I'm on the train back from a workshop on Japanese and computing. For me it was something new meeting these people. I got a very warm welcome and had some nice conversations.

When it comes to writing code, directives and commands are dictated by the programming language (e.g. if ... then ... else), which then is for most programming languages English[1], but when it comes to writing comments the programmer is free to choose which language he uses.

The Shtooka Project offers audio material for learning languages with their swac-collections. The data is provided under a free licences and can be downloaded from the site. Data sets come with a xml index, for which I created a simple Python extractor:

¡ǝpoɔıun oʇ sʞuɐɥʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝʇıɹʍ uɐɔ noʎ 'ʇou ɹo ʇı ǝʌǝılǝq.

This is nothing new (see [1] or [2]), but I wrote a small Python program for this to pipe my instant messaging through it. Needless to say that with KDE's Kopete I found yet another application that seems not to work with non-ASCII characters.

encoding.py is a module that allows the guessing (more formal classification) of languages and encodings of textual input.

It builds on the Textcat library by Gertjan van Noord and the python implementation ngram.py by Thomas Mangin.