Importing HTML5 and CSS3 templates as themes into Sitefinity

This session with the Telerik Academy's "Web design with HTML5 and CSS3" course was an extensive demo showing how a web design template, consisting of an HTML5 page, a CSS3 file and some images can be imported as an ASP.NET theme into Sitefinity and used as a design template for robust pages with dynamic Sitefinity content.
From my lecturing experience I've learnt that the best way to learn something is to teach it. This session was quite interesting for me: being a senior developer of some main parts in Sitefinity for around 3 years now, I've had the pleasure to meddle with many of its internal nuts and bolts, but hardly ever touched the frontend design side of it. This academy session made me dive into the uncharted territory of UI charting and it was loads of fun. I enjoyed it very much.

Wikipedia and the triumph of human knowledge

I see Wikipedia as one of the great triumphs of human technology. After celebrating its 10th year anniversary last year, it never ceases to grow.

"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable" (Isaac Asimov).
It's is becoming a fact that science fiction often turns into science (at least since the vast technology leaps of the 20th century). Dan Simmons prophesied the DataSphere in his Hyperion book series, a self-aware network encompassing the complete human knowledge. This is what the Internet is rapidly becoming, and Wikipedia is taking a huge part in it.
Alongside the knowledge revolution, in the past few years we have been witnessing the  reverse process of the the print revolution from the 1400s. Electronic books are taking over not-so-slowly. Amazon now admits to sell more electronic Kindle books than printed ones. 
Even the printed version of the great Encyclopædia Britannica was discontinued this year (2012) after 244 years of print! As you can see in the infographic below, Wikipedia currently contains enough English articles to fill 952 volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica (the printed encyclopaedia has merely 32 volumes). The era of digital of knowledge is present..


Here is an informative infographic with a few interesting statistics about Wikipedia. I have received it privately with a request to share. I gladly agreed.

Using Babylon-based dictionaries on your Kindle

UPDATE! A Follow-Up Post on this Project Since this post got wide attention, I've decided to follow-up on this project. See my new Babylon-based dictionaries on Kindle - Round 2 post. Now the project is shared as open-source and pre-built dictionaries are organized and shared.

Lost in translation

The problem

Addressing this issue started by by trying to purchase an Italian-English dictionary for my 2nd generation Kindle, running Kindle software v2.5.3.

One dictionary was offered for sale  (as an ebook) on Amazon's website. The problem was that the dictionary was not actually available for the device for another whole year..

Good translations

Babylon, on the other hand, offers high-quality dictionaries, spanning over pretty much every language. Babylon Translator is a paid software for Windows. Its dictionary files (.BGL) are offered as free downloads.

In a perfect universe
If I only had a way to import Babylon's free content dictionary into my Kindle and use it as the built-in dictionary, it would have been perfect..

The solution presented here was tested on my Kindle 2. I'm pretty sure it should work on newer versions of Kindle as well.

The same Babylon dictionary, used on my PC (Left) and on my Kindle (Right)
(Click for full size)

Article Level:

Reasonably moderate

Setting Up Subversion Source-Control with Assembla and TortoiseSVN

Why Source-Control?

When working on sufficiently-large projects, it's good to be able to keep track of changes with a source-control system (sometimes referred to as "revision control system" or "version-control system" or VCS. Personally I prefer the old term "source-control"). The advantages of using such a system:

• Keeping track of changes:
  Know who made the changes and when.
  Record changes with appropriate comments ("..hmmm.. why did I make this change..?").
• Reverting and obtaining previous versions.
• Managing versions and labels of your code in various history points.
• Potentially sharing the project with other developers ,working together making tracked changes.
• Some source-control systems allow tracking bugs and tasks, while associating them to changes made in files.

Many enterprises use commercial source-control systems. Since the majority of my enterprise projects have been on Microsoft environments, in the early days I was using Visual Source Safe (VSS), in later years it's been Team Foundation Server (TFS). Both consist of a source server and client applications which integrate with the Windows domain users and with Visual Studio IDE.

On home projects I prefer to use a more modest source control system, preferably one which I can store online for backups and doesn't require a server running all the time.

Article Level:

Reasonably moderate

A day in a life of a software developer

This is a short lecture I gave on 01/2012 to the students of the Telerik Academy.

The students who do well in the C# fundamentals course, in which I lecture, are offered jobs at Telerik. The job's pool is split into positions of developers, QA engineers and technical support engineers. Since Telerik's products are made for the usage of developers, knowledge of programming is required for all those positions (not just for the developers' positions).
In order to give the students a better understanding of what they may be facing in the future, Telerik Academy conducted a short seminar in which a lecturing representative of each of the aforementioned position gave an introductory presentation.
Representing the developers, I put together a short lecture, describing the everyday chores of of the poor developer.

Douglas Crockford's JavaScript Lectures

Douglas Crockford  is a JavaScript architect working for Yahoo and one of the founding developers of the JavaScript language.

This is a series of fascinating lectures which, I think, should be watched by every developer, especially ones who have interest in web frontend client-side development and JavaScript.
There are many online lectures and tutorials about JavaScript, which is perhaps becoming the world's most common programming language, but not every day you come across such good lectures, given by one of the developers of the language itself.

The first one is quite an amazing overview of the evolution of computers and computer languages. As noted above, the fact that it's presented by a person who has taken part in the actual process, makes it rather special. Should be watched by every geek.

Bookmarklets FTW: Preview Your Blogspot Posts Like a Boss!

Bookmarklets FTW!
Bookmarklets are little (and sometimes not so little) script snippets which are stored as browser bookmarks, thus they can be invoked easily and quickly. They are tremendous help, especially for a lazy programmer like the one I always claim to be, always seeking shortcuts, scripts and automation. Let the computer do the work for you when possible, I say.
I keep a collection of my own home-made bookmarklets which I find handy, and I will share at least some of them here occasionally.
Bookmarklets work on all web browsers except on Internet Explorer, which means they work on all web browsers.
For Google Chrome there is even a option to convert bookmarklets into Chrome extensions!

Article Level:

You should have found this out for youself!