Simon Willison’s Weblog

awesome-falsehood: Curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in (via) I really like the general category of “falsehoods programmers believe”, and Kevin Deldyckehas done an outstanding job curating this collection. Categories covered include date and time, email, human identity, geography, addresses, internationalization and more. This is a particularly good example of the “awesome lists” format in that each link is accompanied by a useful description.

# 8th April 2018, 7:57 pm / internationalisation, programming

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. People’s names are complicated. I’m not at all comfortable with the commonly used first name / last name distinction (as baked in to Django auth) since it doesn’t take cultural factors in to account.

# 17th June 2010, 7:44 pm / django, i18n, internationalisation, l10n, localisation, recovered, names

UnicodeDictWriter—write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files using Python. Stuart Langridge and I spent quite a while this morning battling with Excel. The magic combination for storing unicode text in a CSV file such that Excel correctly reads it is UTF-16, a byte order mark and tab delimiters rather than commas.

# 20th August 2008, 12:19 pm / byteordermark, csv, excel, i18n, internationalisation, python, stuart-langridge, unicode, unicodedictwriter, utf16

django-rosetta—Google Code. Very classy Django-powered interface for both reading and writing your project’s gettext catalog files, hence allowing application translators to work through a web interface.

# 11th April 2008, 7:31 am / django, djangorosetta, gettext, i18n, internationalisation

JavaScript Internationalisation, explained by reindeer. “Santa even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server.”

# 8th December 2007, 2:04 pm / 24-ways, comet, i18n, internationalisation, javascript, matthew-somerville, santa

Django security fix released. Django’s internationalisation system has a denial of service hole in it; you’re vulnerable if you are using the i18n middleware. Fixes have been made available for trunk, 0.96, 0.95 and 0.91.

# 26th October 2007, 9:47 pm / denialofservice, django, i18n, internationalisation, python, security, vulnerability

Announcing Babel. Impressive new Python i18n / l10n package, with improved message extraction and a huge amount of bundled locale data.

# 20th July 2007, 12:20 pm / babel, christopher-lenz, cldr, i18n, internationalisation, l10n, locale, localisation, python, unicode

Personal names around the world. I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about firstname/lastname fields in forms. Now I know why.

# 19th July 2007, 12:54 pm / forms, i18n, internationalisation, richard-ishida

Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage.

# 3rd July 2007, 4:43 pm / google, i18n, internationalisation, languages, translation