What does l10n, i18n or m4 mean ?

Posted on August 27th, 2008 in Code, Linux, Monkey Business

I have never understood what l10n stands for, nor i18n, nor m4 for that matter. But reading a good online book about autotools, there are a couple of words explaining that in fact m4 stands for Macro, which is m+4 chars. l10n is localization written asĀ  “l+strlen(ocalizatio)+n”. Fun. Since I was on vacations while I read this, I had time to write a bash script to do this automatically while enhancing my bash skills. Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash

STRING=$1
STRLEN=${#STRING}

A=${STRING:1:$STRLEN-2}
echo ${STRING:0:1}${#A}${STRING:$STRLEN-1:$STRLEN-1}

Try running internationalization on it.

The sounds of procrastination

Posted on July 22nd, 2008 in Monkey Business, My World

You know your life has taken a wrong turn when you spend more than 15 minutes listening to white noise.

Crazy April Fools - The Overkill

Posted on April 1st, 2008 in Monkey Business

It’s April Fool today, and the world just seemed to go crazy. It used to be a joke or something, but now, what can you trust ?

There has been all sorts of stuff. Google went all out, but others tried to compete:

And the hits just keep on coming… Calm down people, it’s just April’s Fool, and this is a complete overkill…

Following the trend: Site Webgraphs

Posted on August 25th, 2007 in Monkey Business

A couple of friends are doing this, so I decided to make my own webgraph, or, website as graph. It’s basically a visual break down of a website I don’t really see the point of this, rather than looking nice. So here is my webgraph, for the books of history:

digitalself webgraph

Here is what each node means:

blue is for links (the A tag)
red is for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green is for the DIV tag
violet is for images (the IMG tag)
yellow is for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange is for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black is the HTML tag, the root node
gray is all other tags

Cisco’s subliminal iPhone message

Posted on January 26th, 2007 in Monkey Business

Reading my daily email, i stumbled upon an IETF draft released this week, that talks about a new proposal on some routing procedures draft-farinacci-lisp-00.txt. Right about now you should be wondering what does this have anything to do with anything, specially the iPhone ? Well the draft, submitted by Cisco, has a few quirks in it! So, I ran a grep on it to see if i could find Apple’s precious baby:

$ grep iPhone draft-farinacci-lisp-00.txt -n -A 1 -B 1
324-      be a host computer, a switch or router device, or any network
325:      appliance.  An iPhone.
326-
--
819-      the sum of all weight values MUST equal 100.  Going to buy an
820:      iPhone?  If a zero value is used for any RLOC weight, then all
821-      weights must be zero and the receiver of the Reply will decide how

Surprisingly the iPhone pops up twice. Talk about subliminal messages and trademark fights, or maybe just to check if anyone really reads some of these IETF drafts ?