Love the LUG

Had our monthly FVLUG (Fraser Valley Linux User Grroup) meeting last night. Showed the group how to effectively run cygwin in XP, and how to set it up on NTFS to use native DACL security as a way to deal with Unix security within the envrionment. Talked abit about the environment variables and how the work when wanting to set up a remote service, such as SSH, within XP.

Once that was done, Alan installed RedHat 8.0 onto Collin's harddrive, which went by REALLY smoothly. I must admit, RH has it done right in that regard. I was even impressed with the new admin tools to deal with LDAP, Kererbos etc. The fonts/application loads etc were pretty good looking, and sure puts us Debian folks to shame when it comes to installation. Wim tried installing Caldera 3.1.1 .. but it puked out when he tried to switch the mouse. In the end he gave up and tried some other wacked out distro that was basically Caldera under the hood with a new name. Can't remember it off the top of my head, but they used to call it "Redmond Linux".

Afterwards we did the customary Finnigan's run, and pigged out on wings (it was .19 cent wing night) and beer. Discussed the follies of VB and the woes we all have dealing with Windows environements for programming *sigh*.

Now that the web site has been done, at work I am now rewriting and refactoring some of the master sources in preperation of some Internationalization we will be doing to simple chinese. Ever wonder what i18n means? It means there is 18 letters between the i and the n in "internationalization". So guess what l10n is? Localization! I always wondered how they came up with those. Now you know.

Anyways, to do the i18n I had to prune through the resource bundles and find dead keys. When yer paying over 14 cents a word for translation, you don't want to translate text you don't need to. Well, after writing a sweet little perl script to deal with it, I found over 1800 useless keys and a lot of those had paragraph phrases. Nice utility for future use. Never realized how bad we left some of the resource bundles when we refactored/cleaned up stuff over the summer until I ran the script. Originially I thought I must have a bug in the script. But as I verfied the keys.. sure enough... they were all dead.

Anyways, my wife is calling me to dinner. Feeling kinda hungry. Gotta go. TTYL.