invention

From an article on the Small Claims Court in the Southern Suburbs Tatler, our local freebie newspaper:

The third case that afternoon involved a Xhosa-speaking man who, apparently, did some building work for a Xhosa-speaking homeowner and did not get paid for it. The two parties could not converse in English, and the commissioner had to rely on a friend of the defendant to translate. It soon became apparent that the arguments were too complex for the now bewildered commissioner to make a ruling without the presence of an official translator. The case was postponed.

So they may still get a ruling eventually, but it will be more difficult. Unfortunately language inequality is still a reality in South Africa.

I have now fixed most of the issues with multilingual install sets for OpenOffice.org (menu items stuck in a language, needing to edit the config files after the install) so we should be able to do a test release soon...

Finally worked out today how to get the OpenOffice.org setup program to display in the right language - was fairly simple, just set the Locale in Linux via LANG or in Windows via the control panel. In Windows, we need to manually edit the registry as Zulu and Sipedi / Northern Sotho aren't listed languages...

However got frustrated again with the OpenOffice.org code base ... the reason our languages aren't selectable from the list in the setup program, is that they have yet another list of languages defined there ... so we need to patch it. Any program should have exactly one list of languages or better still, use a common list shared with other programs...

An idea I mentioned to Dwayne a while ago - why not use lamp posts to hold WiFi HotSpots - and start a mesh that edges from highways into suburbs...

An idea I've been thinking about for a while, so was nice to read Metadata for the desktop by Edd Dumbill.

I've really been enjoying using KImDaBa to manage my photos. But it doesn't make it easy to share the photos in a categorized way with those not using Linux, or over the web... I wrote a little wxpython app that can read the database. But then I thought, actually a lot of the stuff in KImDaBa would be really useful for indexing other kinds of files (e.g. documents, music, sermon recordings)... but it would really need to be stored as metadata associated with each file.

And then I started reading on the semantic web and thought, this is really how it ought to be done, rather than the ad-hoc xml style of KImDaBa. In fact the article by Edd contains a good description of RDF and how applicable it could be on the desktop.

The real advantage would come if someone like FreeDesktop.org helped to define a standard way of attaching metadata to files (on a filesystem like Reiser, this can be done in the filesystem, but to work more broadly it would have to be in separate files), and perhaps even standard ways to index this metadata. Then KDE, GNOME, and even Windows tools could all work on top of this unified system. This should be done now, rather than waiting for new filesystems like WinFS which might simplify the process in the future. And an open source standard/architecture would gain a lot of traction...

Over the last few days, got a Python script going that merges the setup scripts for OpenOffice.org setups so we can create a multilingual installation with all the Southern African languages so far... Still needs a bit of tweaking but most of it is working. For some reason the installer seems to choose the language with the lowest dialing code, so I'll have to either include English or teach lots of people Northern Sotho