Google Translate adds Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic

I just noticed today that Google has added 4 more languages to its translation tools. Although current tagged as a BETA service, you can now translate in:

  • English to Arabic BETA
  • English to Japanese BETA
  • English to Korean BETA
  • English to Chinese (Simplified) BETA

    So test it out, I have translated “Google adds four new languages to its web translation tool” into each of the new languages:

  • توضع اربع لغات جديده اضافه الي ادوات الترجمه علي (Arabic)
  • Googleは網翻訳用具に4つの新しい言語を加える (Japanese)
  • Google는 그것의 웹 번역 도구에 4개의 새로운 언어를 추가한다 (Korean)
  • 谷歌增加4个新的网络语言翻译工具 (Simplified Chinese)

    I have no idea how accurate the translations are, so if any native speakers could verify them that would be great!

    If you are wondering how I managed to get the foreign characters from Google translate on to my blog, well I couldn’t just copy and paste from the source, so I made a tool that converts foreign characters into html special characters.

  • Installing PDFlib on Fedora Core 4

    First up I had to download the package from the pecl repository via pear

    pear install pdflib
    But that gave me an error sh: phpize: command not found, so I had to install phpize. This appears to be part of the php-pecl-pdo-devel.i386 package. So installed this with yum
    
    yum install php-pecl-pdo-devel
    

    I then tried installing pdflib through pear again, but this time it had a different complaint aclocal: command not found. So apparently I need the automake package.

    yum install automake
    

    I try installing pdflib again, but this time it complains about no c compliler found! So then I try install gcc

    yum install gcc
    

    Installing SQL-ledger on Fedora Core 3

    If you get a No Database Drivers available! error when trying to install SQL-ledger, it is most likely because you haven’t installed the perl/postgresql drivers. With FC3 you can install them through:

    yum install perl-DBD-Pg
    

    These weren’t the only difficulties I encountered with the sql-ledger installation process, so I have detailed the steps I took here:

    yum install postgresql postgresql-server php-pgsql postgresql-pl perl-DBD-Pg
    

    Then download and run the sql-ledger setup script

    mkdir /usr/local/sql-ledger
    cd /usr/local/sql-ledger
    wget http://www.sql-ledger.org/source/setup.perl
    chmod +x setup.perl
    ./setup.perl
    

    Follow the on-screen prompts, and then once that has completed you will have to setup the database user etc..

    su postgres
    createuser sql-ledger
    createdb sql-ledger
    createlang plpgsql template1
    

    You will then probably need to change the security settings of postgresql to trust local users, I did this by editing pg_hba.conf and changing the authentication to

       local           all        all           trust
    

    Finally you should visit the http://localhost/sql-ledger/admin.pl script in your webbrowser to complete the setup.

    PHP Classes / Objects vs Functions

    We’ve been having a big debate in our office recently on whether we should be using Classes and Objects as a method of best practice in our PHP coding standards, or whether instead we should stick to using functions and avoid objects like the plague. I have been searching the web for other peoples views on the issue, and I eventually found this great article over on zend.com. You should read it if only for the comical but accurate descriptions of the procedural fanatic and the object fanatic.

    Zend Technologies – Articles – The Best Tool For The Job: OO versus Procedural Programming in PHP

    The general conclusion is that there is a time and a place for both programming methods, with procedural techniques better suited for building low overhead, tight and fast code, whereas object orientated techniques are better for making code that is re-useable and more flexible.