August 29, 2006
daylight cravings time
for the past couple of months, i've been waking up around 6 am, usually to go run before work. early on, this was really wake up around 5, but stay in bed until six something because honestly.
the last couple of weeks i've noticed it was a little more difficult to wake up, and at first i was unsure why that way. but it's obvious now: it's pretty dark at 6 these days! i guess it's time to shift my wake up time back an hour. that means i'll probably get to work an hour later, which is sad because i really do enjoy my hour of laps around the office on peter's scooter when nobody else is around.
speaking of work, i've been working on hula for almost a year now, and i think this will be my first post about it? anyway yesterday i finally made some headway on something that had been scaring me from the start: how do we do translations?
we decided to take a small page out of mozila's book and just keep all of the web client's translatable strings in a java properties file. gettext already knows about these, so i don't have to write a javascript parser/string extractor. one hundred lines of python convert that (plus the translated .gmo file) into a .js file containing the translations that our client can easily download and parse. we do that using xmlhttprequest, of course, so we can potentially change languages on the fly, without reloading the page. in practice i think we will only do that for the login page.
