June 20, 2004

icu4j 3.0 released

ibm's oh-so-cool icu4j i18n lib version 3.0 is out. you can read what's new from the press blurb. download here.

June 17, 2004

mapping languages

wow a topic that combines my two favorite things, languages and maps. the Modern Language Association has produced an arcIMS driven site that allows interactive mapping of language down to the county/zip code level (from census data). you can compare one language against another, map language use by political boundary (GIS-speak for state, county, zip code), etc. oh its so cool, its making me giddy ;-) it's not "public" until wednesday and it looks like its getting hammered right now. in any case, if you live in the US, it's certainly worth a peek.

off the CNN website.

June 09, 2004

Common Locale Data Repository 1.1 released

hot off the press, the unicode organization has released version 1.1 of the Common Locale Data Repository. its got 50% more data than 1.0, 247 locales spead over 78 languages and 118 countries combinations. the news article indicates that there are also "36 draft locales" in the queue. the repository access page further states that this is "a stable release and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference by other specifications." yeah, finally somebody to blame ;-) you can either do a web CVS or download a zip archive of the CLDR from that page.

i urge you to double check your locale's data & report any bugs you find. i'd say this is pretty good news for i18n folks.

reported via the unicode mailing list.

June 03, 2004

i18nSort CFC updated

we updated the i18nSort CFC to handle queries (single column sort key). you can eventually pick it up in the usual places (in the meantime you can grab it from here). if its of any interest, we used collationKeys rather than straight up compare(). the collationKey creation overhead didn't make much difference with smaller queries but it pays off quite nicely with larger queries:

you can read more details about collation here.