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IMUG Past Events Archive2005 Events
Want to Speak at an IMUG Event?To propose a presentation for an upcoming IMUG meeting, or to get information on how to prepare, please see Information for Presenters. To arrange special equipment or software for a scheduled presentation, or for related technical questions, please contact our Apple host, David Murphy.
Demonstration of ICU Capabilities Some members of the ICU (International Components for Unicode) team will tour the capabilities of the demos and tools of ICU. These demos will cover the following topics: CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) Steven R Loomis is a member of the Unicode Technology group at IBM San Jose. His ICU contributions include the Locale Explorer demo. Steven joined Taligent in 1993, which later became a part of IBM, and he has worked on networking, messaging and web server frameworks. After a temporary assignment to a cross-functional bidirectional text project, he joined the International Components for Unicode C/C++ team. He has as a hobby Linux system administration. George Rhoten works on International Components for Unicode (ICU) at IBM San Jose. His biggest contributions include improved character set support and platform support. He graduated from Cal Poly SLO, California, with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Theater. He has a strong interest in HCI (Human Computer Interaction), and maintainability of code. He joined the ICU group in July 2000. «Top
What's New in the .NET Globalization Namespace Version 2.0 of Microsoft.NET will soon be released along with some significant changes that affect the globalization model. Existing classes have new properties and methods, and several new and useful classes have been added. Among the latter are a significant set of new calendars that have been added to an already extensive collection, including several for the Far East that work on a lunisolar cycle. Another useful feature is the addition of a custom locale builder that allows a range of modifications and models. A new class provides support for localized domain names. Localization operations have been simplified as a result of strongly typed resources. Finally, a number of much needed features, overlooked or ignored in .NET 1.1 are now available. Since not everyone is familiar with the .NET globalization model, the new features will be presented in a context that also covers basic information about the current design. At the same time, the presentation will keep to the essentials and will not be overly detailed. Bill Hall has worked since 1985 as a developer and consultant on Microsoft Windows with experience going back to Windows 1.0, which he ported at the OEM level to AT&T/Olivetti computers. He has also been a Windows application programmer and internationalization engineer for companies such as Olivetti, Novell, NetCom, SimulTrans, and eTranslate/Convey Software. In the early 1990's he became interested in language and locale issues on computing machines. He wrote a book chapter in 1992 for Microsoft Press on the topic and a series of articles on Win32 internationalization in 1993 for the Microsoft Systems Journal. Over the years he has taken products into European and Far East languages for Novell, Netcom, and other companies. He also taught a course at UC Santa Cruz extension on Internationalization for about four years. He continues to write on the engineering aspects of creating world-ready software with most articles today appearing in Multilingual Computing, where he also serves on its editorial board. Currently, he is writing a book on the internationalization model developed for Microsoft.NET. Two of four parts are published on-line, the third is about to go live, and the fourth is in progress. Details are at www.multilingual.com/monographs. In past lives, Bill has been a military and civilian aviator, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, and served for three years as an associate editor with Mathematical Reviews. He still holds FAA certifications as a commercial pilot, single and multiengine, and is also rated as an instrument instructor. However, he suggests that if you want to learn to fly, you should probably find someone else as he has not been in the front left seat of an airplane since 1982! «Top
Language Tags and Locale Identifiers Language tags, based on RFC 3066, form an important part of Internet internationalization. For example, these tags are used to identify language in HTML and XML, as well as negotiate language on the Web. They are the de facto locale identifier for Web-based applications. Recently there has been work to revise RFC 3066 and this includes many new features, such as a subtag registry, support for script codes, and other refinements. In addition, the W3C has recently started work on a new Specification to define locale identifiers for Web services and other Web technologies. This work is expected to be based on existing support for language tags, as well as the CLDR effort at Unicode. This presentation, by one of the authors of the 3066 revision and chair of the W3C effort, will look in depth at the new language tags and explore how these may work in locale identifiers in the future. Addison Phillips is the Globalization Architect for Quest Software, a provider of solutions to help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases and infrastructure. He is the current chair of the W3C Internationalization Core Working Group. He can be reached at mailto:addison.phillips@quest.com. «Top
The Adobe-Japan1-6 Character Collection PLEASE NOTE!! The Adobe-Japan1-6 character collection represents the sixth supplement to the Japanese glyph collection developed by Adobe Systems, which is used by every major Japanese type foundry. This glyph collection enumerates 23,058 glyphs, and supports all current JIS standards. Fascinating details of the development of its key supplements will be conveyed during this presentation. Ken Lunde is a Senior Computer Scientist in CJKV Type Development at Adobe Systems. He has worked for Adobe since 1991. He received a PhD degree from The University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1994, and has authored two books for O'Reilly, "Understanding Japanese Information Processing" in 1993, and "CJKV Information Processing" in 1999. «Top
New International Features in Mac OS X Tiger Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) continues the evolution of support for international in Mac OS, and includes new features both for end users and developers. We'll discuss and demonstrate new language and font support, new input methods, new APIs for developers, and more. Deborah Goldsmith has worked on international software engineering for ten years. In addition, she is Apple's representative to the Unicode Technical Committee, vice chair of the Unicode Locale Data Technical Subcommittee, and Apple's representative on the ICU Program Management Committee. Lee Collins has been working in the area of software internationalization since before it had a name. He started at Xerox in the early 80s and has been at Apple off and on since 1988, with side trips to Taligent and Ariba. He is one of the co-founders of Unicode. His current position at Apple is Manager, OS Engineering Asia. «Top
Cultural User Interface Design This talk will focus on "what is cultural user interface (CUI) design?". Going beyond the basics of color, gestures, icons, and fonts, we find there are many more issue the internationalization engineer or human factors expert must consider. We will look at contextual design, collaborative analogies, usability, and cultural spectrums and their influence on good design. We will discuss methods of conducting an ethnographic survey and how to incorporate those findings into the user experience design and a usability study. Interspersed throughout will be fun looks at cultural adaptations of a corporate presence throughout the world. Much of this material is based on a recent tutorial given in Berlin at the 27th Internationalization and Unicode Conference. Michael provides leadership in building and managing a suite of services establishing the primary technical infrastructure for digital content repositories for the California Digital Library. He has been a specialist in globalization of applications and distributed systems for over one and a half decades. He is a licensed professional engineer with extensive experience consulting or leading globalization projects for a number Fortune 500 companies and has a background in global e-commerce, application design, database internals, distributed bibliographic systems, test engineering, and ethnographic research. «Top
Computing in Vietnamese: Progress and Challenges Throughout its history, and especially in the era of computers, Vietnamese writing has presented some unique challenges because of several interesting dichotomies, beginning with the ideographic- and Latin-based scripts. Unicode has served to unify and multiply the presentation of Vietnamese-language information on the web, easing both browsing and search. Nevertheless, actual usage of Unicode for Vietnamese is far less than one might expect from the universal availability of Vietnamese in modern computers. We will explore the entire spectrum of the Vietnamese computing experience, and the road ahead. [James] Đỗ Bá Phước has been in electronic design automation for more than twenty years. Covering almost that entire period, he has also been deeply involved with standardization issues related to Vietnamese computing, mainly through the Unicode Technical Committee, the Vietnam Standards Committee (TCVN), and the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG). He is a founding director of the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation (www.nomfoundation.org), and of Pacific Links Foundation (www.pacificlinks.org). One of his hobbies to adapt fonts for Vietnamese, such as Vtopia and Vsibon. «Top
Analyzing Unicode Text Regular Expressions have been widely used for many years to analyze, parse or extract desired information from text data. They are used in applications large and small, and everywhere in-between, from simple search operations in word processors to scripting languages such as Perl to queries on large data bases. Traditional regular expressions cannot easily deal with a character set of the size and complexity of Unicode. To address this shortcoming, the Unicode Consortium has published Technical Report #18, a set of guidelines for extending regular expressions to handle Unicode data. Following this allows organizations to correctly deal with data in different languages and scripts. This paper will review the issues and techniques involved in writing Regular Expressions for Unicode data. The guidelines from TR 18 will be reviewed, including a discussion of Unicode encoding forms, character properties and classes, text boundaries, case sensitivity and normalization, and the implications of all of these for handling different languages in regular expressions. The paper will also survey the capabilities and limitations of those regular expression implementations known to provide significant support for Unicode. The presentation is intended primarily for users of regular expressions rather than implementers of regular expression engines. Note: This is a repeat of an IUC presentation - http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/program.html Markus Scherer is the current ICU team manager and a software engineer at IBM developing ICU and other Unicode/Globalization solutions. He has contributed to many parts of ICU including character conversion, bidi, normalization, Unicode properties and collation. After graduating from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, in computer science he worked on projects for wireless and mobile computing with IBM. A strong interest in languages brought him into the Internationalization parts of the projects, followed by his current focus on Unicode and Globalization. «Top
Unicode and Japanese Personal Names: Variation
Sequences to the Rescue In the character/glyph model which underlies Unicode, a character is an abstract unit that can be displayed using any of a number of concrete presentations. For example, an "A" can be rendered by an upright, italic, bold or Fraktur glyph. Unicode simply does not capture that level of detail. The same applies to Han ideographs, and the resulting character repertoire is generally sound and useful. However, there are some differences in concrete representations which are important to capture in some plain text situations, such as in people and place names, yet are not captured by separate Unicode characters. To accomodate those situations, Unicode intends to use variation sequences, which are made of a character together with an indication of the intended rendering. Furthermore, it is not possible to design a single set of variation sequences that satisfies simultaneously the needs of scholars, governements, publishers, etc., yet it is desirable to reliably interchange such sequences. To support this, Unicode intends to open a registry of ideographic variation sequences. Eric Muller represents Adobe to the Unicode Consortium and is one of the principal authors of "The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0." «Top
Diversifying the Web for all the World's Languages The Web offers a valuable means of communication in the many languages of the world, but over eighty writing systems used by the world's languages are not yet included in Unicode, the international character encoding standard supported (or required) by the Web standards XML and HTML. To remedy the situation, a project was established at UC Berkeley, the Script Encoding Initiative. It aims to help get into Unicode those ancient and modern scripts which are still not included. The project involves close collaboration with linguists, user communities, and other groups, and has received support from UNESCO and the NEH. The results of the effort will have an important impact on education, literacy, research, and other areas of communication, and will help open the Web to a much greater audience. Deborah Anderson is project leader for the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley and a researcher in the Dept. of Linguistics. She is the representative to the Unicode Consortium for UC Berkeley and the Linguistic Society of America. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies and in her spare time serves as president of the Archaeological Institute of America, San Francisco Society. «Top
My "Shoe Size Web Page" Fetish or How Companies are
Losing Money on the Internet Here is a lighthearted look at a serious problem on the World Wide Web - the failure to review and QA data made available to customers on the Web and that is critical to business operations. A methodology that worked well when customers came in to stores to physically try on shoes does not work well over the web. Companies are losing money and customers. Does anyone care? Retail web sites for the shoe and clothing industries often suffer from a class of problems that cause the vendors to lose money and customers. The problems go undiagnosed and are hurting the online retailing industry. Reviews of several retail web sites in the shoe and clothing industries have uncovered several problems that commonly occur. These online retailers are not aware of the problems or their losses. Brick and mortar business do not suffer the same consequences, which is part of the reason that existing businesses that migrate to online retailing do not anticipate these problems. This is an update of a paper presented at the 23rd internationalization and Unicode Conference in Prague in March 2003 and again at the 24th Internationalization and Unicode Conference in Atlanta in September 2003. Tex Texin has been providing globalization services, including training,strategy, and implementation, to the software industry for many years. Tex has created numerous globalized products, managed internationalization development teams, developed internationalization and localization tools, and guided companies in taking business to new regional markets. Tex is also an advocate for internationalization standards in software and on the Web. He is an invited expert to the Unicode Consortium and the World Wide Web Consortium. Tex maintains two web sites for internationalization, the popular http://www.I18nGuy.com and http://www.XenCraft.com . Tex is now Internationalization Architect for Yahoo!, having finally escaped from years of shoveling snow out of his New England driveway to lovely Sunnyvale, CA, where he spends his free time emptying buckets of rain from various hallways.
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