Holidays, Norwegian, and relaxed callsign rules

I'm back from the Christmas holidays, and looking forward to fixing some bugs and doing a little new development. I spent Christmas in the Åland islands and worked some HF digital modes as OH0/OH7LZB. It was a lot of fun, I've never really felt like being a DX before. Had a sort of a pile-up on 14 MHz RTTY for quite a while!

New year was spent a bit further away... can you recognize the place from these photos? :) It was a lot of fun, a very nice town with very nice people. The hostel was awful, though, and not very cheap either.

Now, let's get back to business:

I installed the new Ham::APRS::FAP version 1.01 on the production server. It relaxes APRS-IS source callsign validation rules so that any alphanumeric 'callsign' (including a variable amount of '-' characters) with a maximum of 9 characters is accepted. Things like OH7AA-A (D-STAR DPRS) and aprsdOEZ will now get in the database, too. Welcome!

There is a new complete translation in Norwegian, thanks to LA4RT, LA9UI, and LA4DNA. The site is now available in 8 languages (counting complete or almost complete translations)!

There have also been significant new contributions to the French, Japanese, Polish, German and Dutch translations. Thanks go to HB3YKO, HB9HFD, JA7UDE, JO2VTM, SQ6NTI, SQ3EYC, HB9TQJ, Dl7JP, DO1GVT, DK7IN, PG1G and PA3BWE.

I'd like to remind everyone doing translations about two little things:

- Remember consistency. Please try to use a single word for a certain feature everywhere. For example, always use your preferred translation of Options when referring to the Options pop-up window. Please avoid using a mix of Options, Preferences and Selections. It's OK if your preferred translation actually is closer to Preferences, just use the same word everywhere. :)

- If you're uncertain about a translation for a term, please double-check (use Wikipedia or something). For example, Course, Heading and Bearing are all different things and have different translations, which are easy to mix.

After saying that, I'd like to repeat my thanks to everyone involved in the translation project. The translations seem to be of good quality, and they do make the site more accessible. I'll improve the translation tool in the future, and add more strings (the Options window and help texts should appear soon).

Happy new year, everyone!