The Opera's Installer problem
As you probably already know, the translation of Opera itself is best to be implemented in Unicode. This way we may avoid a number of compatibility problems between different versions of an operating system, and even between different operating systems. Since version 6, Opera has a great ability for internationalization on different platforms.
Unfortunately, the innovative brightness of Opera is being delivered hidden under a dirty and unreadable cover: the version of the Wise Installer Wizard they use. The translation for the Installer cannot be supplied in Unicode. Instead, we are stuck to the old legacy encodings such as Cyrillic Windows-1251. This means that the users of Widnows 2000 and Windows XP must fix some settings hidden too-deep inside the Control Panel of Windows. In our daily work it is a common situation to advise people how to run properly th Wise Installer of Opera in a readable manner. We believe that neither experienced nor typical users should dig this deep in their system just to have the Opera Installer running correctly.
The ultimate resolution: Unicode! (And Pancakes Too)
One of us (Vlad) was kind of accustomed to this old problem. You know, it is bad to get accustomed to problems, because you forget they are problems, and that they actually need to be resolved! Happily, another one of us (Mladen) was open-minded enough to state loud that this is really a serious problem! And it actually lowers the value of our efforts to have a really good translation of Opera. So Vlad felt Mladen is perfectly right, and took the effort to complain on the public opera.translate newsgroups.
Now we are waiting for the results. We wanted to be sure that we will have a positive result and the Opera guys (all wonderful girls and boys) will upgrade the installer to a more suitable, Unicode-aware implementation. In an effort to convince Opera people that we need Unicode (eg. UTF8) in the Installer, Mladen tried to prepare pancakes for first time since many years in his life. You may not want to beleive, but, we have materiality proofs! The first proof is the picture of the very result, the panckakes themselves:
You may say that there is no warranty if it's really Mladen who cooked them! Hehe, but we have proofs for this too! Here you are this:
You probably think that's just an artificial pose? Then how about this:
Some of us (Vlad and probably Kamen) still remember the dark old medieval centuries when the Bulgarian translation of Opera was led in such an ancient encoding. Can you imagine that we wereconstantly having "stupid" problems on different installations of Windows 98. We managed to change the translation into UTF-8, which resolved all problems of this kind, and even made possible a flawless work under Linux.
Please, please, please Opera guys, turn our wish into a truth! :-)
The Pancakes Receipt
Here is Mladen's description of the pancake' receipt, taken from a mail:
About the recipe - this is a little bit of tricky question, because I did not have a written recipe, last time I cooked pancakes was when I was 13 (and now I am 25) and most of all I just knew what is inside a pancake, and how dense the mixture should be without knowing any specific mesurment or proportion. Most of all I had to do everything by hand because I did not have an electrical mixer. Indeed. So, last saturday I started to improvise, as usual ... First I put 3 eggs and added 2 spoons of white sugar. Stirred up well until nice yellow color is achieved. Then I put 3 spoons of flour and about 150 - 170ml of milk, and mixed again. Continuing stirring the mixture I thought few drops of salt should be essential for richer taste. Based on my secondary school knowledge I know that human tongue has different receptors for salt and sugar, so both tastes would not nullify, on the contrary they would supplement each other. Because I calculated that the mixture would not be enough for me and my apartment-mates' breakfast, I added a spoon of sugar, two spoons of flour and some extra milk about 130ml. I confess the extra milk was a mistake. In stead I should have put water which would result in some suppleness. Being done only with milk the pancakes were too gentle to turn in the pan, difficult but not impossible, as it could be observed :-) The result should be soft yellow mixture, not too dense or watery. It will be enough for 12-14 thin pancakes. So if I sum up: * 250 ml of milk * 50 ml of water * 3 eggs * 3 spoons of sugar * 5 full spoons of white flour * some salt for richer taste * some fun ;-) Note: spoon equals soup-spoon Looking forward to hear if you have tried the recipe and about the result .. prepare your camera - we want proof ;-)