World 0.1 – January 2007

Corrupted Plain-Text Email Messages – Ever Heard Of Base64?

Posted on Tuesday, 23 January, 2007

Guys – and by guys, I mean the developers of about 90% of the emailing routines behind the avalanche of friendly emails from one of my mobile phone carriers, some well-known on-line retailer (don't remember whether it was ebay or Amazon) and a bunch of marketing communication from different shops, corporations some of which don't even have the excuse that they primarily target a pure-ASCII American public – guys, I've got a nice Conway quote for you:

[...] if you're ready to concede that ASCII-centrism is a naïve façade that's gradually fading into Götterdämmerung, you might choose to bid it adiós and open your regexes to the full Unicode smörgåsbord [...].

Well, actually that's the part which, as it appears, most people seem to have got by now (provided that they check user input at all, that is). However, it also seems “rather déclassé for an überhacking rōnin”, to quote Conway once again, to first ambitiously open up their regexes to the world and then leave those poor Unicode characters to their fate when emailing them in plain text over a 7bit ASCII mail server. Ever heard of base64? Or Quoted Printable encoding for that matter?

Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (1)

Back to the top of this page

Dual-Booting Linux Ubuntu And Win XP On An Old Fujitsu-Siemens C Series LifeBook

Posted on Saturday, 20 January, 2007

I started the new year falling love with Ubuntu, the Linux distribution that I run on my new desktop computer. Ever since the beauty of the Ubuntu desktop unfolded in front of my eyes for the first time, I have kept enjoying this sense of control and logic that Linux brings to personal computing – so much so that I wanted to benefit from its advantages on my old Siemens LifeBook as well. I am now running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on my desktop PC and dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my notebook.

Whereas on my fresh desktop PC installing Ubuntu from the live CD had been a piece of cake, on my three-and-a-half-year-old Siemens LifeBook, I initially ran into some trouble. I, therefore, thought I might share my findings here in case others are experiencing similar problems. My most important recommendation is for users of old notebooks to use text-based installation (from the alternate distribution) rather than the standard desktop Live CD.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Back to the top of this page

Regional Differences In Written German

Posted on Friday, 19 January, 2007

Now that I am doing freelance translation again, I notice that a lot of clients get confused by my regional adaptation skills. But also there is a lot of confusion in the industry as to when it makes sense to adapt copy specifically for a Swiss or an Austrian target audience rather than just to use a generic German version. Note that this post is about written German, not about spoken language.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Back to the top of this page