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Cndnsd Vrsn: 4 PM Thursday 9/18 ACS Room 123- Unicode
The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users
Group (FRUUG) will be held at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, September 18.
Dr. Bruce Haddon from Sun Microsystems and Paladin Software
will be talking about the truth and fiction of Unicode, and why you
need to know about it.
Unicode is yet another common
representation for transcoding other character sets and encodings,
but one which is increasingly met in programming languages and applications,
particularly web applications. One characterization of Unicode is that
it "provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the
platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language."
This, of course, is not true. What is not obvious is why this is not
true-at that will be revealed in this talk.
To many, Unicode is just a big character set, with 16-bit values.
However, human language and writing is nowhere near that simple, so
Unicode has complexities that arise from the efforts to deal with the
realities of written, and spoken, human language. The result is that
there are some special things that must be done when using Unicode,
some obvious, others not so obvious. By the end of this talk, you will
understand why Unicode is the way it is, its relationship (or lack
thereof) to UNIX, plus you will have some guidance as to how to use it
correctly and what can be done with it, and where to get additional
information.
Note: if you have not met the word "transcoding" before, you need this
talk.
Dr. Bruce K. Haddon is well known around Boulder, having worked at
NBI, been a professor here at the University of Colorado, a manager at
StorageTek, Vice-President of Engineering at International Language
Engineering, and more recently Senior Technologist at Redcape
Software.
He now consults, both for his own company, Paladin Software
International, specializing in software internationalization, and also
as a Master Java Architect for Sun Microsystems. Both companies are
sponsoring Bruce's FRUUG talk, Paladin supplying the assemblage
of material, and Sun the time.
Bruce is originally from Australia (accounts for some of the accent),
but has worked in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and
France (which together account for the rest of the accent).
His interest in character sets and encodings started with his first
computer-related job with the University of Sydney, where he had to
document the character encodings in use in the Computing Centre--and
found 14 were in everyday use, a problem he solved by creating a
fifteenth, to act as a common representation for transcoding the
others.
This meeting will be in room 123 of the CU Academic Computing
Center building at Arapahoe and Marine Streets in Boulder. Marine St intersects
Arapahoe at 38th St; the Computing Center is on the southwest corner.
At our July meeting,
Sara Bayko, Juli DiBiase, and Barb Dijker gave an overview of
the City of Boulder's effort to tax Internet Access, and the
current state of their tax assessment on the Colorado Internet
Cooperative.
Announcements, presentation slides, and
writeups for past meetings are be available in the FRUUG Meeting Archive?
www.fruug.org/mtgarchive/index.html.
Our next meeting is tentatively titled: "Life after Make--
Building Software with SCons."
FRUUG Library Merit Badge
holders can sign up for give-away books by visiting the
FRUUG Web site and clicking on the give-away item in the sidebar.
FRUUG merit badge holders are eligible for our frequent
book give-aways, and all you have to do for a lifetime
membership is to review any book from the FRUUG library
and send the review to gaede at fruug.org.
This month we have two books to give away, Linux on the Mainframe,
from Prentice Hall PTR, and Code Reading, the Open Source
Perspective, from Addison Wesley.
If you're a FRUUG Library Merit Badge holder and would like
one of the books, please sign up at
www.fruug.org/library/giveaway.html
Finally, we once again have a
Gift Certificate to SoftPro Books
to give away to a FRUUG member
at the meeting.
New books for the FRUUG library that have arrived
over the summer include:
- Cisco Cookbook,
from O'Reilly
-
Google Pocket Guide,
from O'Reilly
- iMovie 3 and iDVD,
from O'Reilly
- Implementing CIFS, the Common Internet File System
from Prentice Hall PTR
- Intrusion Detection with Snort,
from Prentice Hall PTR
- Managing Linux Systems with Webmin,
from Prentice Hall PTR
- Moving to Linux, Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!
from Prentice Hall PTR
- Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk,
from Prentice Hall PTR
- Secure Coding Principles & Practices,
from O'Reilly
- Tomcat, the Definitive Guide,
from O'Reilly
- The Unicode Standard 4.0,
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 discounts
on your book orders from both New Riders Publishing and O'Reilly &
Associates; refer to the FRUUG Web site for details.
The New Riders discount program has changed; pick up a
discount coupon with our secret password at the meeting.
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