We were nearly 20 people from the Shanghai Linux User Group this evening, at JA cafe (near JinAn temple), celebrating Debian s 19th birthday. As the only DD present at that event (Li Daobing was busy somewhere else), I was honored by my friends to be the one cutting the cake. Above the (very nice) cake before sharing it, below, a few SHLUG members present that evening.

Today, I spent the entire morning working on the iso-codes package. This package features, among others, the giant ISO-3166-2 list, with all subdivisions of all countries of the world, thus about 4000names. Alastair McKinstry built this list long time ago, from various sources, as the ISO-3166 maintenance agency, does not provide the official list freely. Therefore, the work we (Alastair, Tobias Toedter, Li Daobing and myself) are doing on iso-codes is of some importance as this is the only freely available list of ISO-639 (language names), ISO-3166 (country names and subdivisions) and ISO-4217 (currency names) available in a machine parseable format, along with translations in a lot of languages. We are indeed upstream for that list which is used in many Linux distributions. So, today, I went on the ISO-3166 maintenance agency newsletters (*these* are freely available) and used them to update the subdivision list for as many countries as possible. That involved *copy and pasting* from PDF files to text files so that names are preserved along with the correct various funky characters used in many languages. You can help this work. Just install the "iso-codes" package, then check /usr/share/xml/iso-codes/iso_3166_2.xml for your country and report anythink you consider being a problem as a bug against the iso-codes package. Please note that the ISO-3166 MA only uses official references from the national standard bodies of all countries, so please use official sources as your reference. Of course, patches are very welcomed because dealing with all these names without messing with the "funky characters" is not easy. Please also note that the ISO-3166-2 standard uses "romanized" names, so only Latin characters should be used (all variants of such characters are accepted, though). My conclusion of the day: the world is bloody complicated. There are even subdivisions (named "castles") for....San Marino, one of the smallest states in the world. Luckily, the Holy See (the reall smallest state in the world), doesn't seem to have subdivisions...so far. And the country with the highest number of official subdivisions is....Slovenia (184!).