Now and again I receive helpful (and much appreciated) feedback from people who are using the IconFamily code in their projects. Today's mail suggested an improved technique for notifying Finder of changes to a file's custom icon, directing me to an archived post on a Cocoa developer list.
Fortunately, C (flavored, in this case, with Carbon API calls) is quite the universal language. The updateFinderIcon() function provided by the message's author appears to work beautifully, and solves the long-standing problem of custom icon assignments not always showing up immediately in Finder views. The technique it illustrates looks like it will make a promising enhancement to the project.
Curious whether I might be able to glean something more from the context of the post, however, and not myself a speaker of Japanese, I thought I'd try running the text of the message through one of the online translation engines that are available nowadays. (My Google search for the same information in another language had turned up nothing.) The results of using an automated translator are often unintentionally entertaining; this one seemed blogworthy.
BabelFish for some reason threw up its hands when asked to translate the page, but I managed to get something out of Sherlock's translation plugin, which uses Systran. My intent here is not to find fault with the translation engine — it's a wonderful minor miracle of technology, really, that we can even attempt such a thing and more often than not get something approaching a reasonable result out the other end. No, this is all just about sharing a couple of laughs over the clearly very humbling task that the poor authors of these translators have to face...
Here's the translated text of the message body, including some fragments that were evidently untranslatable (I suppose they might be proper names, or perhaps identifiers from the code spelled phonetically?):
Ogiwara @ it is the Kobe university.
Me in [ macosx-dev-jp:01455 ]
> after setting information to the resource file, the display of Finder is made to modify
> directly, when in regard to the program, how it does, it probably is to be good?
> Everyone's basket you don't know?Inside and the ま, 澤, Mizuno, Iimori, answer thank you.
When Iimori in [ macosx-dev-jp:01459 ]
> modification is added to File system, vis-a-vis Finder
> sending AppleEvent of EventClass:kAEFinderSuite/EventID:kAESync, display 更
> it is the fixed mark where forcing new applies after System7.5.
> AliasRecord of file which is modified is specified to keyDirectObject.After all, it went well with this manner. In the reference of Carbon, because almost there is no description regarding EventClass and EventID, as for the information of Iimori was useful very much.
The program which it tries writing (operation verification to be completed) it publishes below. Because sump ルプログラム has become the cause, as for the place where the husband it has done largely being with you think, but when there is a strange dot, if you can point out, you think. The file where we would like to modify the icon with FSSpec of argument is specified.
I'm thinking I'd like to e-mail the author, to thank him for the useful info he's provided.
Maybe I'll seek some human help with the translation though.