Google Abroad and Language Selection

Posted by on November 1, 2011 No comments

I am currently in the Philippines for work and twice today I have been presented screens by Google that have utterly confused me. First I was trying to RSVP for an event and the form was hosted on Google Docs so I saw this:

When you look at that you may say “Huh, what does the button and everything else below it say?” and that’s what I said too. I assumed it meant submit or something like that since I knew that the form was trying to do.

Later in the day I was using my Gmail account as my OpenID to login to a StackExchange site and was shown this screen:

This is when I was really confused. I am using Google as my OpenID and I have previously authenticated with Google, proven by my email address being presented to me, so they know who I am and what my preferred language is and yet they are still showing me text in the native language of the country I am currently in. How is this helpful? I didn’t even get the “Translate this text” popup in Chrome like I get when I’m in the states viewing something in German meaning they assume since I am in the Philippines I understand Tagalog. Luckily I recently learning that “salamat” means thank you in Tagalog so I could guess that it meant “No, Thank You” or something like that.

Shouldn’t Google know who I am and what language I should be presented? I set the value in my Preferences for my account:

Even if you are going to show my the language of my current location couldn’t you also present a language option like you do on your home page?

I use Google almost everyday in my life for email, searching, RSS reading and tracking stocks/401k and was shocked to encounter these usability flaws while traveling. Guessing which button to click isn’t a major inconvenience if you have and idea of what the page should be doing but if you didn’t know the context you may do the wrong thing or just give up.

This brings up a question; how do you decide which language you present a new user when they first visit your site?

How do you determine what language to show a new user?

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Luke Rogers Gmail Mistakes

Posted by on January 18, 2010 6 comments

Hey Luke, yeah you. Apparently you think you know your email address when in fact you do not. I have a gmail address with luke.rogers which includes other variations (lukerogers, l.u.k.e.r.o.g.e.r.s, etc…) due to the way Google handles email accounts (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=10313). If the only alphabetic characters before the @ symbol are “lukerogers” and they are in that order then the email comes to me.

With that said I have had 3 different people sign up for accounts on sites and use some variation of my email address so I receive their verification emails and therefore I can log into their accounts. Now, I haven’t done that because it would be unethical. People should really be sure they know what their email address is before they create an account of any site.

If you are one of the Luke’s I am referring to email me at the email addresses I eluded to at the beginning of this email and I will send over the information you were supposed to receive. Here are the Luke’s and what they might be looking for:

  • Luke in Europe (Airline account, looked like a nice trip)
  • Luke in Pennsylvania (Online Textbook for this semester, probably important and thank your dad for paying)
  • Luke in Great Britain (iTunes account, you probably want this one)

Generation of Designer File Creation Failed

Posted by on August 12, 2009 No comments

I ran into the problem recently where Visual Studio 2008 could not generate the designer file for a page that was using a custom control that had templated sections. I scoured the internet and couldn’t find anything so I resorted to some old school techniques. Here are the steps I took:

  1. Rebooted (It is Microsoft after all)
  2. Deleted all of the files out of C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files
  3. Opened the Solution
  4. Ran a Clean on the solution
  5. Rebuilt

That seemed to work. Just a little heads up for other people like me. I am currently running Windows XP but upgrading to Windows 7 in September.

JQuery TableSorter Pager Problems

Posted by on June 5, 2009 2 comments

I had a problem recently where the Pager for the TableSorter plungin for jQuery was skipping pages after I manipulated the table (temporarily hid a row).

Just so you know what I was doing I was showing a table of 100 rows then paging it 10 records at a time. The goal was to allow the user to select items and add them to a list. When they selected an item I would hide the row and create a new row in a new table. If they wanted to remove the item I needed to have it show up in the table again.

If the user selected and item on page 1, went to page 2 and “unselected” the first item I needed to show it again where it originally was. Since the tablesorter hides the actual DOM elements you have to show the entire table again, show the row again then apply the Pager plugin to get pagination back. This worked great until you tried to change pages and it ended up skipping pages. The more times you ran tablesorterPager on the table the more pages it skipped.

I searched high and low for the answer and it turns out it was burried here in the innocuous line saying $(“#pager *”).unbind(‘click’);

It turns out that each time you run tablesorterPager() on the table it binds a new click event handler so it runs multiple times. The key is to either call the unbind method before each tablesorterPager() call or add that line to the contructor of the tablesorterPager plugin javascript file. Either way will work but the later is favorable since you only do it once.

Here are terms I tried searching on in case others are trying the same:
jquery tablesorterpager cache problem
jquery tablesorterpager cache update
jquery tablesorterpager skipping page

Firefox Addin that saved my ass – Poster

Posted by on April 13, 2009 No comments

Without going into too much detail I am working on an application where a small portion of the functionality allows companies to assign and track online training for their employees. We aren’t in the business of creating or hosting the online classes but we need to be able to track their progress through each course so we can give them credit when they complete it.  The online class provider uses the HACP interface (I would love to add a link to resources if you are looking for them but they are hard to come across) which means that it POST’s data to a page you provide, you work your magic and send a response back. I did this and it worked perfectly… when we hosted the content.

When we made out way out to production and a client went to use it they noticed that the course launched just fine but when they completed the course nothing happened. I looked in the database and sure enough nothing had been updated. Since we use ASP.NET my initial response was to make sure the page was allowed to be acccessed without being authenticated and that was correct. I knew the provider was able to hit the page since when the course is launched the it hits the page and gets a response with the users information so it had to be something else.

The main problem I ran into was that I couldn’t attach to the process in production to debug and I couldn’t replicate the real world scenario so I had no clue how I was going to attack this problem.

Tonight I got an email from CodeProject that had a link to an article called 15 Firefox add-ons for Web developers. I like tools so I checked it out. Low and behold there is an addin that allows you create your own web request (GET, POST, HEAD, etc…) and change it to be what you want. This addin is called Poster (boring name but effective). I installed it and within a few minutes I was able to mimic the exact scenario that I needed to. The problem that I ran into was that ASP.NET validates requests and it was blocking the content saying that it was unsafe. I added ValidateRequest=”false” to my header and it works now.

If you are looking for information about HACP and C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET or any combo in between there aren’t many resources and I’m not sure what I am allowed to share so RTFM over and over again. Good luck!

New Shoes for my G-Ride

Posted by on February 20, 2009 No comments

Well, that’s about the most gangsta I’ll get all day.

Last May I went out to Moab with some friends for a camping trip and while we where there a friend pointed out that my tires were getting kind of bald.  Me being the responsible adult that I am did nothing about it for 8 months. I like to think that this in itself is an accomplishment because I was able to drive on bald tires for 8 months without getting a flat or in an accident.

The problem with my car is that it comes with fancy shmancy rims that have non-standard tires which I didn’t realize until I went to get new tires.  I found the size and went online to Discount Tire and the cheapest tire I could find was $150/piece plus installation and 15 random fees. I know I appear to be wealthy due to my thick accent and many leather bound books but I actually try to stay on a budget and $800 for tires didn’t quite fit in.

In my search for tires I came across TireRack.com and found their site to be extremely helpful and easy to operate. Like most sites they took in my car make, model, year and also that I had specialized tires but what I found most helpful was how they then proceeded to ask how you would be driving on the tires. Would you drive on the snow? Would they be a dedicated snow tire? Do you like to drive fast? What is your favorite food? Then they made recommendations based on those answers. The tire they recommended for me was spaghetti.

After looking at the tires they recommended for me I was able to get tires at a price that was pretty fair ($115/each) that came highly recommended by previous buyers.I was a little skeptical of the reviews until I found a handful of tires that had terrible reviews so that leads me to believe they are real. I went with the Potenza G 019 Grid beacause they got good reviews, the test results looked favorable, they were reasonable priced and they looked kind of cool.

I’m sure a lot of you are thinking “But Luke, if you buy tires online how are you going to get them installed?” Well, I’ll tell you. TireRack.com actually has a list of installers in your area and you can ship directly to the installer. They also have previous customers review the installers so you know what you are getting into. I chose to use the installer they recommended in my area, The Tire Source. The installation charges were fair, they were really nice and they did a great job. I also wasn’t going to be able to pick it up before they closed so they agreed to lock my keys in the car and I would come back with a set of spare keys and take it when I was ready.

Moral of the story: I’m surprised you’re still reading this; it was boring. Oh yeah, sometimes doing things differently than you are used to can pay off. I had a great experience buying tires this way and would recommend it to others.

Re-center ASP.NET ModalPopup with Javascript

Posted by on January 26, 2009 No comments

I had the problem of opening a modal popup in my ASP.NET application and showing more information when the user clicks a checkbox or radio button and the data was too big for the modal or the dropshadow wouldn’t match up with the parent window.  I searched all over the web and posted a question on StackOverflow but I couldn’t find anything.

Finally I got the brilliant idea to check the source code to see what happens  in there and then I found the answer:

$find(‘ModalPopupExtenderClientID’)._layout();

Just add that javascript to the event where you are changing the content of the modal and it will resize.

Today I shed a tear

Posted by on January 14, 2009 1 comment

On Monday November 24th, 2008 I was in a tragic accident. I tore my ACL playing indoor soccer.

On Monday January 12th, 2009 I had ACL constructive surgery using part of my hamstring.

Today, Wednesday January 12th, I am stuck on a couch with nothing to do. I am so bored that I resorted to watching American Idol. Shoot me. 

When I tore my ACL I was really scared that it would ruin my plans to travel to Honduras over Christmas and New Years. After speaking to my doctor he said it would be okay for me to go as long as I took it easy and didn’t put myself at risk. I did just that and the trip went great quite well (see I was propositioned).

Monday I woke up at 5:45 in order to get to the surgery center at 6:30. Christie and I left  at 6:20 thinking it would be plenty of time but when I looked outside I saw it was dumping snow. We weren’t too late when we arrived at 6:45 and I was the second surgery of the day so check in was pretty easy and I was in pre-op before I knew it.

After all of the questions and verifying that they were in fact replacing my right ACL with a piece of my hamstring they brought in Dr Happy aka the anesthesiologist. Right before they took me back into the operating room Dr Happy gave me some juice to help me relax. For those of you that have had surgery and had this medication understand what I am talking about. As I rolled into the operating room the juice kicked in and I said “oh yeah, there it is” and I think there was some laughter but that is where my memory goes blank.

The next thought I had was “when are they going to start my surgery” only to realize that I was in the recovery room. I was shivering non-stop and I heard the nurse tell me that she would give me something to help me out. After the shot of demerol and a blanket that had hot air piping through it I warmed up and continued through a pattern of wake and sleep.

After about 3 hours in the recovery room they gave me a swift exit (I guess making more room) and I was on for a new adventure. I took up residence on Christie’s futon with my ice machine running while I went in an out of consciousness for the rest of the day. 

Tuesday was more of the same with sleeping most of the day and not doing anything.

Today I ventured to the Physical Therapist office which I thought was crazy. I just had surgery two days ago and I can’t event stand on it and I’m going to PT? The visit was quick but hardly painless. He had me work on an exercise where I try to extend my leg as much as I can while pushing down then lift my leg and hold it for a few seconds.  Now the the most painful thing I can do right now is fully extend my leg so this exercise was like listening to country music (I hate country music) while stabbing myself in the eye. Finally I got out of there and could breathe again.

This is just the very beginning of a very long journey and I’m hoping the worst is over and it will get better each day. They tell me I should be able to jog in about 3 months and run in about 5. After 6-7 months I should be able to make cutting moves while running and be fully recovered after 9-12 months.  Just in time for ski season.

I Was Propositioned

Posted by on January 14, 2009 1 comment

I was recently in Honduras for a vacation with some friends and just past the halfway mark we spent the night in La Ceiba, Honduras. We had some traveling books on Honduras and both of them mentioned that La Ceiba had an active night life and we were excited to check it out.

As we walked towards the main area of town we noticed some police driving by but didn’t think much of it. The streets were a far cry from the scene earlier in the day. The streets were packed with people walking, shopping, talking, driving, honking, selling and haggling. Now it was an empty town as if everyone packed up and left town. We turned on to the main strip and started walking towards the area where more people were.

We passed a street vendor that had a couple guys standing out front. As we passed them one guy seemed friendly and started talking to us as we walked. We didn’t think much of it and kept walking but he kept up with us and continued talking to me and another guy with us. He was telling me that he was a good boy and that it was okay. He then told Christie that he was a good boy and it was okay.

Now I’m starting to get freaked out and worrying about my wallet and my passport. I don’t want to get robbed or beat up or sent to jail so I am looking for a way out of the situation. Next thing I know he tells me that I can have him for $50-$60.

Wait, what?

Thats right, I could have him for $50-$60. Gross.

We make a beeline for a restaraunt, any restaraunt, and walked in to get away from that guy. All of us were freaked out and decided to take a cab home even though we were only 8-9 blocks away from the hotel.

At this point I was ready to go home but thankfully the rest of the trip went very well and we had a great time.

Note to kids: don’t talk to anybody.

The Engagement Night Story

Posted by on December 14, 2008 No comments

My birthday is December 11th and Christie and I went to dinner at the Walnut Brewery which is my favorite restaurant. The night was perfect; we had great food, great beer and we were joined by my good friends Ryan and Amanda towards the end of our meal and laughed a lot. This was a distraction from the truth.

The Plan: Christie is very close to her family and friends so I wanted to incorporate this into the engagement night. My idea was to have all of the people that were important in her life in one place so she could go and share the moment with all of them. I would propose to her nearby and trick her into going out for a drink so we could celebrate with just the two of us before chaos ensued. 

The Execution: My goal was to catch Christie completely off guard and I figured it would be pretty easy to accomplish this around my birthday. I got home from work at 6:00 I realized I had a text message from Christie asking what our plans were for the eventing. Oops, I forgot to tell her what the plans were! When I called her back she was very short and I could tell she was annoyed but I couldn’t help from laughing in my head. Her night was going to take a major turn later on. I went to her house so we could go to dinner and she seemed less than enthusiastic about the evening due to my lack of communication and the headache she was fighting all day long. I tried to cheer her up a little bit so dinner would be fun.

At 7:00, Christie and I met some of my friends from work at a Hibachi grill in Westminster to celebrate my birthday again; at least that is what she thought. My friends were in on the scam and were acting as a diversion from the whole engagement thing. We had a great dinner and finished up just before 9:00.

I told Christie that we were going to meet a friend of mine at a bar because he wanted to blow off some steam since he was in the midst of finals for grad school. My plan was to park at the St Julien Hotel (the nicest hotel in Boulder) and somehow get her out in the courtyard to propose under a gazebo. When I asked if she was going to park there she said that we should park at the bus station since it was much closer. Damn logic, couldn’t argue with her. We went from going to one of the more romantic places in boulder to a public transportation hub; awesome. I had to improvise to figure out where I could propose in the 2 blocks from the parking garage to the bar filled with everyone waiting for us.

There is an ice skating rink close to the Pearl Street Mall but as we drove near it I could see that it was packed and I wanted a slightly secluded place where people wouldn’t be staring at us. We started walking from the bus station to the bar and we were going to walk right by the courthouse.

courthouse.jpg

When I saw it I decided it was about as perfect as it was going to get. Once Christie saw it she started talking about how beautiful it was and then she went on a tangent on how she wanted to decorate her house first thing in the morning since my parents would be coming over before breakfast and how she needed to clean her house before decorating it and AHHHHHHH!!! The feeling you got from reading that sentence was how I felt at that moment.

As we got right in front of the courthouse I said “hey” and grabbed her arm. I turned her around and said “I love you.” She said she loved me too then I said “I want to marry you” and she said that she wanted to marry me too. At the moment I grabbed the jewelry box out of my pocket and started to kneel while saying “so…” While I was on my way down I was watching Christie and I could tell she was registering what was actually happening. When I got on my knee Christie bent over ever so slightly and made an awkward face that made her look like she was about to vomit. I wanted to avoid any sort of disaster so I moved along quickly.

“Will you marry me?” That was all I could get out. I didn’t have a major speach in my head but I wanted to say more than four words but I couldn’t get it out. Still bent over she managed to say yes as she started to cry. I stood up and we hugged for a little bit then I pulled away so I could put the ring on her finger. I got it about half way on then told her that she needed to do it so I wouldn’t break her finger. We hugged some more and it was a very magical moment.

We started to walk to the bar and she said excitedly “I need to call my parents!” and I said “hey, let’s go get a drink and just enjoy this moment, you can call them soon” and she agreed. When we got to the corner across from the bar I could see my friend Ryan and her father inside the bar. We had a red light so I turned her towards me so the surprise wouldn’t be ruined. We crossed the street and as we got right in front of the door she saw her dad’s head (her words) and started to cry. We went inside where her parents, my parents and 30 of our closest friends were waiting for us. We entered the bar to a showering of silver streamers (thanks mom) and  Christie was in tears.

first-reaction

The rest of the night was spent with our friends and family enjoying the night and speculating on the future (no kids anytime soon). The night turned out perfectly and I couldn’t ask for a better experience. I truly believe this was the perfect beginning for the adventure that Christie and I are setting out on.

I would like to thank everyone that showed up or sent us congratulations and best wishes. Though it might take us a while to get in touch with each of you, know that you are in our thoughts and we will be in touch soon.

engagement