:: 22-Jan-2000 18:55 (Saturday) ::

It’s been ages since I last updated my .plan but work is still very much
ongoing for me here. For those of you who are curious about the behind the
scene details on what’s happening with the multilingual web site, I put
together a brief set of pages to keep you informed.

http://www.distributed.net/~jfc/translations/

:: 22-Jul-1999 02:04 (Thursday) ::

Here’s to keep you updated on what I’ve been up to lately. I have been pretty
busy getting translated versions of the web site up online for our non English-
speaking users. Our team of translators has been stunningly efficient in
translating pages in many different languages, including Russian, French,
Dutch, German, and more to come, such as Danish, Italian, Spanish
and Portuguese. Many thanks go to them.

At first, the way things were handled is that users’ browser language
preferences were taken into account to serve them the ‘most suitable’ version
of the web site. It soon enough proved to not be a very effective way of
offering multilingual pages. That’s why as of yesterday, the translated pages
are only accessible via the links that are present at the top of each page.
Everything should now default back to English in any case.

Sorry about the temporary inconvenience that some of you may have experienced
over the past two weeks. Thanks.

:: 08-Jul-1999 03:01 (Thursday) ::

Right after yesterday’s State of the Net was posted
(http://www.distributed.net/SOTN.html), several of you rushed off to
http://www.distributed.net/jobs/ in order to file for the currently
offered positions here at d.net.

Even though the submission cgi was tested shortly before the SOTN
post, it failed to properly record 6 submissions yesterday. The 6
missing submissions were filed on July 7, 1999 between 07:20 and 11:10
UTC. I sincerely apologize for this unexpected problem and would like
to ask the people who submitted their application during that 4 hour
lapse of time following the SOTN post to please take the time to
resubmit their application, so that it can effectively be processed.
2 submissions were from Italy, another 2 from Spain, 1 from the US and
the last one from Europe. If you have any doubts, please consider
reposting your application.

Once again I wish to apologize for that glitch that has now been
fixed, and would like to thank those who have volunteered so quickly
for their enthusiasm. I hope to welcome you aboard shortly!

If you have any questions, email me at jfc@distributed.net

:: 28-Mar-1999 19:41 (Sunday) ::

It has already been 2 months since I took over regional support
coordination from Decibel at the end of January, so I guess that it’s
about time I updated my plan.

I’ve been doing a lot of ‘behind the scene’ work to make sure that our
ever growing team of regional representatives is ready to provide you
with fast and reliable help. As of today, 45 countries offer regional
support for distributed.net.

I have also been working on implementing a multilingual website
management tool that will allow our regional support staff to
translate web pages for us. These pages will be accessible through
your browser if you set the language priorities properly (ie: set a
higher priority for French than for English, for example, and pages
that are available in French will be displayed instead of the default
English pages). More information for Netscape users is available
http://help.netscape.com/products/client/communicator/nethelp/Navigatr/nav.htm#PREFERENCES_NAVIGATOR_LANGUAGES.

I still have to clean up the code and fix minor things before a small
group of regional representative beta testers can actually start using
a functional version of the translation tool. On the whole, I’ve been
making significant progress on this project and beta testing is only a
couple of weeks away.

On a totally unrelated note, I set up a search engine for the d.net
website. You can use it at http://n0cgi.distributed.net/cgi/dsearch.cgi.
A query form will soon be added to the navigation bar of the
http://www.distributed.net/ page.