invention

My sister Debbie got married yesterday! What a fantastic wedding, on Oudekraal beach in Cape Town, with the mountains and the sea ... the wedding just seemed to reflect Debbie and Jonny so well. Celebration, Worship, Community, Joy.


they danced by the light of the moon

and hand in hand,       
on the edge of the sand.        
they danced by the light of the moon,   
the moon, the moon,     
they danced by the light of the moon.   

Having had many deadlines with my St James Software work, I haven't had a chance to respond to many Pootle / translate enquiries as I would have liked to. (Fortunately I've been making progress there, it's been nice to get things finished off). Anyway I leave them all marked unread until I do - now have exactly 100 unread messages in my translate list mail folder.

And as a Christmas bonus I've added a release 0.8rc2 of the Translate Toolkit to sourceforge. Won't have any time to react to any issue until after Christmas, but please do send them to the mailing list. This includes the full source code for Pootle, and the only other requirement is jToolkit (the web framework we use).

I'd like to emphasise that Pootle is Open Source software, available under the GPL - the version we've put up is really a demonstration although we would like to host a full version somewhere some day (anyone wanting to donate resources let me know ) ... but the idea is anyone can download it and use it for whatever they need.

Happy Christmas everyone!

We've put up a live version of Pootle at pootle.wordforge.org, kindly hosted by my employer, St James Software

More details in the press release.

What's been fun has been trying to maximize the number of projects and languages - so far we've had people using it for a Swahili TuxPaint, an Esperanto OpenOffice.org, Amharic Gaim ...

It's still early days, but "release early, release often". All the source is freely available, in our CVS, or I can send you a tarball. It's easy to set up a Pootle server. And any contributions are welcome.

Aaron J. Siego thinks that porting too much open source software to Windows will kill open source on the desktop.

The fear reminded me of a conversation I had with Dwayne and Alberto in Tanzania.

I said, I don't think we should define the platform in terms of the software. I like to think of the Free Software Platform - that's what matters to me. Obviously quality and design counts, but I wouldn't have that a problem running free software applications on top of something like ReactOS. So what counts is the freedom, the license, the philosophy - and what the applications do. What's underneath isn't as important.

Preached at Jubilee last Sunday night on building with gold, silver and precious stones - how we build the church.

Included this great version of the three little pigs ("Wolf-Side story"?) and a picture of the Taj Mahal, contrasted with the Cardboard House mentioned last week on Slashdot.

What kind of church are we after? Something temporary or something permanent, something functional, or something of beauty? We need to build Love, Obedience, Passion for spreading God's glory (Jim Elliot quotes) as well as Persistent Prayer, Faithfulness and Commitment, Sacrifice and Suffering and Discipleship. We need to avoid building mere structure. Building on the precious foundation of Christ, building for eternity means we cannot settle for less. And God supplies the materials by his grace (v10) so we don't ever have to settle for less.

Felt like it was delivered OK, people encouraging afterwards. Presentation here and low-quality MP3 here.

Came across this in comp.lang.python, fairly useful for localization work as you often have to guess what encoding something is in:

Re: character encoding conversion

Now, how should you guess the encoding? Here is a strategy:
1. use the encoding that was sent through the HTTP header. Be
   absolutely certain to not ignore this encoding.
2. use the encoding in the XML declaration (if any).
3. use the encoding in the http-equiv meta element (if any)
4. use UTF-8
5. use Latin-1, and check that there are no characters in the
   range(128,160)
6. use cp1252
7. use Latin-1
 
In the order from 1 to 6, check whether you manage to decode
the input. Notice that in step 5, you will definitely get successful
decoding; consider this a failure if you have get any control
characters (from range(128, 160)); then try in step 7 latin-1
again.