How’d he get in there!? Through greasemonkey of course!

My first script! Places a little fish icon near focused textfields and allows you to translate the text to the language of your choice.

Currently the script is set to translate from english to spanish. You can set different languages by modifying the js. Soon I will convert to a full fledged extension with a preference pane to set language options and whatnot.

Download

The latest version can be downloaded here: babelfish.user.js

Things Left to Do

• Convert to extension. – This will allow a preference pane for language selection.
• Button to revert back to original text.
• Super crazy translate as you type mode!

Changelog

• .3 (5/22/2005) – Translate selected text! Woohoo! Being able to do this was a big motivation behind this script, as now you can just translate that one word you can’t think of when typing in a foreign language! Also fixed small bug with spinner hiding itself even when work is being done.
• .2 (5/20/2005) – Added spinner, translucent fish, and a few small optimizations.
• .1 (5/19/2005) – Basic functionality.

Known Issues

• My particular brand of screen scraping breaks on large bodies of text. Looking into why …

I sat down on ‘fred,’ the server this is now running on, today to set typo up w/ pg and ran into a small hitch. Make sure you run initdb on your /data directory (pg_dump if you already have stuff in there!). Specifically, rails complaines about the lack of information_schema, and a ’\du’ in psql returns an error.

I think I’ve mentioned that I’m forced to use sqlserver at work for some rails projects I’m doing. I guess it’s good that at least one more person is hammering down on the db adapter (making a total of about 4!).

Fixed nil datetimes in the adapter today, which coincidentally fixed problems with using updated_at.

If you use sqlserver you can test with this patch. (ticket)

UPDATE: I’ve changed the link to the new patch here. I’ve now taken out all typecasting being overriden in the sqlserver adapter, so it should be inhereting the method from abstract_adapter.rb. This seems to work fine … kinda scary though because I can’t see any reason why it was originally done. Mabye problems in old abstract_adapter code?

I’m back! So I’ve moved into a new place downtown, which I’m absolutely loving in every way. I still don’t have internet (well, actually I have it from my back porch :), but will probably get it going sometime in the future. Jesse and I are beaming wireless from his house all the way down to me (2 houses down!) which will be very cool.

I also have no television at the new pad, which is turning out better than I ever could have expected.

Joe hates TV too!

Anyway, I have lots of good pictures to post, and lots of good things to go over (life and geeky), so I’ll follow this up with a few posts over the next couple of days.

And of course, a huge heapin honkin thanks to Jesse and Voltaic for providing a new cosy home for this site!