digitalself » Monkey Business

What does l10n, i18n or m4 mean ?

alfmatos — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:24:15 +0000

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 as “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

alfmatos — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:55:23 +0000

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

alfmatos — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:38:10 +0000

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:

Google Joke: Google Plane
Google Joke: Google Future search
Google Joke: Google custom gmail time
Google Joke: Google and Virgin go to Mars
Ubuntu Joke: Top level directories renamed on Ubuntu
Ubuntu Joke: Ubuntu Forums go haywire
Pratical Jokes: Lifehacker top pranks
Non so funny jokes, hope it’s not true: ISO approved OOXML
Not so Funny Joke : Apple cracks down on cheese
Nonsense stuff: Epiphany switch to Webkit
Nonsense stuff: KDE’s ISO Delegate Votes Yes to Office Open XML
Kernel Jokes : Switching to BSD
Mind blowing jokes : Teacher head explodes

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

alfmatos — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:23:25 +0000

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:

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

alfmatos — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:14:14 +0000

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 ?