The War In Iraq: Looking Back At What I Wrote In 2003 (re-run, in German)
Posted on Thursday, 22 March, 2007
Another re-run: This time I am re-publishing an incredibly long, horribly poetic and somehow pretentious, but still, I think, intelligent article that I wrote back in 2003 just during the first few days of the American invasion in Iraq. I criticized both Old Europe and the US – Old Europe for not acknowledging that their position (doing business with Saddam whilst letting the Iraqi civilian population starve to death under the UN sanctions) was in no way ethically superior to that of the United States; the Bush administration for their illusion that in a country as diverse and complex as Iraq most problems would just disappear by themselves once they got rid of Saddam Hussein. In hindisght, I have got to say that I was not that far off the mark with my apprehensions.
That being said, the best part is still the Swiss-German song by Mani Matter that I quote at the beginning...
Categories: Free Thought, Free Markets
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Back to the top of this pageHow To Tell Your Browser What Languages You Speak
Posted on Thursday, 22 March, 2007
This is the first of two entries I have planned to write on language and content negotiation. A lot of non-techies do not even know what content negotiation means – which is not really a problem –, but they also miss out on an opportunity to improve their user experience on the Internet. Since in this post I am going to limit myself to language negotiation – as opposed to content negotiation in general –, I believe that it is particularly relevant to language professionals.
Categories: Language and Translation Web Development and Programming
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Back to the top of this pageQuite Some Characters: A Unicode Primer for Linguists
Posted on Monday, 19 March, 2007
For people who are part of a creation process as is the case for us linguists it often proves helpful to have at least a basic idea of the other aspects involved in that process even if, strictly speaking, they are outside our own responsibility. Since computers have become such an integral part of our lives and working environments, computer-related aspects of multilingual content should be of interest to anyone involved in a translation process. This knowledge may not be directly required for our linguistic work, but it can greatly facilitate collaboration and communication with engineers, graphic designers, etc. and make it easier to identify and analyse obstacles that we may encounter from time to time. Yes, you guessed it right, this article is dedicated to the horribly dull and nasty topic of text encodings, in particular, Unicode.
Categories: Language and Translation Localization and Internationalization
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Back to the top of this pageWhy I love Bach (re-run, in German)
Posted on Monday, 12 March, 2007
I'll start my series of re-runs of some old posts with a short article that I wrote some years ago for my first homepage. My goal was to explain my personal approach to the music and personality of J. S. Bach whom I view as the greatest composer, nay, the greatest artist, ever. In particular, I emphasize how he blends mathematical sophistication and deeply-felt spirituality, rationality and emotions, in a unique way. I also mention his humble concept of his own role as a "musical scientist" or maybe a mediator between heaven and earth rather than a "genius". The entire article is ripe with fanboy-like enthusiasm, but, hey, I was young back then.
Categories: Thoughts on Music
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Back to the top of this pageRe-run Time
Posted on Sunday, 11 March, 2007
When I moved to my new CMS and design in autumn, I could not really figure how my old articles on music and my free-market advocacy would best fit in with the new structure. This is a pity: I noticed that a lot of visitors come here exactly for that content which is currently offline. Since this blog has not ever had any sort of real focus anyway, I now decided to rerun them here. They are all in German, but I might give my English-speaking readers a brief summary.
Categories: Loose Talk
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Back to the top of this pageSpreadsheets and localization
Posted on Wednesday, 7 March, 2007
Just noticed: It's not only Microsoft Excel, even OpenOffice.org does localize keywords. Why? Why?!
Categories: Localization and Internationalization
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