What does Etc mean in time zone definitions - timezone

I can't believe this hasn't been asked before, but I can't find it on SE — or even on the googletron.
What does "Etc" mean in time zone definitions?
Example: php's
date_default_timezone_set('Etc/GMT');

The zone identifiers starting with "Etc/..." come from TZDB-repository maintained by Paul Eggert and hosted by IANA. There is following private non-official github-based repository (labelled as experimental but can be considered as preparing repository for TZDB): github.com/eggert/tz
There you will find an etcetera-file. The zone identifiers mentioned above are available in this file. So the answer is:
"Etc" stands for "et cetera" (latin for "and so forth").
About the motivation of such naming, I think it is best to directly ask the maintainer of TZDB-repository Paul Eggert on the IANA-mailing-list.

Related

Get localized name other channel

I get the version number of the firefox from the applications.ini.
Then I hardcoded that between date #### and #### v35 is release. So now based on this and the current date and version from applications.ini I figure out the channel of other builds.
But now I want to get the localized name of the channel.
So for example I'm using beta channel and from this build I want to get the localized name of "Nightly" in chineese, so it has the chineese characters, and word for nightly in chineese. Can this also be obtained from the applications.ini? Is [App] -> Name localized in applications.ini?
This is the applications.ini method: https://ask.mozilla.org/question/705/detect-if-auroranightlybetanormal-and-get-paths/ (credits to #paa)
EDIT
i discovered this file: OS.Path.join(Services.dirsvc.get('XREExeF', Ci.nsIFile).parent.path, 'defaults', 'pref', 'channel-prefs.js')
its contents is the following:
//#line 2 "c:\builds\moz2_slave\rel-m-beta-w32_bld-00000000000\build\browser\app\profile\channel-prefs.js"
/* This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
* License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
* file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. */
pref("app.update.channel", "beta");
Is this a reliable check? Does this channel-prefs.js file exist for all builds as soon as they are installed?
Is this a reliable check?
Not really. There used to be channel switcher add-ons, and in theory the user can change this pref (although at the moment this is not sufficient to really switch the channel I think).
Does this channel-prefs.js file exist for all builds as soon as they are installed?
Yes, for now. But this is an implementation detail. There is no guarantee that the file won't be moved or renamed later, or merged with another file.
Can this also be obtained from the applications.ini?
The localized name? I didn't even know there was one... I thought it was called e.g. "Nightly" in all locales like it was a (product) name. But yeah, it is theoretically possible to localize that string. It is not available from the ini file, though.
I wouldn't poke in application.ini anyway, and instead just use Services.appinfo.defaultUpdateChannel
But now I want to get the localized name of the channel.
Since you're in a running Firefox instance already (judging from your OS.File code), you should use the string bundle service to load chrome://branding/locale/brand.properties and get the brandShortName or brandFullName string from there.

Lua - My documents path and file creation date

I'm planning to do a program with Lua that will first of all read specific files
and get information from those files. So my first question is whats the "my documents" path name? I have searched a lot of places, but I'm unable to find anything. My second question is how can I use the first four letters of a file name to see which one is the newest made?
Finding the files in "my documents" then find the newest created file and read it.
The reading part shouldn't be a problem, but navigating to "my documents" and finding the newest created file in a folder.
For your first question, depends how robust you want your script to be. You could use Lua's builtin os.getenv() to get a variety of environment vars related to user, such as USERNAME, USERPROFILE, HOMEDRIVE, HOMEPATH. Example:
username = os.getenv('USERNAME')
dir = 'C:\\users\\' .. username .. '\\Documents'
For the second question, there is no builtin mechanism in Windows to have the file creation or modification timestamp as part of the filename. You could read the creation or modification timestamp, via a C extension you create or using an existing Lua library like lfs. Or you could read the contents of a folder and parse the filenames if they were named according to the pattern you mention. Again there is nothing built into Lua to do this, you would either use os.execute() or lfs or, again, your own C extension module, or combinations of these.

Specification for vda formats

I'm student and I have to make project which include EDI converter (mine of course). To be honest I have to use ODETTE format and VDA. Does anybody know where I can find any specification for this formats?
Any help would be great !:)
ODETTE is edifact. see http://www.unece.org/trade/untdid/welcome.html
all UN edifact messagges are there.
they have versions (like D 96A etc); so you have to be beware of the version of the message you use.
VDA is used in German automitive.
This is their website: http://www.vda.de/de/index.html
look eg at http://www.vda.de/de/publikationen/publikationen_downloads/index.html?aid=1
They have more than one format: edifact, csv, fixed elngth records.
Yes, you can build your own translator.
Take a look at Bots open source edi translator (http://bots.sourceforge.net),
you might get some idea's ;-))

Referencing a theorem-like environment by its [name]

I am using ntheorem to typeset a set of conditions. In my preamble I have:
\theoremstyle{empty}
\newtheorem{Condtion}{Condtion}
When I want to typeset a condition, I write:
\begin{Condtion}[name]
\label{cnd:nm}
foo foo foo
\end{Condition}
The name appears boldface on the same line as the start of the text of the condition, with no number or anything. Perfect.
What I want to do now is refer to the condition by some variant of the \ref command,
\ref calls the number [which is not displayed anywhere else]
\thref writes "Condition n" for the nth condition
\nameref writes the name of the SECTION of the label.
a zref solution was suggested here, but seems unsatisfactory and unwieldly.
Any suggestions on a simple way to do this? (Even a simpler zref solution would be nice) At the moment I've just defined a \newcommand for each condition and use that rather than citing the condition itself. This is semantically opaque and just unsatisfying...
(edit: I emailed one author of ntheorem, Wolfgang May, and he explained that there isn't really a way to do this within ntheorem, since the [name] option isn't recorded.)
(edit: This isn't a dupe as suggested in the comment, since I'm interested in referencing an environment by its optional name command, not referencing the section/chapter it sits in.)
I think the following may do what you want.
\makeatletter
\def\namedlabel#1#2{\begingroup
\def\#currentlabel{#2}%
\label{#1}\endgroup
}
\makeatother
Then you use it as
\begin{theorem}
\namedlabel{thm:seamus}{Seamus' Theorem}
Here is Seamus' Theorem.
\end{theorem}
Here I reference~\ref{thm:seamus}.
Unfortunately, it can then only be referenced by name, though I suppose you could use a normal \label as well (with a different key of course).
For the amsthm environments you can use
\makeatletter
\let\#old#begintheorem=\#begintheorem
\def\#begintheorem#1#2[#3]{%
\gdef\#thm#name{#3}%
\#old#begintheorem{#1}{#2}[#3]%
}
\def\namedthmlabel#1{\begingroup
\edef\#currentlabel{\#thm#name}%
\label{#1}\endgroup
}
\makeatother
nameref doesn't work: it references the title of the SECTION the theorem-like environment appears in.
This is a nameref bug that was already fixed a while ago:
http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/9uUx5EuqoCGynIvx3om7#lY2MJxvge2oMgOi
Unfortunately some Linux distros like Debian/Ubuntu ship with horribly old versions of the packages (Ubuntu 11.04 still ships TeX Live 2009 although the latest version is TeX Live 2011). If you're using such a Linux distro stop using the Tex Live package in the distro, and install TeX Live directly from here: http://www.tug.org/texlive/ You can then update packages using tlmgr (a really cool tool that doesn't ship with Debian/Ubuntu).
you may want to check out the nameref package, which is distributed with hyperref. There is a section in the nameref documentation about referencing "stuff".
More on referencing can be found in the TeX FAQ item Referring to things by their name.
I thought others might find this helpful. Even though I had an updated hyperref package installed, I had to explicitly call \usepackage{nameref} after \usepackage{hyperref} in order to get the correct behavior from \nameref. Without the explicit call to \usepackage{nameref}, \nameref worked, but exhibited the bug discussed in this thread.
Update: this workaround isn't requred for a minimal example (which I checked). I don't know if there's something more complicated going on in my style files, but I'll update this if I find something. This may still help someone running into the same issue I was.

Alternatives to gettext?

Are there any general localization/translation alternatives to gettext?
Open source or proprietary doesn't matter.
When I say alternative to gettext, I mean a library for internationalization, with a localization backend of sorts.
The reason I'm asking is because (among other things) I find the way gettext does things slightly cumbersome and static, mostly in the backend bit.
First of all I think gettext is one of the best at this point.
You may take a look on Boost.Locale that may provide a better API and use gettext's dictionary model: http://cppcms.sourceforge.net/boost_locale/docs/ (not official part of Boost, still beta).
Edit:
If you don't like gettext...
These are translation technologies:
OASIS XLIFF
GNU gettext po/mo files
POSIX catalogs
Qt ts/tm files
Java properties,
Windows resources.
Now:
Last two total crap... Very hard to use translate and maintain, do not support plural forms.
Qt ts/tm -- requires usage of Qt framework. Have very similar model to gettext. Not bad solution, but limited to Qt. Not so useful in generic programs.
POSIX catalogs -- nobody uses them, no plural forms support. Crap.
OASIX XLIFF -- "standard" solution, depends on XML, even ICU requires compilation to specific ICU resources for use. Limited translation tools, I don't know any library that supports XLIFF. Plural forms not so easy to use (ICU included some support only in 4.x release).
Now what do we have?
GNU gettext, widely used, has great tools, has great plural forms support, very popular in translators community...
So decide, do you really think that gettext is not so good solution?
I don't think so. You haven't worked with other solutions at all, so try to understand how it works at first place.
Fluent is a new system that offers a number of adaptations that gettext lacks. Where gettext supports pluralization, fluent has a generic framework for the text variants. Where gettext uses the "untranslated" string as its translation key, fluent supports an abstract key (allowing multiple translations for something that just happens to be homonymous in the source language. Here is a more extensive comparison.
An example of fluent .ftl file, taken from firefox's preferences codebase, looks like this:
# This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
# License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
# file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.
blocklist-window =
.title = Block Lists
.style = width: 55em
blocklist-description = Choose the list { -brand-short-name } uses to block online trackers. Lists provided by <a data-l10n-name="disconnect-link" title="Disconnect">Disconnect</a>.
blocklist-close-key =
.key = w
blocklist-treehead-list =
.label = List
blocklist-button-cancel =
.label = Cancel
.accesskey = C
blocklist-button-ok =
.label = Save Changes
.accesskey = S
# This template constructs the name of the block list in the block lists dialog.
# It combines the list name and description.
# e.g. "Standard (Recommended). This list does a pretty good job."
#
# Variables:
# $listName {string, "Standard (Recommended)."} - List name.
# $description {string, "This list does a pretty good job."} - Description of the list.
blocklist-item-list-template = { $listName } { $description }
blocklist-item-moz-std-listName = Level 1 block list (Recommended).
blocklist-item-moz-std-description = Allows some trackers so fewer websites break.
blocklist-item-moz-full-listName = Level 2 block list.
blocklist-item-moz-full-description = Blocks all detected trackers. Some websites or content may not load properly.
Interesting comments about gettext() and all those pro-gettext().
I'm not saying that it ain't working right in most cases, but I tried to manage one project with it and quickly felt overwhelm by the hardness of using it. Maybe there are a few user interfaces for translators today, but I did not even look. The extraction and merging of strings is just not doing it for me.
Now, I thank you Artyom for talking about XLIFF which is a much better solution for my environment since everything is XML. Oh! And there are excellent editors out there. But if you like gettext() you won't find them. 8-)
I'll suggest looking at this one for example:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/wordforge2/
Now, this may give the programmer a nightmare to make it all work, but what we want is a dream come true for the translators (and zero work by the programmer as translations pour in, because I can tell you that with gettext() I had to do all the work!)
There is an alternative from Zend that supports gettext *.po / *.mo files and many more formats.
Many Apache servers cache the translation files because gettext is implemented as a module and the server has to be restarted to refresh the translation data.
The Zend implementation avoids this and supports many more formats:
http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.translate.html

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