 |
Cndnsd Vrsn: 4:00PM Thursday 3/8 — Unicode, Take Five
The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users
Group (FRUUG) will be at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, March 8
at the CU Engineering Center, room ECCR-265. Thanks
to Dirk Grunwald and the CU Computer Science Department for
co-hosting this meeting.
More details are in Meeting Location (below).
The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0, was released November, 2006. This
character encoding, promoted as the universal character code,
supplanting ASCII as the character representation for many
applications, including the Java and C# programming languages,
HTML/XML, Microsoft Windows 2000/CE/XP, MAC OS, etc., now has over
15 years of evolution and history. This newest version comes in the
wake of new challenges in the areas of mathematical notation,
programming languages, and processing algorithms, most notably string
comparison.
The concept of a "universal character set" brings into focus complex
(but fascinating) problems of human written communication, requiring
different approaches to encoding problems from those of the last 40+
years (since the definition of ASCII and EBCDIC). The talk updates
previous information, and will cover briefly the history of Unicode,
demonstrate more recent changes in approach, outline some of the
above problems, and indicate solutions. Research is invited into the
remaining problems.
Dr. Bruce K. Haddon is an Australian who came to the US and graduated
with his PhD from CU in 1979, was a member of the CU CS/EE faculty
1980-1982, and an adjoint Associate Professor with EECE 1982-1987. He
is President of Paladin Software International, Inc., and a Principal
Engineer with Sun Microsystems, Inc. His interests are operating
systems, programming languages, large-scale systems architecture,
software engineering, and in particular, software internationalization
in all of the above areas.
This meeting will be held the Engineering Center Class Room
wing, room ECCR-265. This wing is on the southwest
corner of the CU Engineering Center, located at the corner
of Colorado Boulevard and Regent Drive (see map below).
There is metered parking available on the north and the south sides
of the building. Parking is free starting at at 5:00.
The Engineering Center is also right off the RTD HOP route,
and is a walk across campus from the SKIP.
For more details on getting to the Engineering Center,
please visit:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/department/gettinghere/, and for
a detailed map of the building itself, visit:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/department/maps/eccr2.html.
At our last meeting, Doug Fales discussed how he used Ruby on Rails
to create a Web site that integrates GPS data with photos using
Google Maps and Flickr. The site presents a travelogue of trips
that users post to the site.
Announcements, presentation slides, and
writeups for past meetings are available in the FRUUG Meeting Archive.
www.fruug.org/mtgarchive/index.html.
Until we settle into a permanent home, we'll only be bringing
our new FRUUG library titles to each meeting. In fact,
given the volume of new books, we might not bring them
all to this one, so if you want to check one out in
particular, feel free to send a message to the user
books1006 at fruug.org.
Learn how you can review a book and keep it through
our
FRUUG Library Merit Badge program.
Our publisher friends have some exciting news: Addison Wesley
and O'Reilly (and their associated imprints) are now offering
a user group discount of 35 percent, see our
library discounts page
for details.
New books for this meeting include:
- Fedora Core 6, from SAMS
- Live Linux CDs, from Prentice Hall
- Agile Web Development with Rails, from Pragmatic Bookshelf
- Ruby on Rails books from O'Reilly, To Be Announced
- The Unicode 5.0 Standard, from Addison Wesley
You may check out books using your business card as your
library card; you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books
are due at the meeting following the one in which they are checked out.
Remember that your FRUUG membership entitles you to up to 35 percent
discounts
on your book orders from
Addison Wesley/Prentice Hall,
IBM Press,
O'Reilly Media,
New Riders,
No Starch,
Paraglyph,
PC Publishing,
Pragmatic Bookshelf,
Sams Publishing,
SitePoint, and
Syngress;
refer to the FRUUG Web site library page for details.
|
 |
