November 24, 2004

icu4j dirty secret exposed!

recent icu enhancement requests have exposed a long suspected secret of IBM's Unicode Technology group folks--they have a wicked sense of humor;-) either that or they are truly the geekiest people on the planet. for example:

and now we all know why there's no persian calendar in icu4j....those rotten klingons are blocking it.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 2:20 PM 0 comments

November 23, 2004

icu4j 3.2 released

talk about fast, IBM has just announced the release of icu4j version 3.2-- it was just in alpha first week of this month. and just in case you haven't been paying attention, this is a pretty significant release:
  • icu4j locale data is now 100% built from the CLDR 1.2 data, and has data for 232 locales!
  • the user guide got a major overhaul (not that anybody reads user guides but hey, they did overhaul it)
  • Universal Timescale conversions have been added that allow you to swap between binary datetimes on different platforms
  • Accept-Language, icu4j now provides a mechanism for parsing http_accept_language vars and matching against locales--no more parsing these ourselves, and i can tell you the ones from Apple boxes used to give me the dry heaves oops this didn't make it into the final release.
  • RFC 3066 locale ID support has been added
  • and of course bug fixes

if you do any i18n work, you should pick up this release. you'll find it here.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 3:04 PM 0 comments

November 17, 2004

iText updated

the super cool java lib iText has just been updated to version 1.1 (which sort of synchs to the experimental version of 1.4.2, btw which is now termed "early access").

what's iText? why it's the best PDF burning lib around. it's free, works a treat and is easily used from within cf (via createObject), not to mention the pretty good support bruno lowagie and paulo soares provide.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 2:34 PM 0 comments

November 10, 2004

icu4j 3.2 in alpha

IBM just anounced that icu4j version 3.2 in now in alpha. you can read more about it and download here. you can see API changes (tool generated) between 3.0 and 3.2 here.

this is a pretty significant release. to the already nifty features it adds:
  • icu4j locale data is now completely built from the CLDR 1.2 data which includes interesting locales like en_US_POSIX English (United States, Computer), eo Esperanto, fa_AF Persian (Afghanistan), kl_GL Kalaallisut Greenland), kw_GB Cornish (United Kingdom) and a whole bunch more. that's 230 icu4j locales vs 134 locales in core java!
  • icu4j now overloads it's methods that accept locales to take either java locales or it's own uLocales
  • Universal Timescale conversions
  • DateTimeFormat object initialization performance improvement!!
  • and of course bug fixes ;-)


there's also an eclipse how-to for icu4j.

all in all, its pretty cool.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 10:29 AM 0 comments

November 06, 2004

anti-social cybergeography

there was an interesting post on the geowanking mailing list today concerning the cybergeography of anti-social internet use: spam, virus, etc. besides graphs of statistics, there's some interesting maps of sources.

it seems the rise in cheap broadband here in thailand might be responsible for the "hotspot" of spam activity around the big mango.

more info here.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 11:31 AM 0 comments

November 05, 2004

cldr 1.2 released

the unicode consortium has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Common Locale Data Repository (cldr). quoting the press release, the latest version contains "232 locales, covering 72 languages and 108 territories. There are also 63 draft locales in the process of being developed, covering an additional 27 languages and 28 territories". wow.

you can pick up the cldr here and read more about it here.

via the unicode mailing list.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 9:08 AM 0 comments