first baby steps with luatex

ok, I compiled the luatex beta and was puzzled on how to run this.

Then I found Luigi Scarso's answer:

what about
$texmfstart texexec --luatex luatest1.tex

What is texmfstart? No idea, but "wer sucht, der findet"

$ locate texmfstart
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb

I do remember having played with context ones, but I do not remember whether I installed context there. Anyway, the .rb extension is for ruby, so

ruby /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb texexec --luatex sheet06.tex

did what I wanted... mostly. It produces a .pdf but it looks very basic, the page numbers are on the top of the page, and so on. Well a good starting point nevertheless.

lost in multi-lingualization

I figured out that my multi-lingual dictionary needs a multi-lingual website.

In web-design as elsewhere, i18n is quite a pain: one has to actually think what one wants before going off and doing something.

For my web dictionary and its associated websites, there is one obvious requirement: the text on every page should be viewable in various languages.

There are interesting links on the net on how to approach this systematically: I have found the following particularly useful:

• the comments in W3C's q&a blog article Content Negotiation: why it is useful, and how to make it work


• the EURESCOM report Multi-lingual web sites: Best practice guidelines and architectures

When looking for a standard encoding of languages as strings, the three letter languages codes (ISO639-2) are quite enough (ISO-639-1 are the two-letter ones). Of course, despite the thing being a standard, there is some fun to be had with e.g. deu == ger.

Apart from deciding, which languages to support, there is also a user interface question, and for my website, I consider this the most important. In times of Google, content can also be found if your website has a lousy user interface, but since I am looking for something that is fun to use interactively, usability takes priority.

That is why I need to ask myself: how would one select between languages? I think the best is to go with a hybrid approach:

• have URIs of the shape domain/language-code/path and rewrite them to domain/path.language-code.extension (the dispatching described in the comments to the W3C article).


• additionally have a footer with links (view page in language1, ..., languageN)

Pages should not be very long, so that the footer is visible. For added fun, I can later go into having facebook's wall-to-wall (two pages displayed side-by-side) layout to see the same page in two different languages, for translation and language-learning.

asp.net, and computerclubzwei

About to start a web app... coming from a Scala and Java background, but my web hoster offers me php and asp.net -- which poison is tastier? I was set to go for php, although I don't like the language much. So I thought I'd give this asp.net stuff a try.

For my first timid steps, I was happy to have read the German Wikipedia entry, and the
beginning wikibook "Webentwicklung mit ASP.NET". This had a link to visual studio web express, which is free, and it rocks as an IDE (I am a big fan of Microsoft IDEs, although I do everything to avoid owning a Windows OS). I get curious about MonoDevelop, all this Emacs juggling is getting boring sometimes.

About asp.net proper, the difference in complexity seems ridiculous compared to php... but this is more a psychological thing. While I quickly hacked a phpinfo.php to test that scripts were properly executed on the server, asp.net development first started by installing an IDE. There are quite some concepts to learn, and here I lost interest. Compared to the jsp world, the "usine à gaz" factor seems the same (I also lost interest in JSP 2, my last activity was a struts-1 webapp).

Out of curiosity, I will try to connect to the mysql database on asp.net, and continue some experiments... and if that works fine, I might stick with it and get used to IDE land again.

---

Growing up in Germany, I have at least one seen a show called "computer club" - although I was too young to appreciate it back then. Apparently, they have recently started podcasting on their new site cczwei. It's fun to listen to this professionally produced piece of audio-layman-tech-journalism - for one who enjoys people talking about technical things in a simple manner.

Code-follows-Type

Adriaan writes up something on Code-follows-Type programming. It's a neat technique that has a killer application: automatically generating pickling and unpickling code from your class definitions - without code generation, without reflection, without anything... wait, it says it only works for "representable" types.

Again, a web designer might be interested in
Google's Web Authoring Statistics for best practices.


There are far too many articles about the GWT, but here is Dion Hinchcliffe's analysis of GWT's service abstraction.

always good to remember some best practices in web development.


Ralf Laemmel and Erik Meijer take a head-on jump into xml object mismatch. More (or less) data binding.


I still haven't gotten to look microformats and wonder if I need to.


This Scala XML documentation needs some updating.

different takes on data binding

Some time ago, Kathleen Dollard showed how to generate classes from an XML Schema using XSLT. I dislike both schema and XSLT, but I would understand why someone would need to use both technologies and have respect for everybody that plunges in that hell. However all those technologies together might serve to describe the problem rather than the solution

Pull parsing examples, also a while ago, is often demonstrated as a fast way to do data binding. We can find Chris Fry's writeup on XML pull parsing. It seems
Pull parsing will be available in JDK6

This pull parsing stuff ultimately looks better than all other APIs, because all the other ones can be implemented on top of this one.