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The Diego Thomson now has its very own Intranet. Sort of.

Chregu follows Antonio’s lead (see monblog.ch and the Swiss feed directory) and now also provides an OPML feed with the active blogs on freeflux.net. This OPML feed is automatically imported to the blog list once a day. Thank you Chregu! In Chregu’s feed all blogs with 10 posts or more and at least one post in the past 30 days are included. My original call to arms still holds and I will cite it here: ...

When I create a new Web application I usually try to implement translation right from the start. For example as the Swiss blogosphere has four significant languages, I translated both the blog list and the Swiss weblog statistics. The list is available in English, German and French (thanks to Jérôme for the French translation!) and the Stats are available in German and English so far. I’d like both applications to be translated into more languages. And potentially other future applications as well. So I’m proposing a simple small “project”: a contact point for translators. I want to collect some addresses of people who are willing to provide translations for free - for free applications of course. This would be used only for projects in the Swiss blogosphere (blogug.ch for example or swissblogs.com once that rock starts rolling again). If you are willing and able to provide translations between German, English, Italian or French (pick two or more ;-) please contact me with a list of your languages and I’ll note you. I’ll just keep you in my personal address book, so your name and address won’t be made public. And I won’t spam you, honest! If you need a translation, also contact me and I will forward your project to everyone who has announced willingness to translate between the required languages. There is no commitment for the translators. So they can decide every time if they have time for that translation or not. That’s basically a braindump of an idea I just had. So what do you think? Is the idea sensible or complete rubbish? ...

Jan Zuppinger contacted me today about a problem they had with the Swiss weblog directory. For a weblog to be nominated for the Swiss Blog Awards it has to be listed in the blog directory. So we currently get many new additions to the list. Great! But one problem surfaced. There are weblogs that don’t have an XML feed (RSS or Atom). But the feed URL was obligatory in the list and I even actively deleted submissions without feed URLs. After all, the list is mainly for the aggregators. Or is it? I currently know of the following services consuming the provided OPML feed: ...

(Nur auf englisch damit du den letzten Tipp gleich umsetzen kannst). This advice should be pretty obvious. But I meet far too many people in this industry who don’t like to read. In my book (no pun intended) it’s pretty much impossible to survive in our business without the willingness to learn a lot. And there is no cheaper and better way to learn than reading. I’ve always loved reading and I’m a natural autodidact, so that was not a difficult lesson for me to learn. I actually prefer reading technologies from a good book to course lessons. One thing you really should learn is parsing a lot of text quickly for some keyword. Though I have that gift, I have no idea how you can learn that. You may want to buy one of the many speed-reading books or search the Web for some advice (look for speed reading). So, what might you want to read? There’s a lot of stuff out there that may help you. Of course, the obvious answer is reading books. I myself am a book addict. And when you want to learn a technology from the ground up a book is often the best way. Also when you have a problem at hand, O’Reilly Safari Bookshelf often comes in extremely handy (though more for big picture questions than specific error messages). Safari is also available as a site license for groups of five or more. You may want to lobby your boss about this. Unfortunately no pricing is published for the site license. Then there are application documentation, standards (I LOVE reading RFCs), weblogs, wikis, mailing lists and newsgroups. And of course there’s the Web as a whole. It includes many a gem that you really need just now for just your problem. Overcome your reluctance and start to love reading. It’s worth it. ...

I just fixed a nasty problem on the two planets I run (one for namics and one for local.ch). The aggregator script would run forever without stopping. A bit of debugging showed, that the problem was about how UTF-8 character were handled (or rather weren’t handled). The script uses PHP’s DomDocument, more specifically it’s functions loadHTML and saveXML, to extract valid XML from the blog posts. That’s necessary because the posts are shortened and this shortening can lead to a completely invalid (X)HTML structure. Let alone all the rubbish content that many a software produces. Shortening the content was of course done with the PHP function substr. And that’s where the problem was. The relevant part of the text that caused problem was “steht nur auf Englisch zur Verfügung”. Translated to UTF-8 this becomes “steht nur auf Englisch zur Verf??gung”. To this string substr was applied and it produced “steht nur auf Englisch zur Verf?” - the second half of the UTF-8 character was cut off. If you know anything about UTF-8 you will go “ouch” here and smile about your knowledge and skip the following two paragraphs. If you don’t see the problem yet, let me enlighten you. UTF-8 is a Unicode encoding. So it can transport any of the characters defined in Unicode which is just about any character that you might ever want to use in today’s computing. It’s neat because for most of the content in European languages it requires just one byte per character (versus two bytes in UTF-16 for example). When a byte is in the ASCII range it’s displayed and all is well. But when the byte is outside of the ASCII range (which only knows about 128 characters and can be encoded in 7 bits per character as you probably know) this means that the following byte belongs to the same character. I’m sorry, I don’t really know how to explain that any better so let me just give you an example. The string Für becomes F??r in UTF-8. So the UTF-8 decoder would read the first byte, the letter F. That fits nicely into ASCII, so that byte is read and the decoder continues with the next character. It reads one byte which is ?. “Holy cow” you hear the decoder exclaim, “that’s not ASCII”. So the decoder has to read one additional byte and gets the ?. Reading those two characters, putting them together and calculating a bit, the decoder then knows that it has just read an ü. So do you already see the problem in the UTF-8 string “steht nur auf Englisch zur Verf?”? The decoder arrives at the last byte which is ?. It knows it has to read one more byte, but there are none. So somehow the PHP code in question decides to patiently wait until the string magically grows longer. The real problem though is of course the careless use of substr. You shouldn’t just cut UTF-8 characters in half. The problem can be solved with mb_substr, a substr function that is Unicode-aware. Just give it ‘utf-8’ as its fourth argument and the problem is solved. Update: It seems that the problem goes away automatically with newer libxml versions. On my server it’s 2.6.16, while Chregu uses 2.6.23 and can’t reproduce the problem. Thanks Chregu for digging into this. ...

So, now we can nominate for the Swiss Weblog Awards. My current nominations are as follows: The Best of Swiss Blogs «Zum Runden Leder» - Funniest blog in Switzerland. Pendlerblog - Interesting, funny. Beobachtungen zur Medienkonvergenz - Good coverage of Gadget news. Though the gadget stuff now goes to neuerdings.com which I don't nominate because it's too young. namics Weblog - Jürg does a great job of putting good technical content on that blog. Rookie-Award Switzerland World Cup Blog - Good coverage of Swiss world cup preparation. Promises to become the most-read Swiss weblog in a few months. Beobachtungen zur Medienkonvergenz (again) cake baker - Innovative content about a new Rails-like PHP framework (how many are there of those anyway, something like 200?) Best Multimedia-Blog Photos from Ernscht Though I don't know if this already qualifies as multimedia blog. I like it because of the one-photo-a-day-at-9'oclock-diary I have to admit, that most of these nominations are friends of mine (Konvergenz, namics, Cakebaker and Ernscht). Should I change my nominations, I'll update this article here.

(This article is also available in English). Vor einigen Tagen schrieb ich über den Arbeitsmarkt in der Schweiz und versprach einige Tipps, wie du deine Chancen verbessern kannst. Diese Tipps sind vor allem für Leute gedacht, welche momentan in der Lehre, Fachhochschule oder Uni studieren. Es ist klar, dass ich mit meinen bescheidenen Erfahrungen nicht sehr viel darüber weiss. Aber ich habe einige Ideen, welche ich kommunizieren werde. Ich hatte auch schon einigen Kontakt mit Praktikanten und kann die guten von den schlechten unterscheiden. Oder anderes gesagt: jene, welche ich einstellen würde, von denen, welchen ich unter keinen Umständen einen Job geben würde. Und hier kommt mein erster Tipp: Lerne Englisch. Sehr viel technische Dokumentation steht nur auf Englisch zur Verfügung. Vor allem für neue Technologien. So gibt es zum Beispiel meines Wissens kein deutsches Ruby on Rails Buch. Bücher sind allgemein ein gutes Beispiel. Die meisten deutschen Bücher wurden aus dem Englisch übersetzt und Monate nach dem Original veröffentlicht. Und die meisten Bücher werden nie übersetzt. Lerne also, Englisch zu lesen. Falls du bei der Entwicklung einer Software oder Technologie mitmachen möchtest, wirst du wahrscheinlich eine Mailingliste oder Newsgroup abonnieren. Auch diese sind meistens in Englisch. Und wo es auch eine Deutsche Liste gibt, ist die Englische Liste meistens besser. Also solltest du auch lernen, Englisch zu schreiben. Und schliesslich musst du wahrscheinlich auch ab und zu per Telefon mit Ausländern kommunizieren oder möchtest an einer Konferenz teilnehmen. Die Caron Workshops sind zum Beispiel aus der Schweiz gut zu erreichen. Lerne also auch Englisch zu sprechen und verstehen. Wie kannst du konkret anfangen, Englisch zu lernen? Die meisten Schweizer in meinem Alter haben bereits an der Schule Englisch gelernt. Die Grundlagen sind also vorhanden. Um die Lesekenntnisse zu verbessern, fange einfach an zu lesen. Schnapp dir am besten ein Buch, welches du bereits auf Deutsch gelesen hast. Ich habe aus genau dem Grund vor einigen Jahren John Grishams Bücher zu lesen begonnen. Auch kannst du beginnen, verschiedene Englische Weblogs oder Mailinglisten zu lesen. Und um das Verständnis zu verbessern, abonnierst du am besten Englische Podcasts. ...

(Dieser Artikel steht auch auf Deutsch zur Verfügung). As I wrote a bit more than a week ago, I am giving out a few tips how you can improve your chances in the tech job market. This is mostly targeted to people who are currently in their apprenticeship or maybe at university. I’m far too young an inexperience to know a lot about such things. But I have a few ideas and those I’ll voice. Also I have dealt quite a bit with interns and know which ones I would employe and which ones I wouldn’t. So my first tip: Learn English. A lot of technical documentation is only available in English, especially for new technologies. Books are a case in point. Just look at the books available from O’Reilly in English and in German. Most German ones come out in English first and are only translated to Germany months later - if at all. So, learn to read English. If you want to participate on some software or technology, you will probably subscribe to a mailing list or newsgroup. Again, most of those are in English and where German and English are available, the English list is usually of better quality. So, also learn to write English. And last but not least, you may have to communicate to people over the phone or may want to participate at a conference. For example the Caron Workshops are easily accessible from Switzerland. So, learn to understand and speak English. But how do you start improving your English? Most Swiss my age already studied English at school. So the basic knowledge is in place. To improve reading, just start to read English. Pick up some book that you already have read in German. I started to read John Grisham’s books a few years ago for exactly that reason. You may also want to follow some English weblogs or mailing lists. To improve your understanding, you may subscribe to some English podcasts. ...

After my State of the Swiss blogosphere article, Antonio contacted me about his blog platform monblog.ch which is popular in the French part of Switzerland. Basically none of the monblog.ch blog was represented in the feed directory. I suggested he provide an OPML feed that I can import and so he did. So starting today, monblog.ch weblogs are automatically added if they have at least ten articles, are older than three days and have published an article within the last month. I don’t check those conditions myself, but Antonio only corresponding publishes weblogs in the OPML feed. If you are a blog provider in Switzerland or have an easy way to extract only Swiss weblogs, feel free to publish your active weblogs as an OPML feed. It’s probably best to follow the format I use for the feed directory OPML. Once you have done that, send me a mail with the feed’s URL. ...