Wireless Networking in the Developing World is a free book available online, under the Creative Commons license. It looks pretty good, not that I've ever needed to do such networking, as I mostly work in the UK.

Bit of a fonts for minority languages theme going here. Here's an article on Gentium, "a font that can be widely used in a variety of languages".

Tags: fonts

On the same theme as my Ubuntu post, here's an article about Localization of Linux in India.

I haven't got the technical details yet, but last week we had a major step forward when some of the people who work on complex scripts for the Non-Roman Script Initiative met with Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Ubuntu. The next release of Ubuntu in April will incorporate some of their work. The reason I'm interested in this is that support for complex scripts enables Bible Translation to take place in minority languages. The reason we're interested in Linux is the low cost for people for whom the economy of their country prevents them getting legal copies of Windows.

The official press release is on our website.

I downloaded a 30 day trial of Radio Userland the other day because a site they hosted some of my stuff on was no longer free.

I don't think I've had a worse experience with software that is mature and commercial. I expected the unintuitive interface (though having used its predecessor years ago, Frontier, and then used a Mac I could see how the outlining worked). I didn't expect it to keep on nagging me to register every time I ran it, even after I'd registered (several times because it didn't give feedback that it had worked). It was slow to do some things, and didn't change the cursor so I knew it was working on it. Other things (export to text) just didn't work at all without an error message. It crashed on me, but fortunately I'd got my data out of it in some sort of text form which I can use in future.

If I intended to purchase it I'd log these complaints through the support channels, but seeing as I'm not I thought I'd share my experiences here.

It is powerful, it was worked on by some high fliers (in some circles) like Dave Winer and Robert Scoble (he worked in the company, I'm not sure if he worked on the product and I'm too lazy to research), so it's probably worth a look at if you can get over these annoyances. Caveat emptor though.

This really is the stuff of science fiction:
I want to know which version of SQL server I'm running. I type into Google
"find out sql server version"
and the top result tells me what to do.

You could imagine an SF novel:
"He opened his terminal to the global megabrain and typed in his question. The answer came back in a split second."

I've been doing some PHP coding and Google is my online documentation. Compared to when I last did some serious coding - 6 years ago, things have moved on so much.

I've dipped my toes into Google maps gplotter.

We've got a commercial product from AFD to do postcode to national grid mapping, but I also tried this hack, though it was slow.

I converted national grid to latitude and longitude as required by gplotter using a spreadsheet and a hand-written macro to do it on a list in a spreadsheet.

The results look good, but I can't show you them.

Edit: postcodes to grid reference data is now available for free. See my post about getting postcodes in a constituency for the source.