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battle with the multilingual
Friday, May 22 2009
I'd implemented my language changes last night and was happy with them, particularly since they were at such a low level and would require such trivial changes to the site as already written. But the guy I work with remotely in California is easily spooked and freaked out about my changes to an unanticipated extent. Evidently he'd thought he'd had the bilingual support in the database completely nailed down when he created a language table and then added language columns to the tables with a need for multilingual content. Indeed, such a design would have been fine for a simple database, but this one was full of table-to-table relations that would be impossible to maintain if each relation had to go to two different rows keyed to two different languages. I think part of the reason my colleague was offering additional resistance to my changes was his firm conviction that for once he'd completely known what he was doing. He's learned a lot over the years and perhaps no longer feels the need to defer as quickly to my ideas as he once did. There's also the issue of the project's timeline, which (as always for clients obtained through this colleague) has been grotesquely compressed. But it's foolish to work with an inadequate database design no matter the timeline, particularly if it's been grotesquely compressed. In the end, it took very little effort to adapt to my new multi-language database support, but the only prize forthcoming was not having to revert back to the inadequate design I'd supplanted.
Gretchen went away to Vermont for the night with our friend Susan (the one who wrote a book about being chosen by a horse), leaving me alone to battle with the multilingual website. Occasionally I'd venture down to the greenhouse, where I've been building a rock retaining wall reaching westward from the greenhouse's southwest corner. North of this wall is where I'll be piling much of the rest of the soil from the greenhouse's initial excavation.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?090522 feedback
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