World 0.1 – Web Development and Programming

How To Tell Your Browser What Languages You Speak

Posted on Thursday, 22 March, 2007

This is the first of two entries I have planned to write on language and content negotiation. A lot of non-techies do not even know what content negotiation means – which is not really a problem –, but they also miss out on an opportunity to improve their user experience on the Internet. Since in this post I am going to limit myself to language negotiation – as opposed to content negotiation in general –, I believe that it is particularly relevant to language professionals.

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Important Difference Between List-Based and Cell-Based Feeds With The Google Spreadsheets API

Posted on Wednesday, 14 February, 2007

(See below for update. Turns out I should've RTFM *blush*.)
Yesterday night, I hacked together a little script that notifies some of my friends via email when a given sort of changes have been made to a Google Spreadsheet that we are working on. It was a nice opportunity to familiarize with the new API – it may still lack some advanced features, but it's simple, logical and easy to use.
However, I was bitten by one peculiarity that is not documented too clearly: It appears that the list-based feeds only cover the the rows above the first empty row regardless whether more data may be present after the gap. The cell-based feeds, on the other hand, will report all non-blank cells, regardless of blank rows.

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Sharing my Firefox “Wow” Moment – FF 3.0 to support offline web apps

Posted on Monday, 12 February, 2007

This morning started with a genuine “Wow” moment: On Read/Write Web, I learnt that Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3.0 will allow for offline access to web applications (as reported by Rod Drury). Obviously, some re-engineering will be required to enable a web app for offline functionality, and the typical application might not expose its full functionality in offline mode.

But, hey, this is still revolutionary: Imagine you want to keep working on some documents in Google Docs when on an air plane: currently you have to remember to download them before and upload them again afterwards. Even worse, if others work on them concurrently, you might unwillingly undo their changes. Imagine you could just open Google Docs in your browser while offline without all the hassle and error-proneness of “manual synchronization”.

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Corrupted Plain-Text Email Messages – Ever Heard Of Base64?

Posted on Tuesday, 23 January, 2007

Guys – and by guys, I mean the developers of about 90% of the emailing routines behind the avalanche of friendly emails from one of my mobile phone carriers, some well-known on-line retailer (don't remember whether it was ebay or Amazon) and a bunch of marketing communication from different shops, corporations some of which don't even have the excuse that they primarily target a pure-ASCII American public – guys, I've got a nice Conway quote for you:

[...] if you're ready to concede that ASCII-centrism is a naïve façade that's gradually fading into Götterdämmerung, you might choose to bid it adiós and open your regexes to the full Unicode smörgåsbord [...].

Well, actually that's the part which, as it appears, most people seem to have got by now (provided that they check user input at all, that is). However, it also seems “rather déclassé for an überhacking rōnin”, to quote Conway once again, to first ambitiously open up their regexes to the world and then leave those poor Unicode characters to their fate when emailing them in plain text over a 7bit ASCII mail server. Ever heard of base64? Or Quoted Printable encoding for that matter?

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Dual-Booting Linux Ubuntu And Win XP On An Old Fujitsu-Siemens C Series LifeBook

Posted on Saturday, 20 January, 2007

I started the new year falling love with Ubuntu, the Linux distribution that I run on my new desktop computer. Ever since the beauty of the Ubuntu desktop unfolded in front of my eyes for the first time, I have kept enjoying this sense of control and logic that Linux brings to personal computing – so much so that I wanted to benefit from its advantages on my old Siemens LifeBook as well. I am now running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on my desktop PC and dual-booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my notebook.

Whereas on my fresh desktop PC installing Ubuntu from the live CD had been a piece of cake, on my three-and-a-half-year-old Siemens LifeBook, I initially ran into some trouble. I, therefore, thought I might share my findings here in case others are experiencing similar problems. My most important recommendation is for users of old notebooks to use text-based installation (from the alternate distribution) rather than the standard desktop Live CD.

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The European Union Hates Books and Education

Posted on Wednesday, 13 December, 2006

This morning I received the two excellent books “Object Oriented Perl” and “Perl Best Practices” by the eminently competent and entertaining Dr. Damian Conway that I had ordered on Amazon's US site. Imagine my consternation when the postman grinned at me as though I had illegally ordered cigarettes on the Internet again and told me: “Alright then, that would be €11.79 for custom duties.” Since my postman is more than 2 meters tall, I did not dare to object and went to get my wallet. But then I had to ask: “I am just curious, but between you and me, 12 bloody euros in tariffs? I mean, it's two books that are barely worth 35€!” As it turned out, it was only a 5-euro duty, along with a 7-euro processing fee, but still a 15% (!) duty on educational books? Are you kidding me? I mean it's not like I ordered the Great Anthology of American Porn by Hugh Hefner or How To Build A Dirty Bomb by Osama Bin Laden, but an educational book on computer programming! Isn't that at odds with the EU's purported aim to “become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world”?

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GoogleOS: What Not To Expect (or: Why Cars Don't Look Like Horse Carriages)

Posted on Thursday, 23 November, 2006

There has been quite some discussion going on over at my favourite blog Read/Write Web following Emre Sokullu's article GoogleOS: What to expect. I believe that, regardless of the much criticized misapprehension of the Ubuntu licence, Emre's post is quite representative of a line of thought that has lead to a lot of speculation among the web-savy for the last year or so. In this post, I would like briefly to summarize this line of thought and outline why I do not entirely agree with its basic premises. Disclaimer: This is going to be more of an essay than a short blog post.

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christianflury.com Relaunch

Posted on Tuesday, 14 November, 2006

As regular reader's may have noticed, I am almost done with the general overhaul of my old website. I have learnt loads of new things that I plan to blog about a bit in the future. In fact, my purpose was not “good design”, but a kind of design that would allow me to familiarize with a maximum of new concepts. The result is a CMS whose model is half database-backed (navigation) and half xml-based (main content), and a controller logic which is half object-oriented and half functional. However, I think, from the outside it looks acceptable by now, and so I have put the new site online.

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Crimson Editor, Unicode and Single-Malt Whisky

Posted on Wednesday, 8 November, 2006

When one has used a great, free text editor for years, it's probably about time to say thank you. Therefore, first of all, I'd like to thank the developpers of Crimson Editor, my favourite editor. It's free, slim, stable, offers a neat tabular interface, handy syntax highlighting, and a lot of other features, combined with great ease of use. I can only recommend it to anyone looking for a nice, user-friendly text editor.

I've just got two small suggestions and wonder if anyone shares my thoughts. Both concern Unicode support which was added just in time before I thought, working in the localization industry, I had to switch to another editor.

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Happy Birthday, Ehrensenf – Congrats, Ruud Elmendorp – Long Live Internet Video Journalism

Posted on Thursday, 2 November, 2006

What the heck is Ehrensenf, you are possibly going to ask. Since you're asking, it's more or less like the German equivalent to Rocketboom. If you don't know Rocketboom, check it out. If you speak German and don't know Ehrensenf, have a look. Right, I am writing about video blogging/Internet TV/geek TV, whatever you want to call it.

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How Intrusive Are Fake Pop-Ups?

Posted on Thursday, 2 November, 2006

In a recent post on O'Reilly Radar, Nat Torkington claims that the new, increasingly popular fake pop-up ads are about to become a plague as bad as Javascript pop-up windows were in their worst days. I agree that they are getting more and more widespread and annoying – but are they really that intrusive?

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IE7 And Its Arrogant HTTP Accept Header

Posted on Thursday, 21 September, 2006

(Yes, a string can be “arrogant”).

I have to give a thumbs up to the developers of Internet Explorer 7. Even if the developpers have just done a “paint job on their Pinto”, in my opinion, they have done a rather good paint job. Obviously, IE is still far from on par with Firefox or Opera, and I do not have any reason to switch back from Firefox anyway. However, it's not that much from a user perspective that I am interested in IE7, but rather as the amateur web developper that I am.

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