll have to set channel encodings again. Ah, and topic setting doesn’t, and isn’t going to work, yay XChat.

Been to København yester-yesterday, it’s cool, full of interesting places, big and noisy, and I prefer my Smallville to live in :). And it’s cool when you can usefully communicate in Danish, and I’ve been able to do that more and more over the past months.

developerWorks published another piece, this time about i18n in GTK+ context. Never before was so much of tricky knowledge (attempted to be) stuffed into so few words, let’s hope it manges to give people the right idea where to begin.

Also, preparing for the trip to GUADEC, and by implication, me leaving DK for 2 months, not to mention trying to catch up with my SoC that’s been lagging way too much. Fun.

(This post is written in Japanese. I don’t think it’ll look pretty on advogato, but I can’t help it either)

今日#nihongoで日本語の私という意味の言葉についての会話が出た。それで、次の表ができた。

• わたし
• わたくし
• われ
• わし
• うち
• おれ
• ぼく
• あたし
• わっち
• あちき
• 自分
• わたす （何か北の方言だと思う）
• あたい
• こちら
• ちん
• まろ
• せっしゃ
• それがし

面白いよ。ポーランド語とか英語とかには一つだけの言葉がある。西洋語が詰らないw

Since yesterday, I’m back in DK. Bleh.

Introducing CCharset!
If you were ever annoyed by XChat’s perpetual inability to follow per-channel encoding settings, then be no more! CCharset allows you to override encoding on a per-channel basis, so now you can use iso-2022-jp in the ever stubborn #nihongo and utf-8 everywhere else. Isn’t that cool? It does exactly this one thing, manages your encodings, nothing else, particularly won’t spew stupid messages on all channels you’re on and fuck with your colours, unlike certain other plugins (coughfreecharcough). Also supports saving your settings, so you don’t have to ever enter that info more than once.

Of course, the usual disclaimer applies, so if this plugin runs over your cat, then sorry for the cat, but you have only yourself to blame.

Update: It has come to my attention that the plugin messes with non-ASCII topic setting badly. So there. You have been warned. I’ll probably (attempt to) fix it someday, but right now, it’s not a top priority.

reason #84.

(For those of us who need smart IME anyway, check out UIM, great stuff. Japanese and Polish diacritics at the same time are finally possible.)

… that Danish and Norwegian are so similar to each other. Gives you immediately 2x more bang for buck for every bit of language your learn. And makes it easier to get valuable google hits, too.

Whoever at MSFT decided to replace undisplayable CJK characters with ? deserves my most sincere kick in the nuts, deliverable whenever we meet.

Woah

00:05:48 will forever live in our memory. That is all.

Salmoni, that was Genuine Windows programme, not programming :). And besides, http://www.arafaelion.com/ seems to be claimed by godaddy.com or something.

Couple of observations from Denmark:

• They are really hyperpatriotic in some regards. You see discount stores display their offer-of-a-day invariably on top of the Dannebrog. But what really made me laugh was a visit in Netto store, where I found the shelf with honey. There were 2 jars labelled as follows:
  • Danske honning - 25,-kr
  • Udenlandske (ie foreign) honning - 12,50kr

  So, you pay twice as much for the Danishness of it. Where I come from, we’re more used to classifying honey by what it was made from, not the nationality of bees which produced it :)

• Symbols do matter. You don’t notice (or even know about) it normally, but there are some hidden assumptions and conventions used where you live even in truly trivial matters, and you only come to realise that after coming somewhere else, where those no longer hold. Like, here when ending a mathematical proof, you won’t see people writing QED on the blackboard. Instead, about 90% will draw ■ (U+25A0 BLACK SQUARE), just like you see printed in some books. Also, when marking true/false, in Poland you’d use ✓ (U+2713 CHECK MARK) and ✗ (U+2717 BALLOT X). Here you see ✓ (U+2713 CHECK MARK) and % (U+XXXX NO CLUE, that is, symbol which looks very much like percent sign, but has dots instead of circles).
• Ads delivery is a very nice job here, because people actually wait for them. It’s really extremely nice when everyone you meet is nice and greets you, although I have to bring them down with my “Sorry, I don’t speak Danish”, so usually no further talk follows. Pity.

In other news, I (finally) started frequenting gym in here; taking shower is a funny experience when you cannot raise your hands above your shoulders :)

Turns out that this MSKLC thing (which I downloaded to try and fake Compose key from Unix) is more fun than I suspected. First, the whole download process, with its braindamaged “genuine windows” stuff, which apparently wasn’t read by any English speaker before publication:

To share comments with and ask questions of other users of genuine Microsoft software, participate in the Windows Genuine Advantage newsgroup.

And then, I get to see this pinnacle of UI and HCI design:

Now I finally understand the true benefits of Genuine Windows programme.

Lots of everything going on, due to various circumstances I wasn’t able to post in the last week, so the amount of what should be written is rather large. Part of the reason was that I was sick last weekend, so instead of going for the announced cottage trip and having fun, I spent it lying in bed, not-really-able to think or write consistently. After that, I no longer had a computer available, so posting was rather out of question. And now you know.

Anyway, back to the stuff, in random order:

Bought myself a pair of bike lights, to be able to bike at night and not get fines from the local police. Turned out they didn’t work. Gone back to the big store I got it from (Bilka), and they have special section split out reserved just for the customer service. You just get a number in line, wait till it’s your turn, and settle your matters quickly and painlessly. Now, I can’t really compare it to Poland, because I don’t think I ever had to complain about a faulty product, but what I like here is the acceptance of the fact that shit happens, and someone just has to handle it, and its better for the business to do the dirty work, instead of relaying it to the customer. That’s still far too uncommon in Poland, sadly. My belief in the fact it’s a system, not an isolated occurence is strengthened by me having to cancel the cottage trip (due to the abovementioned sickness) just the next day, and it went even smoother than before — I just needed to make one call, I was instantly proposed to get my money back whenever I’m good enough to visit the office. Really a zero fuss system (even though in the end the lights stopped woring after few days, and I spent more on them I’d pay for at local “everything home and workshop” store for proper lights, but the customer service is still nice).

OTOH, I must say that things here are seriously fucked up. Honestly. For example, I missed one lecture because the timetable isn’t up for it yet (thanks to busted electronic everything system, which generated hellish delays all over the place), and I couldn’t login to “blackboard” system on Tuesday (again, busted system), and that was the only place where I could learn that first lecture is on Wednesday. So I learned that, on Wednesday after coming back from school.
Further, you’d expect that all these “e-learn” gizmos we’re supposed to use, SingleSignOn system (from Oracle, no less), account automatically created for every student would mean that I’m able to use the labs computers right from the start. Well, no. Instead I need to register with every institute separately, and of course, each has its own naming policy, acceptable passwords policy, policy on whether I’m regarded to be guest or full time student (which projects on my account’s name), hell, I even need to get Windows and Unix accounts separately in one institute! (But, not in another). Oh, and Unix in form of Solaris 8 is just a joy to use (even with Gnome 2.8 installed), becaus that fucking thing has no support for XKB. Which means no hope for Polish keyboard. Which means no school paper writing. Which means angry me, grrr. Fortunately, both institutes also have Linux labs, which is a lot nicer. Even though it’s Mandrake (or Mandriva now), which in turns means every menu and settings fucked up to infinity. D’oh.

Oh, and another lecture I missed because it overlapped with another class (from the same institute, nothing fancy like classes from different institutes), and, I think I found the Denmark’s single civil officer unable to speak even a word in English. But I wonder why she was placed in Folkeregister (National Register), which by definition deals with assigning CPR (sort of Danish social security evidence) numbers to the foreigners. And everything here is so damn expensive. Coffee is 12kr at the very least (I mean, coffee at the human-run place. Vending machines strangely enough have 4 kr for coffee, strangely because they have ∞ kr for everything else). And the books I’m supposed to buy will easily amount to several thousand kr. Booo :(

Just got back from welcome party at Uni. There was rector’s speech, then a speech from one professor researching globalisation, and then there was kindof party. That’s what I call international. We got Polish, Chinese, German, American, Hungarian, Danish, Korean, French, African, Norwegian and some other nationalities I have forgotten. Afterwards we went to the bar in the city centre, and now I’m beat. G’night.

So. I wanted to get around the city and look for cheap bikes today. Instead, I got flat tyre and spent entire time I had allocated on first attempting to fix it, and then getting new one and changin it. Ghrr. Also, the laptop I’m using right now has danish keyboard, in small notebookish layout to that. And some genious invented having “Fn” key instead of Ctrl, and Ctrl slightly to the right. So I need to aim to the right when I want to hit Ctrl-Backspace, which often results in Alt-Backspace instead. Which for some reason means “delete everything” in IE (yeah, I’ll be installing FF ASAP here). So first half of this post has been already typed in 3 times. Yay for great ideas. Now I need to finish before I run out of battery juice, because I have the laptop, I have the power adaptor, but I don’t have cable to connect that adaptor to the mains :>

Wow, an update. There haven’t been one in something like… 4 months? That means I had to delete several thousands of spam comments before doing anything :(. I need to finally update to WP 1.5, hopefully it’ll cope better with spam. Honestly, I’d like to just have my spamassasin but for blog, and a way to delete all the spam comments at once.

Anyway, I’m in Denmark now (been here since Thursday). Thanks to Socrates/Erasmus programme, I’m in Odense (take a look at the coordinates which should be somewhere close to this post :), as an exchange student. So far it’s very cool, if you have ever seen kids books illustrations of typical Danish town, there’s a news for you: it’s all true. The houses really look like they do on pics, most are small and very, hmm, cute. Also, the interior design seems to be universally good, you just don’t get to see badly arranged houses.

The city is all crazy about bikes, Odense being one of the biggest Danish towns is also the most bikified one. You can get by bike everywhere. And you have special bike lanes on every street, including roundabouts, which is something completely uncommon in Poland. That’s the part I really like about it, although I still don’t have a bike on my own (I will be going to town to look for a bike tomorrow). What totally beat me was young woman, with two small kids, doing quite significant shopping, and then riding home by bike. Turns out that with a basket, kids seat and a trailer you can do it.

There’s still a lot to do before the term starts, good thing my “buddy” (the person you get assigned to help you get around in the city when you arrive, sort out the paperwork, etc.) is a very nice guy, and extremely helpful. Thanks to him, I have a bike before I get my own, same thing with a computer (I don’t have a laptop, and couldn’t really take my desktop with me here).

One very noticable thing (besides everyone speaking Danish) is that you can get away with English almost anywhere. Even the old ladies walking with dogs will tell you you don’t need to be afraid in English once they notice you don’t understand Danish :>. Another is that Danes really like their Danebrog, there’s a good chance to see a flag on every street, and about every other shop is called “Dansk something” (the rest is called “Fynsomething”, Fyn being the name of island Odense is situated on). Quite similar to Americans and their love of Stars & Stripes, I think.

That’s enough for today, I need to get up early tomorrow and look around the city for a cheap bike.

So, looks like I’ll have to spend some of my precious time killing certain Rich, for he attempted to spoil my fun of reading Prattchet’s book when it comes out in PL. I mean, it’s very good to advertise Prattchet to anyone who may not know his works yet, but for heavens sake, DON’T just go all happy, let’s-put-some-spoilers all of sudden. It’s already hard enough to avoid accidentally reading these highly annoying synopses publishers just love to put on the backcovers. If I also have to defend myself from fellow men, that’s going to lower my chances of retaining some kind of mental stability significantly. Now, you don’t want to be driving a geek insane, do you?

wingo, “I see no beastly problem here”. Instead, I see area filled with several, resonably well defined problems, each of reasonable size and complexity. Think Unix, dude (hint: CORBA isn’t Unix, CORBA thinking isn’t Unix thinking)

salmoni: wrong. Very, very wrong. Google is by no means cross platform, it has one, well defined platform: the web. The fact that you are able to host Google’s target platform (that is, $browser) on multiple OS’s / GUIs doesn’t make it cross platform. It’s the same kind of portability that Swing does — “we look equally foreign everywhere”. If you still think Google does any kind of x-platform UI, answer these simple questions: What are the platforms Google looks (and feels) native on, besides browsers? Does it have standard Win32 UI? Does it conform to GNOME HIG? Does it employ Aqua guidelines? Is it integrated in any way with KDE? Does Google use ROX UI metaphors? In any case, the answer is negative, ergo Google is not cross platform.

e8johan: That’s probably because:

1. Mono is easier for high-level app development than C
2. It has very good, actively promoted, FLOSS implementation readily available, together with nice set of GTK/GNOME bindings (they’re very much not perfect, but what they lack in functionality, they gain in marketing :). Compare that with (yes, yes, don’t say you thought I wouldn’t bring that up ;) Java and its eternal “not quite there” state of FLOSS implementation
3. On related note, Mono is very visible. It has vibrant community of users eagerly evangelising Mono to the outside world, it has insiders advertising it left and right, and, quite unlike Java-GNOME, GTK# is being held as main selling point for Mono. Just ask yourself — how many people know of Java-GNOME, and how many people can name one GNOME app written in Java?
4. Mono is new, hip toy, which just about everyone wants to try out. This is very similar to Java hype 10 years ago, with one important difference — this is today, and both Java and .NET are wiser by 10 years of Java’s experience. But it’s .NET that’s new and hip :)

Now, why bring Java on table at all? Because, whether you like it or not, Java or Mono/.NET are the platform for great majority of corporate users. Which means in-house development. Which means real majority of apps used, but invisible to the outside. I hear that Java-GNOME is particularly strong in this invisible development. But then, Mono is visible in the wild, which means newcomers, evaluating one of platforms to pick up for future development, are more likely to stumble on GTK# than Java-GNOME, and conversely, use it as in-house platform of choice. So, in the end, Java-GNOME being so little visible outside internal corporate usage can hurt it in that internal corporate world.

And finally, (WARNING: totally subjective opinion follows) Mono/.NET is nicer than Java, so it gains new users on the expense of Java followers. How is it better? Delegates, built in events, x-language support, little things here and there. Also, quite surprisingly for MS platform, it has less marketing fuss in it than Java. Noone tries to convince us that platform and language are one, versioning is quite sane (did someone say Java 1.5? I mean, Java2, that is, Java 5.0), etc.

Now, having said that, the most popular non-C language in GNOME development is almost certainly Python / PyGTK. And there’s a reason to that — it’s one insanely great language with insanely great bindings set :)