Cameron's Pensieve

I can't remember why, but for some reason I happened to have a quick glance in my spam folder. I think ever since I've been blogging about Unicode, I've had an enormous amount of foreign spam (strangely enough, the English spam has really dropped off). I've had a lot of foreign spam before (Spanish mainly, since I took a short course in Spanish). But now I'm getting e-mail I can't read at all, because the spammers defeated themselves and didn't include the charset (meaning Mail doesn't know in what charset to display it in).

What does the image (taken from a site about Japanese table manners) on the left make you think of? If you're Chinese or Japanese, it may very well mean ‘death’.

I point this out because it shows that when translating software, there are cultural nuances to take into account, such as the suitability of clipart and meanings attached to colours and shapes.

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With the very large array of glyphs available in Unicode, I thought it might be interesting to play with putting some Unicode into my e-mail signature. It's a shame that not all glyphs have been implemented yet. Apparently the most complete typeface comes from Arial Unicode MS. I wonder why there is no glyph for a website; Webdings has both a spider and a web... and a pirate; and Apple Symbols even has a map of the world! Unfortunately these are glyph-variants, which means they could be an entirely different looking character in a different typeface.

• Cameron Kerr  • ✉ cameron@humbledown.org • ☧  •
• ✎ http://humbledown.org/blog/ • ✆ 021 4117 644 •

I'm currently reading an old (1993) book called Software Internationalization and Localization: an Introduction (ISBN: O-442-01498-8) that a collegue leant me so I can learn about the various aspects of internationalisation for protocol design. It's really quite interesting really, and I really think every student educated in any Computer Science or Information Science paper should know about the various issues.

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