Contents tagged with Other
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Writespace in Other Languages
Some time ago I noticed a peak in Writespace downloads and I started to get some emails from people with requests for new features and stuff, which is fun. I saw from the stats that Lifehacker had a couple of articles on Writespace, as well as Danish PC-World, some Japanese site (I have no idea what the site is about :) and a few other places.
I had no idea if Writespace actually worked in Japanese, but apparently it does!
Lifehacker.com Pcworld.dk Moongift.jp If I get some time for it I’ll release a Word 2003 version and add a few of the requested new features.
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A Couple of Good Days at Microsoft Sweden TechDays
It was a pleasant first day at TechDays, held in Västerås by Microsoft Sweden. During the day I met with and talked to people I know from before, people I’ve never met but follow on their blogs and some new acquaintances. Cheers to Samuel Kastberg, Pelle “Pellesoft” Johansson, Tomas Wirén, Johan and the guys at Dropit, Kai Fransson just to mention a few.
I talked to Johan Lindfors, manager of the Microsoft DPE team in Sweden, who had a good presentation (the best I’ve seen so far actually) on Oslo together with Alan Smith. I ran into Daniel Akenine, chapter president of IASA Sweden and CTO of Microsoft Sweden. It’s always nice to talk to Daniel!
Later in the evening I talked to Tess Ferrandez and Fredrik Normén about some common mistakes we’ve seen developers do, especially with ASP.NET. Tess had a good talk on the topic earlier that day together with Mikael Deurell, and Fredrik did a good one on what to expect for Silverlight in the future.
Today I attended two talks with Christian Weyer on WCF and on .NET Services and I got the chance to chat a few minutes about WCF interop and bindings to use with usernamepassword tokens which I will will try out soon.
Earlier today I also listened to Ivar Jacobsen about “what they don’t teach you about software at school” and it was very entertaining. Ivar is so professional and full of experience and good knowledge it’s amazing and I have so much to thank him for, considering how much help I’ve had from his work on RUP, UML and so on. It was great to meet him.
The day ended with a session on .NET Services, also by Christian Weyer, which was very, very cool. I have no idea how many moving parts he had going in his demos, but he was doing federated security, services and workflows in cloud and on his machine with azure and he had both .net clients and java clients going and you name it. I have to watch the presentation again when it’s available on the Internet later on.
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Microsoft Online Services « Jan-Erik Öhman’s Weblog
My dear friend Jan-Erik just blogged:
Microsoft Online Services soon available for Swedish users. It will be launched during the Swedish Techdays 2009
Microsoft Online Services « Jan-Erik Öhman’s Weblog
It may take some time for organizations of the right size to jump on this, but it will be interesting to follow.
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Translating the Domain Language to English
Fredrik wrote a quite interesting blog post about the translation of the domain into English, even though the company language may be something different:
I’ve worked on projects where the ubiquitous language became anemic because the developers translated the Norwegian domain into English. Apart from often having trouble finding good translations for many of the domain concepts, the fact that the developers begun calling things by their English names when talking about them often caused misunderstandings between the developers and the domain experts.
Some interesting comments there on his post. I've been using the, what Fredrik calls, “GetLønnslipp()” method the last couple of years when developing services for customers. We first tried to translate the, in our case, Swedish domain names into English, but some expressions were hard to translate and get an agreement on. So we went for English verbs and Swedish nouns and it has worked out quite well. Felt stupid first, but not any more.
The best thing is that the data contracts based on XML Schemas have no English in them at all and are therefore very easy to understand and discuss with the customer.
It would have been a whole different matter if the customer in question already had business with/in other countries and had well known names and terms for the domain. In that case I would have spent some time to get to that English-only Ubiquitous Language.
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New DELL M4400 Problems Makes Me Mad
I've been waiting for almost a month for my new DELL M4400 and I got it yesterday. Within some 30 minutes of "getting started" procedures, I got 3 different blue screens, several "recovery from an unexpected reboot error" Vista dialogs and (most annoying of all) audio/sound stuttering problem which gets on my nerves. There are some other minor issues as well, but I can live with those.
I called the "pro support" which we pay extra for, and that guy was not aware of any audio stuttering problems with the M4400... amazing, Let Me Google It For You. It's been known for months now, but DELL keeps selling it anyway. I hate that. The poor support guy talked to a friend for 5 minutes, came back with a sigh and told me he had to get back to me on this one because there is no simple fix for this. I knew that already, that's why I called them :)
Still not a word from him, but the day is not yet over.
I've made a backup on my HomeServer now, and also downloaded the 64-bit Windows 7 beta from MSDN Subscriptions. I've read that some M4400 users have successfully installed Win 7 on their machines and everything runs just fine. I'll first try whatever the support guy suggests, then go for Win 7 and see how that works out.
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The Art of Displaying Consumer Friendly Error Messages
As a programmer, this error from Facebook tells me a great deal:
My daughter on the other hand started yelling "DAAAAAD, INTERNET IS DOWN!!" and wanted to reset the broadband modem...
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iTunes and iPhone...
Why is iTunes one of the most widespread, annoying, unresponsive but still CPU-munching program out there? Probably because you cannot sync your iPhone without installing it... It's amazingly bad and Apple has to do something about it.
There... feels much better now, but I'm definitely getting closer and closer to that jailbreak decision.
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Status of Messenger Services
Yeah sure :)
Is it just me or has the Messenger service been kind of flunky the last couple of days? I keep getting these 81000314 error codes all the time. Not even WebMessenger is working.
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How to Update Google Chrome
So you've downloaded and installed the beta of Google Chrome and found that that Ajax story of Chrome isn't the best? You're thinking that the Google guys must have fixed it by now and you start looking for news related to Chrome on *.google.com but finds nothing... a bit frustrating to me at least.
Then you find out there's no obvious way to "Check for update..." in the Chrome app itself - unless there's actually a new version available! The trick is to click the "Customize and Control Google Chrome" button and look at the "About Google Chrome..." dialog, which will check to see if there's a new version available. If there is, it'll look something like this down at the bottom of said dialog:
Dave Taylor has written a nice detailed blog post about it, that's how I found out. Thanks Dave!
If anyone knows of an RSS feed, or official site to get news about Chrome updates, I'd love to get that URL.
UPDATE: It seems that the best URL is "The Official Google Blog" on http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ which unfortunately doesn't seem to use categories or tags unless I'm not blind. Would have been nice to have a Chrome category/tag as I'm not that interested in Picasa and the Democratic National Convention... :/
Now I just hope the introduction of Google Chrome doesn't lead into another browser war with website-breaking features like those we've had so many problems with before.
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Google Chrome and Facebook...
...is just not working as it should. There are major Ajax problems in that browser. I know, it came out like this week, but they talk much about the rigorous testing they go through and how Chrome should work well on popular sites. Well Facebook should count as quite popular I guess.
I'm sure it'll be fixed very quick, and other than that - the browser seems to work pretty well. The UI feels clean and bare-bone, and occationally it feels somewhat faster.
I like the Google Chrome story they made, very cool.