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Saturday, June 30, 2007
Sussex Digital
Josh and Dave, the guys behind Dash Labs recently introduced Sussex Digital, a service to let the people in Sussex know what is going on around and about. They are introducing a new section every week, and so far have given us twitter reminders of events and other notifications of interest, events list and information about the local networking opportunities and groups. What they've done is effectively aggregated a lot of feeds with relevant information into one hub. A great idea.
Yesterday they also launched their buttons so in the interest of community I've added one to the bottom of this page, and thought I'd add one here as well so here we go:
Yesterday they also launched their buttons so in the interest of community I've added one to the bottom of this page, and thought I'd add one here as well so here we go:
Labels: sussexdigital
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Localisation
The current project I'm working on is going to be delivered in Dutch. I figured I had 2 choices, the hard coded method or a resource based method. The hard coded method would be ok, but as the whole of the site is being presented in Dutch my fear was that it would make testing, and maintenance incredible hard (for the record I don't speak Dutch!). The resource based method might take slightly longer to implement, but not enough to prevent me from doing it.
So, I'm using the .NET ResourceManager class to manage my resources files and using resgen to take a text file of name value pairs and generate the .resources file.
My naming strategy for the text items are XXX_YYY_Key where:
XXX is the main area of the project - i.e. admin, front end, etc
YYY is the module of the area - i.e. article, menu, etc
Key is the "thing" we're providing text for - i.e. title, contact name, email address, etc
so, ADMIN_ARTICLE_Title = Title etc
I have 2 files, one in English, one in Dutch and I use an appSetting in my web.config file to specify what my DefaultCulture should be. The site will only run in either Dutch or English so there is no need to make anything more complicated that this, and it allows development and maintenance to be affected in English, whilst the live site is presented in Dutch.
This is all working well, but then I got to thinking about the javascript and drew a blank through my google searching. Some of my javascript files perform validation, and alert the user with appropriate messages if the content isn't valid. I asked some of my local brains and still came up with a blank, a few names were banded about, but I didn't get to HackDay and so didn't get to pick their brains.
At the moment, I've added a line to my resources file to contain the javascript file to include in the file. This allows there to be muliple validation files, one per language if I want - at the moment there is just one file and it's in Dutch. But really this isn't a great solution. I've started doing some investigation and playing, but haven't really had the time to progress it any further.
The current 4 options to do this that I can think of are:
Anyone done any localisation/localization in javascript and got any more options or solutions for me?
So, I'm using the .NET ResourceManager class to manage my resources files and using resgen to take a text file of name value pairs and generate the .resources file.
My naming strategy for the text items are XXX_YYY_Key where:
XXX is the main area of the project - i.e. admin, front end, etc
YYY is the module of the area - i.e. article, menu, etc
Key is the "thing" we're providing text for - i.e. title, contact name, email address, etc
so, ADMIN_ARTICLE_Title = Title etc
I have 2 files, one in English, one in Dutch and I use an appSetting in my web.config file to specify what my DefaultCulture should be. The site will only run in either Dutch or English so there is no need to make anything more complicated that this, and it allows development and maintenance to be affected in English, whilst the live site is presented in Dutch.
This is all working well, but then I got to thinking about the javascript and drew a blank through my google searching. Some of my javascript files perform validation, and alert the user with appropriate messages if the content isn't valid. I asked some of my local brains and still came up with a blank, a few names were banded about, but I didn't get to HackDay and so didn't get to pick their brains.
At the moment, I've added a line to my resources file to contain the javascript file to include in the file. This allows there to be muliple validation files, one per language if I want - at the moment there is just one file and it's in Dutch. But really this isn't a great solution. I've started doing some investigation and playing, but haven't really had the time to progress it any further.
The current 4 options to do this that I can think of are:
- Basic - 2 javascript files, one per language - duplicate functionality
- Literals - 3 javascript files - one per language, plus one with functionality
- A self detecting piece of javascript that works out the locale from some setting and thus includes the appropriate literals file (or other data store method) dynamically
- A method using a better form of data store than variables
Anyone done any localisation/localization in javascript and got any more options or solutions for me?
Labels: ASP.NET, javascript, localisation, localization, resources
// posted by Jane @ 7:47 PM 
Comments:
Guy Smith-Ferrier is your man. He's a regular DDD speaker (including Saturday), and an internationalisation expert, such that he's written a book about it. He's friendly and approachable too.
Girl Geek Dinners on Woman's Hour
Thanks to Val's post to the Brighton Girl Geek Dinners mailing list, I've just listened to the Girl Geek Dinner section of Woman's Hour from last week. Great to hear the Girlie Geeks getting such positive coverage.
Labels: Geek Dinner, girl geeks
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Flash Brighton - Aral Balkan - SWX - Rediscovering Fun!
Last night I put aside my (very old) flash prejudice and headed over to Aral's beautiful flat for his presentation to Flash Brighton on SWX. One of my reasons is because when Aral was first working on SWX, when it was still "the tangent" I bumped into Aral quite often and got snapshots of the development process - but that is all I got. I listened in to some of his OSFlash SWX presentation last week, but then got distracted by beer at the Victory and haven't had a change to listen to the rest. The other reason was to see the Nabaztag bunny that Aral gained at Hack Day - you can send the bunny a message from Aral's website.
Aral put on a really good presentation, explaining in words that non-flash developers could understand. His demo's mostly worked ;-) and the whole interface and method of working looked good and seemed to just make sense. Great job Aral!
I spoke to quite a few Flash developers and designers and they didn't seem too upset to have a .NET developer in their midst (although at least one of them needs to get out more as I had a comment that they'd never met a female developer before).
My only experience of flash, other than as a user, was many years ago, 2000 or 2001 and I wasn't impressed - I didn't work with it, I just observed others and the work they produced. It looked pretty but that was about it.
Having seen some flash yesterday and listened to Aral's talk I must admit to having seen flash in a new light. I don't think I'm going to be giving up my back end development preference any time soon, but neither am I going to run away from flash either. To be honest, I think my acceptance of flash has been progressing in the background for a while - Niqui gave a good presentation at the Girl Geek Dinners on accessibility.
So, a great evening, slightly outside of my comfort zone, but big thanks to Flash Brighton for putting on such a good session, and to everyone for being so accepting of a non-flash person.
Aral put on a really good presentation, explaining in words that non-flash developers could understand. His demo's mostly worked ;-) and the whole interface and method of working looked good and seemed to just make sense. Great job Aral!
I spoke to quite a few Flash developers and designers and they didn't seem too upset to have a .NET developer in their midst (although at least one of them needs to get out more as I had a comment that they'd never met a female developer before).
My only experience of flash, other than as a user, was many years ago, 2000 or 2001 and I wasn't impressed - I didn't work with it, I just observed others and the work they produced. It looked pretty but that was about it.
Having seen some flash yesterday and listened to Aral's talk I must admit to having seen flash in a new light. I don't think I'm going to be giving up my back end development preference any time soon, but neither am I going to run away from flash either. To be honest, I think my acceptance of flash has been progressing in the background for a while - Niqui gave a good presentation at the Girl Geek Dinners on accessibility.
So, a great evening, slightly outside of my comfort zone, but big thanks to Flash Brighton for putting on such a good session, and to everyone for being so accepting of a non-flash person.
Labels: Brighton, event, flash, sussexdigital
Can't logon to SQL Server 2000/2005 after password change
We have a strict password change policy here, and having changed my password yesterday I could no longer start either of my two local instances of SQL Server.
On an attempted start I got an error message:
"The MSSQLSERVER service was unable to log on as with the currently configured password due to the following error:
Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password." error.
To resolve this I headed to Control Panel -> Services and selected MSSQLSERVER. I right clicked, selected Properties and opened the Log On tab. I updated the password and confirm password and then skipped back onto the General tab and started the service. It worked :-). I did the same with SQL Server (SQL2005), also successfully.
On an attempted start I got an error message:
"The MSSQLSERVER service was unable to log on as
Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password." error.
To resolve this I headed to Control Panel -> Services and selected MSSQLSERVER. I right clicked, selected Properties and opened the Log On tab. I updated the password and confirm password and then skipped back onto the General tab and started the service. It worked :-). I did the same with SQL Server (SQL2005), also successfully.
Labels: SQLServer, SQLServer2005
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
£5 App Evening
Another enjoyable £5 App evening last night at the Regency Town House. The format of this evening was slightly different to the previous 2 with a presentation from Dan Glegg on Tails in the first half, and then after our refreshment break 3 pitches from Neil, Stuart and Danny.
Dan did a good presentation about his bug tracking software, explaining what his focus was and what lessons he'd learnt on the way. He released the application as a beta to a few people, and ended up with 100 or so users using it and providing valuable feedback (which was tracked in tails itelf). Some of the beta users came up with some non software uses for tails such as recipes and text reviews which just goes to show how inventive people can be. It sounds like the project was built to meet his own needs, and so the use cases etc are all well thought out, after all, bug tracking is obviously a process that most developers have a need for. Some interesting questions were asked of Dan, including who is his competition and what will he do if it succeeds - questions which are relevant to all of the £5 app presentations I've seen to date. Yesterday Dan announced that tails is ready to ship, with pricing packages all ready to implement. Good Luck Dan!
After a quick break (during which time Dan demo'd tails to anyone who wished to see and whilst ginger cake was munched) it was time for the pitches.
First up was Neil talking about art-hole. This is his idea of a community/social network site targetted towards the large number of artists that live and work in Brighton. The open house website doesn't represent artist's work as well as he'd like - only allowing one image per house, not even one image per artist, and so he's interested in using as many existing sites and APIs to produce a useful community to showcase art.
Next up was Stuart talking about a media finding tool which would run across the internet allowing photographers/videographers to search for their own work which had been copied and was being used without consent. This sounded like an immense amount of work to me but maybe I missed something obvious.
The final pitch was Danny's retro-pitch. Danny came up with an idea a few weeks ago, and has implemented in that time. It is basically a service which strips the comments and whitespace out of CSS files thus reducing bandwidth required. Andy pointed out that there were others offering this service as well with some added functionality. As Danny pointed out this has been released as open source and so if people want to use and change it they can do.
After a successful evening, a lot of us headed down to the Farm for a pint and a chance to do more chatting. Another great evening Ian and John. Thanks!
Dan did a good presentation about his bug tracking software, explaining what his focus was and what lessons he'd learnt on the way. He released the application as a beta to a few people, and ended up with 100 or so users using it and providing valuable feedback (which was tracked in tails itelf). Some of the beta users came up with some non software uses for tails such as recipes and text reviews which just goes to show how inventive people can be. It sounds like the project was built to meet his own needs, and so the use cases etc are all well thought out, after all, bug tracking is obviously a process that most developers have a need for. Some interesting questions were asked of Dan, including who is his competition and what will he do if it succeeds - questions which are relevant to all of the £5 app presentations I've seen to date. Yesterday Dan announced that tails is ready to ship, with pricing packages all ready to implement. Good Luck Dan!
After a quick break (during which time Dan demo'd tails to anyone who wished to see and whilst ginger cake was munched) it was time for the pitches.
First up was Neil talking about art-hole. This is his idea of a community/social network site targetted towards the large number of artists that live and work in Brighton. The open house website doesn't represent artist's work as well as he'd like - only allowing one image per house, not even one image per artist, and so he's interested in using as many existing sites and APIs to produce a useful community to showcase art.
Next up was Stuart talking about a media finding tool which would run across the internet allowing photographers/videographers to search for their own work which had been copied and was being used without consent. This sounded like an immense amount of work to me but maybe I missed something obvious.
The final pitch was Danny's retro-pitch. Danny came up with an idea a few weeks ago, and has implemented in that time. It is basically a service which strips the comments and whitespace out of CSS files thus reducing bandwidth required. Andy pointed out that there were others offering this service as well with some added functionality. As Danny pointed out this has been released as open source and so if people want to use and change it they can do.
After a successful evening, a lot of us headed down to the Farm for a pint and a chance to do more chatting. Another great evening Ian and John. Thanks!
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, £5 app
// posted by Jane @ 6:48 PM
Comments:
Debugging Stored Procedures
In SQL 2000 you could debug stored procedures through Query Analyser. Today I needed to work out how to do it in SQL 2005. The only way I found is via Visual Studio 2005. Register the database in Server Explorer, then within Server Explorer navigate to the stored procedure to debug, right click on it and select "Step into stored procedure". If parameters are required then you'll be displayed a dialog allowing you to put in appropriate values. From here on it is just the same as debugging normal code using VS 2005 - F10 to step over, F11 to step into etc.
Happy debugging!
Happy debugging!
Labels: SQL, SQLServer2005
Monday, June 11, 2007
IE7 issue - navcncl and tabswelcome
Well that was odd, I came back from lunch to discover that whenever I tried to create either a new tab in IE7 or open a new window I got "File Download" dialogs asking me to download navcncl and tabswelcome.
A quick google search directed me to a solution for Vista, which did the trick for me on XP as well.
A quick google search directed me to a solution for Vista, which did the trick for me on XP as well.
Labels: IE7
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Sussex Geek Dinner
The secret army of Ninja coders you didn't know you had
Jun 6, 2007 by Jane Dallaway
Last night I headed off to the Black Horse to hear Dan Glegg talk about "The secret army of Ninja coders you didn't know you had", or alternatively the concept of using easy to develop frameworks which come with easy to use, easy to write and easy to distribute plugins to speed up delivery times allowing small development companies to produce decent sized products.
A good turn out again, and some new people to meet, resulting in a really enjoyable evening.
This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.
As usual more photos available at flickr.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
London Girl Geek Dinners 13
I've considered heading up to London for a girl geek dinner for quite a long time now, months before Rosie, Joh, Devi and Ribot brought the concept to Brighton. The trouble was always that working in Crowborough it was going to be a struggle to get into town in time. Of course I don't work in Crowborough any more, Hurrah!
After my last successful trip to Google, having a Girl Geek Dinner there was just too good an opportunity to miss, so Rosie and I headed off again.
The format was different to the Brighton ones, but as this was my first I have no idea whether this is "normal" or not. We arrived and were greated with glasses of wine (provided by Sara of San Lorenzo) and before very long dinner was served in the Google canteen. The desserts were excellent again!
After satisfying our hunger, we then had the talks and presentations. First up was Shivauna Raff talking about the future of search and what the next big innovation in search was likely to be (vertical apparently).
Next up were Li-Wei Lee and Danielle Drew from the Google Checkout mobile team. Of course, as with all good presentations, their demo failed. They spoke about the development and test process, and most importantly the lessons learnt. They mentioned some specific testing tools for mobile applications which I duly made notes about for Richard. Specifically mentioned were argogroup and mobilecomplete - which sounds like a great, if expensive, way to test a mobile app. Also mentioned was a firefox plugin but I have no idea which one - Helpful eh! It caused quite a reaction when Danielle (from QA) mentioned that they used donuts and beer to encourage others to help test the applications, and also when Li-Wei said that the average google development team is 2.2, and as they had 4 developers they were a fairly large team.
Overall a good evening, and I met some interesting people. I'm not sure I'd trek all over London to get to another one, but if it's within an easy walk of one of the mainline train stations served from Brighton then I might well pop along again.
After my last successful trip to Google, having a Girl Geek Dinner there was just too good an opportunity to miss, so Rosie and I headed off again.
The format was different to the Brighton ones, but as this was my first I have no idea whether this is "normal" or not. We arrived and were greated with glasses of wine (provided by Sara of San Lorenzo) and before very long dinner was served in the Google canteen. The desserts were excellent again!
After satisfying our hunger, we then had the talks and presentations. First up was Shivauna Raff talking about the future of search and what the next big innovation in search was likely to be (vertical apparently).
Next up were Li-Wei Lee and Danielle Drew from the Google Checkout mobile team. Of course, as with all good presentations, their demo failed. They spoke about the development and test process, and most importantly the lessons learnt. They mentioned some specific testing tools for mobile applications which I duly made notes about for Richard. Specifically mentioned were argogroup and mobilecomplete - which sounds like a great, if expensive, way to test a mobile app. Also mentioned was a firefox plugin but I have no idea which one - Helpful eh! It caused quite a reaction when Danielle (from QA) mentioned that they used donuts and beer to encourage others to help test the applications, and also when Li-Wei said that the average google development team is 2.2, and as they had 4 developers they were a fairly large team.
Overall a good evening, and I met some interesting people. I'm not sure I'd trek all over London to get to another one, but if it's within an easy walk of one of the mainline train stations served from Brighton then I might well pop along again.
Labels: event, Geek Dinner, london
