i summon one kim

After a dozen years of living in the United States, I can relate to a lot of what Therese Catanzariti writes in her column titled Communication – Finnish style, published on Crikey.

But many of her comments don’t apply just to Finns. From my experience of working in a subsidiary of a German bank, I tell you Germans are a lot like the Finns described in the column. It always drives me nuts when I get asked for the “actual status” of a project. (The reference to Amélie is just perfect!)

I also remember having a visiting professor from France at the University of Delaware. Everyone was complaining how difficult it was to understand her. I had noticed also, but had no trouble — I was using the literal translation approach mentioned in the column, automatically.

I’d warmly recommend a few years of living in a “foreign language” to everyone.

WordPress on ”henkilökohtainen julkaisualusta” eli bloggaus-ohjelma. Se on toteutettu PHP-kielellä ja käyttää artikkeleiden talletukseen MySQL-tietokantaa. Olen käyttänyt WordPressiä osana oman sivustoni toteutusta vajaan vuoden, ja olen ollut erittäinen tyytyväinen. Niin tyytyväinen, että vietin muutaman yön ja päivän monitorin ääressä kääntämässä sen uutta versiota suomen kielelle.

WordPress 1.5:n käännös on nyt valmis. Samalla minusta on tullut suomenkielisen version ylläpitäjä.

Käännetyn version voi ladata WordPress (FI) -sivulta.

The WordPress download page has version 1.5 available! I’m up and running 1.5 as of a couple of minutes ago, although I’ve been running and tweaking the latest CVS code for the past couple of days anyway. Or I maybe I should say “untweaking,” as really I’ve been able to remove almost all of the local changes, and move many of the remaining ones to plugins.

Cool stuff, especially all the new goodies for plugins!

Due to the low volume of comments on my site, I didn’t think it is necessary to tag links in comments with the rel="nofollow" attribute. All the links in the handful of comments that exist are just fine. I created a plugin to disable such automatic tagging.

Download: dofollow.php

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WordPress implements a nice wide selection of hooks for plugins to modify the functionality of the software. I’ve used some of the most recent ones to override the time offset value with information derived from the operating system. The benefit is that WordPress can now automatically observe DST changes.

The result: timezone.php — download it now!

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