Isofarro

The amount of work required to internationalise a website is woefully underestimated, and sometimes, the codebase is compromised to the extent that many features or capabilities are impossible to deliver with the existing code. In many cases, complete ground-up rewrites are needed to separate cleanly the business logic from the localisation requirements of countries.

Mostly this requires developers and engineers of platforms to be aware of the internationalisation implications of their implementation choices. What may seem like an engineering best practice could very well be a massive barrier for localising sites to various countries.

The common approach to laying out a page is through the use of float. A container floated left becomes a left-hand sidebar. And even within components of a page, the float is used to create columnar layouts.

The natural internationalisation stumbling block, particularly for technical people, is that localisation isn’t just about translating static text strings. Surprisingly, many developers and programmers fail to consider that sentences in one natural language cannot be simply translated one word at a time to another language.

Apple stood up and reclaimed the defacto number 1 position of the tablet generation yesterday. They got the price point absolutely spot on (in US dollars at least). So spot on that Michael Dell's proud display of the Dell 5-inch mini-tablet at Davos the next day is now laughable at double the price.

For years we've lived with tablets that cost about the same or more than laptops. Interesting devices - the Microsoft Origami specification, the Microsoft Tablet specification - just too expensive to be practical as a sofa-ware, or potato-couch-ware device.

An engineer builds platforms. A web developer creates websites using those platforms.

Title: Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development
Authors: Tim Bowler, Wojciech Bancer
Publisher: Packt Press
Publish Date: September 2009

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book from Packt Publishing in September 2009.

On the 18th July 2009 a rag-tag army of geeks invaded Bletchley Park. Thanks to the genius of Neil Crosby's unorganising Big Geek Day Out. However, the geeks were spotted well in advance by the Bletchley Park organisation, and soundly routed and disarmed and subject to a wonderful show of hospitality and an abundant knowledge.

JEOS (Just Enough Operating System) is a wonderful baseline for creating Linux-based virtual machines for web development. Bradley Wright has written up the best set of instructions for creating a new virtual machine for web development running on JEOS and that is the starting point for building a CouchDB server.

The typical way of setting margins and paddings involve specifiying a value for each of the top, right, bottom and left in sequence. Depending on the situation, we can use shorthand values for both optimisation and clarity, but sometimes it isn’t always clear.

Note: Using file size optimisation as a basis for a styleguide for writing CSS is the wrong way to go. Always favour readability and legibility of the code over the number of bytes across the wire. Use a CSS compressor right before the CSS file gets deployed to a production environment; that’s the right place to optimise file size.

Two years after the double lightning strike on Alexandra Palace, Yahoo Open Hackday came back to London with a fresh new name: Yahoo Open Hack London. A weekend hackathon of developers and geeks.

As sequels go, they never outdo the first. And Yahoo's first London Hackday is legend. The second, far better organised, a brilliant venue (except for their below-par networking infrastructure) and excellent food. Congratulations are very much in order for Anil Patel and Sophie Major for pulling off a remarkable and well-run geek event.