Simon Willison’s Weblog

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. People’s names are complicated. I’m not at all comfortable with the commonly used first name / last name distinction (as baked in to Django auth) since it doesn’t take cultural factors in to account. 17th June 2010, 7:44 pm

UnicodeDictWriter—write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files using Python. Stuart Langridge and I spent quite a while this morning battling with Excel. The magic combination for storing unicode text in a CSV file such that Excel correctly reads it is UTF-16, a byte order mark and tab delimiters rather than commas. 20th August 2008, 12:19 pm

django-rosetta—Google Code. Very classy Django-powered interface for both reading and writing your project’s gettext catalog files, hence allowing application translators to work through a web interface. 11th April 2008, 7:31 am

JavaScript Internationalisation, explained by reindeer. “Santa even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server.” 8th December 2007, 2:04 pm

Django security fix released. Django’s internationalisation system has a denial of service hole in it; you’re vulnerable if you are using the i18n middleware. Fixes have been made available for trunk, 0.96, 0.95 and 0.91. 26th October 2007, 9:47 pm

Announcing Babel. Impressive new Python i18n / l10n package, with improved message extraction and a huge amount of bundled locale data. 20th July 2007, 12:20 pm

Personal names around the world. I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about firstname/lastname fields in forms. Now I know why. 19th July 2007, 12:54 pm

Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage. 3rd July 2007, 4:43 pm