Embacing my inner geek

[yrieithydd]

I've been thinking again this evening about the fact that I get the impression that there is a lack of Welsh-speakers with good computer support skills. So for instance in various digitization programmes etc there are the people who have the academic skills (Middle Welsh) and those who can do the technical side (but have no Welsh at all). Or, and this is where it started this evening, there are people who design bilingual websites and content management without being able to read the Welsh half of the content (and so they lack proof-reading ability at the very least). For example, I noticed that the company that hosts/develops etc the Plaid website, the Welsh language Board website, the Assembly Website, the National Eisteddfod website does not itself have a bilingual website. This would seem a niche I ought to be able to exploit as I have the Welsh language skills and, I believe, the technical aptitude. But, I lack the specific knowledge and experience to get in in the first place.

I think the fact that in doing my PhD when I needed a stylesheet for BibΤεΧ which conformed to my departmental stylesheet (including author shorttitle references) I managed to achieve this by using makebst to get me part of the way to what I needed and then by hacking the unnamed postfix stack language used by BibΤεΧ demonstrates my aptitude, especially considering that I started from a position where I understood neither postfix nor stack; hacking got considerably easier when a former mathmo colleague explained that bit to me. However, that is probably not enough to get into those sorts of jobs. So I turn to the geeks amongst my f'list for advice on becoming a better geek!

I started well as a small child – I tried to write a database programme in BASIC aged 9 or 10 (but was frustrated by the fact that our very old telly didn't display the top and bottom lines of the screen) but when we got the Arc when I was 12 it was easier to buy Squirrel to database my books than write my own so my programming stopped because I didn't have anything I wanted to achieve by it.

Where should I start to get good all round geek skills, possibly with a web bias?

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Helping out with free software has given me a huge boost in geek skills, almost as much as my degree did, perhaps more. There are places you can help with coding, web work, design, documentation, translation into Welsh. My own community is the GNOME community and it has all those openings, but there are many others; I can put you in touch with GNOME people who can help. (Actually, I know one person who's both on the GNOME welcoming organisation *and* the Welsh translation effort-- I could ask her to talk to you if you like about how you can help.)

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

(Oh, I meant to add: while this is all worthwhile in itself, I have the job I have now entirely and only because I worked in free software before. It really does open doors.)

[yrieithydd.livejournal.com]

That sounds useful (though I really need to get the PhD done before I've got the time to get involved) but I think my question was really, what should I read so that I have a chance of understanding the terminology used in order to get into it. For example, I find your posts on it interest but I'm pretty hazy about the technical terms so I get a vague sense but no more (rather like i get from my boyfriend's logs of what he's done on his hardware PhD).

With the BibΤεΧ example, even after my colleague explained what a postfix stack language was I was still pretty hazy about stacks and concatenation and things and for a long time had an annoying bug which generally gave the error message 'can't pop an empty stack' for a certain subset of my entries, but the output looked ok unless there was another error in the entries at which point it all went horribly wrong. I didn't understand the error message well enough to be able to work out what had happened. I eventually solved it when something which had been working started producing the same error and I tracked it down to an extra * (concatenation character) in the complicated layers of if clauses I was writing in notepad. At which point various things clicked about popping stacks and concatenation and I understood what the error message was, why it went so horribly wrong in conjunction with the other thing and more importantly how to fix the other instance of this!

I need something that will fill in the holes I have in the basics so I've got somewhere to build.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

What you want is http://ocw.mit.edu/ . In particular, you want:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-001Spring-2005/CourseHome/index.htm

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

If you have any questions or want to talk about anything, I'm sure you're surrounded by compsci people anyway, but feel free to come and find me.

[emperor]

marnanel is wise. Websites used to be just HTML (and then later, plus CSS); these days they tend to be based upon a particular Content Manglement System. A lot of these you pick up by encountering them, I think.

[wackydave.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest that "just" reading probably won't be enough you will have to try some examples as well. Looking at web pages around, html and css will give a bit of background, however you'll have to look at a scripting language as well, as pages are increasingly becoming more interactive. As I understand it php is a popular choice at the moment, but I know nothing about it.

[keith-underdown.livejournal.com]

Talk to your dear old dad!

[senji.livejournal.com]

Everyone above has given you good looking suggestions already, so just a little pedantic note that the HTML entity you're looking for is called 'ndash' not 'endash' (I assume an American got involved or something).

[keith-underdown.livejournal.com]

But it's &enspace!

There's consistency for you!

Imaginet

[rhysbryn.livejournal.com]

"For example, I noticed that the company that hosts/develops etc the Plaid website, the Welsh language Board website, the Assembly Website, the National Eisteddfod website does not itself have a bilingual website."

Dwi'n digwydd nabod rhywun sy'n gweithio i Imaginet, ac fe fedra i ddweud ar goedd fod 'na rai o fewn y cwmni sydd a'r sgiliau iaith a'r sgiliau technegol angenrheidiol ar gyfer dylunio dwyieithog. Mae'n siwr fod na reswm am y diffyg darpariaeth dwyieithog ar eu gwefan 'farchnata' nhw'u hunain - ond nid diffyg sgiliau o fewn y cwmni yw hynny.

Am ba fath o beth wyt ti'n chwilio, Carys? Dwi'n gweithio yn y maes technoleg iaith a lleferydd. Rho wybod ac fe alla i awgrymu rhai llwybrau posib, efallai.

Ac mae'r hyn ddwedodd marnanel yn wir - mae cyfieithu meddalwedd rhydd yn ffordd wych i ddod i nabod mwy am y maes (a'r rhai sydd o fewn y maes).