According to the story, there are now 220 million Chinese internet users vs. 216 million USA users (USA had the world dominate usage).

The part that is really interesting is the 220 million is only 17% of China whereas the 216 million Americans is 71% of the USA. The growth potential is staggering.

It’ll be interesting times ahead. Savvy people might want to start to i18n their application for 中文…

(All the figures are from the USA Today article)

I woke up Saturday with an idea (which is actually a joke at our house now, “Guess what honey, I have an idea!”). I wanted to have a podcast of news bits that I could listen to while I did my morning routine - the catch being I wanted it daily, and I wanted to control the shows overall subjects at will.

That desire, along with my new found Automator curiosity, led me to throw together Rohan Times Radio News ( :-D ). It’s an automatic process that takes an RSS feed, reads it, and makes a podcast out of the stories. To get the content I want, I am using yahoo pipes to filter and sort the feeds, and then republish the feeds as the shows teleprompt.

Here is a basic overview of how it works (sorry for the oddities with the movie, youtube seems to be doing odd things on upload lately):

One of the coolest parts about this is it basically requires no code (I did, however, use a bit of code to have finer control).

I don’t think I can publish the podcast for the world, as I think it would be seen as a copyright violation, but if you are interested in this let me know.

The .net web.config file is kind of a pain when working with source control and multiple developers. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to keep conflicts to a minimum, and allow for each developer to have different configurations (which is required for the current development environments).

So here is the crux of the problem. There are user defined setting in that file that look like this:

<appSettings>
...       <add key="OLAPCString" value="Provider=MSOLAP; Integrated Security=IIII; Data Source=QRSTUV;Initial Catalog=WXYZ;Cube Name=ABCD;"/>
...
</appSettings>
<connectionStrings>
...       <add name="ConnectionString" connectionString="Server=127.0.0.1;Database=TheDB;uid=TheUID;pwd=ThePWD;Max Pool Size=100; Connect Timeout=300;"/>
...
</connectionStrings>

There are many settings in both appSettings and connectionStrings that need to change based on the developers environment, but we also want to have a base version.

Setting it up with the developers directly adding / editing web.config will have web.config conflicting constantly. Often daily, eating into development time. As people add things to the file other developers will have to readjust the connection strings etc for their own environment. It gets really old really fast.

appSettings has an attribute “file” that lets you specify an external file that can override settings in the appSetting section - which is great. If that file exists, and a setting is defined there it uses that one, if the setting is not overwritten it uses the default one web.config.

That’s great, and solves half the problem, but what about connectionStrings? Well, there is an attribute “configSource” which allows you to have an external file but it’s an either or choice. You either define something in web.config or in an external file - it doesn’t override like in appSettings.

I am left scratching my head as to why that would be. It doesn’t make any sense. Why can’t you do the same thing as with appSettings (Well, Rob, because it simply is that way - he said to himself).

So, from what I can tell, we either:

1. Leave the connection strings in web.config and get svn conflicts

2. Move them to an external file, put the external file in svn and still get conflicts

3. Move to an external file, put a comment in the web.config and if someone adds something to connectionStrings (or we get new developers) have them add it to that comment and tell the developers to add it to their local file.

This seems overly complicated.

I tried to dance around this by doing something like the following on startup:

//get the developer defined connection string
string connectionString = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("ConnectionString");
//set the "real" connection string
WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ConnectionString"].ConnectionString = connectionString;

but, of course, the connectionStrings connection string is readonly. Sigh.

I even tried adding entity references to the web.config in order to get around it:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" ?>
<!DOCTYPE configuration [
<!ENTITY server "192.168.1.100">
]><configuration xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0″>
…

But that doesn’t work either for several reasons (I even tried to find a version of the schema to try to use a hacked version, but I couldn’t find one).

Square peg round hole.

Anyway, until we are enlightened, we’ve just decided to do the override for appSettings and just “waste” time dealing with the inevitable connectionStrings conflicts.

Anyone have any suggestions? Or is just a limitation of .Net development?

(On a positive note, the ability to completely override these sections, the configSource setting, makes doing deploys quite nice)

I stumbled on a Git hosting provider today called github. The prices are good, and they range from free (for hackers), to $12/month for small teams, to $100/month for large companies.

If your company does outsourcing to countries where the net connectivity is sometimes sketchy, you owe it to yourself to checkout Git. The distributed nature of the program allows for better collaboration in those types of environments.

Because each “clone” of the repository can still commit, even when the network is down people can still work, and re-sync when the network comes back up.

The other gem I spotted today was a Git Textmate bundle which makes using Git in Textmate as easy as using SVN. Here is a screens shot:

You can install the bundle by following the steps on Gitorious (You need to have the command line version of git installed first).

And lastly, I said before that “git doesn’t have a UI and you need to be comfortable with the shell”, but I was incorrect. If you run the command git gui from within a git directory there is a simple but effective UI. Here is a screen shot of what it looks like on Mac OS X but it works on Linux and Windows as well:

I find the Textmate bundle nicer for most day to day activities, but git gui frequently comes in handy.

I’ve seen quite a few blog posts where people list out the apps that they use and like, and thought this might be an easier way to produce those list (the specs for this where wishfully expressed by Chirs Prillo on one of his shows)

It was also an excuse for me to give AppleScript a go. I had never used it before and I wanted to see what it was like.

This app has been in development for a few months (not because it was hard or time consuming, but because I’ve only worked on it in small 30 minute increments). I’d call it beta.

It’s released under the Apple public license so you can download and tweak it if you feel the need.

Movie on how it works:

Here is an example output from the application (with a bit of annotation and a touch of style added)

Ottomate is a set of automator tasks that let you fill in forms, click buttons, and do simple asserts without writing any scripts (though you can add a script task).

Here is an example login workflow:

It’s a nice (and kind of fun) way to do simple Automated testing.

It’s a neat tool. This is a movie of how it works:

(After re-watching the movie, my tones are kind of bad on n词酷. It should be cíkù. Also I say the c sounds more like “s” instead of “ts” a few times -sorry about that.)

Some of these newer games are visually stunning - they are breath taking; however, I just don’t have time to get into them. I’ll play two or three complex games a year, often on my Microsoft® Xbox™. (I do enjoy watching other people play new games though. I am fascinated by the programming skills it would take to create such things.)

Every once in a while I like to just unwind and play a game. Something more than solitaire, but not quite as intense as Doom 3, Half life, Halo or what have you (and those are the easy ones to figure out). At times like these I often turn to my retro nintendo. Square controller, 2 buttons, four point joystick, and a game cartridge the size of small child’s face - heaven.

Well, now instead of going into the family room and waiting for the TV to warm up, turning the dial to 3, and switching the A/B controller to B to play the games, I can do it online.

They have most of the games I have, and a few I don’t. The only question I have is - is this legal?

If you’re like me, not having to create tons of accounts all over the place sounds like heaven. There have been several services I’ve wanted to try out, but filling out the same information again and again, and remembering yet another password tends to put me off. Many places have lost purchases from me because it was just too much effort for me to create an account.

The way it works in a nut shell: you create an account on some OpenID authentication service (or create your own authentication server), and from then on you log into web applications with a simple URL. That’s it. You put in your OpenID URL, it asks the authentication service if it’s ok, and bang, you’re off and running.

There are a lot of services that are supporting OpenID now. And according to the OpenID website, the number of sites is increasing very quickly.

Try it out and you’ll see why. Once you create an account and login to your first OpenID enabled website, you’ll know why it’s an idea who’s time has come.

So, if you’re curious, create an account on the OpenID web site, then for a safe haven test, you can login to one of my sites that support OpenID.

If you have a public service, you might want to think about adding support for OpenID. If you are using Drupal, there is even a module you can just plugin.

Ustream.tv is an interesting service. Using Flash it lets you broadcast (stream) live from your DV camera or web cam. So, you can have your own live “TV show”.

One of the bonuses of setting up your own channel is you get your own IRC room with an embed-able Flash client. Very useful for people to ask quick questions about your applications or services without giving out your personal information.

Here is what the client side of the service looks like.

This service does have potentially many uses (aside from any narcissistic tendencies):

* Free meeting broadcasting
* Teaching / Online classes
* Interviews
* Get yourself used to being monitored all the time

It’s a free service, and I think it has the potential to be a a “youtube killer” (you can record the streams as well for later broadcast).