So I've cranked up the linux box for sandbox development of wordpress themes and plugins. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Well, for a hard-core java programmer moving back into PHP doesn't immediately seem like a step up, but here we are, eh dear reader? And this may be where the business is in Bulgaria these days …. WordPress is a perfectly good Content Management System (CMS), and It's likely that skills in this CMS will prove useful in this country at this time. I installed NetBeans, the latest version. Installed apache2, php, all that good stuff with apt-get and aptitutude. And finally I went to http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/php/wordpress-screencast.html for a quick tutorial on how to setup a wordpress plugin project. Good stuff, eh? Let's see where this goes. If you're interested, I can write a post on the setup procedures which got me here. Just try and get XDebug and all this running on windows, pee-yew.
On this day last year I landed in Washington D.C. to begin my efforts at a more permanent stay in Bulgaria … at least my efforts stateside.
I lived here in Burgas for the most of the summer, from July 5th to October 2nd. I worked for Benetech, or rather more directly for Bookshare.org during this entire summer. This company is located in Palo Alto California, which just happens to be 10 hours behind us in Burgas.
It was a great time, let me tell you. The best group of programmers I’ve worked with in my 25 years in this industry, almost all of us remote developers. We met online in a jabber chatroom maintained by Bookshare, and once a week in a sort of call-in stand-up scrum with each other. I got for myself a packet8 phone line so I could attend these meetings — all the way from Burgas.
Of course being 10 hours ahead of Palo Alto meant I had to start work about 3 or 4 in the afternoon here, I generally worked until 4 or 5 in the morning. Still, I enjoyed the hell out of myself. I wish I could have a job like that now.
Anyway, I digress. Today is a date on the calendar I’ve never experienced here in Burgas. From now until January 22nd all the days will be dates I haven’t experienced. As the autumn progresses, the foliage changes, the rain progresses …. will I see snow this winter?
Just wondering.
Well, the Romania idea is long dead. As best I can tell, a new law or set of laws were passed in Bulgaria on Sept 4 regarding how long a foreigner can stay without a visa, how visas are obtained, how registering a company in Bulgaria works … and all that.
Basically, I can only stay in Bulgaria without a visa for 90 days in any 6 month period. July 4th to October 2nd … so the idea that I could just leave the country for a day and come back in (the trip to Romania) no longer would do what I needed to be done.
Second, to apply for the visa-D business visa, I must return to my home country and apply at the Bulgarian consulate there, waiting 30-40 days for the vias. Thus, my trip to Washington D.C.
On Wed October 2nd we went to a travel agency and purchased a flight to Washington D.C., and that night we drove across country once again to Sofia, where at 6:15 a.m. I got on my flight. First to Brussels, Belgium, a 4 hour stay there, then an 8 and a half hour flight to Washington D.C.
I spent the night with my friends Don Mackay and David Jones, living near the corner of N and 22nd street. I arrived there in D.C. about 3 pm local time, Dave picked me up, we met Don and headed for an Outback Steakhouse – I haven’t eaten steak in 3 months you know.
On friday oct 3rd at 10:30 am I showed up at the Bulgarian consulate on the corner of R and 22nd streets and applied for my visa. The woman I talked to seemed to be saying to me that my situation should not give me problems, that I could have a visa D in 30-40 days.
So after that, Dave and Don gave me a ride to Dulles airport, and I flew down here to Longview Texas to wait out the time for my visa. I’m staying with my parents for the next 6 weeks it looks like.
I really did not want to have to return to the US for this, it’s had a significant impact on my work … I can continue working from here on the MacBook, but it’s not my favorite development platform.
Anyway, that’s the current story. There is a chance I might be flying up to Madison WI again to see about a possible new remote contract with a friend’s company … we’ll see. I really don’t want to be in Texas, I really don’t want to be in the states right now.
Comment translation
I’ve been getting an amazing number of comments on some of my blog entries coming from Russia – and they’re in the Russian language in Cyrillic. I expect there’s some kind of rss-feed going on, I do have several subscribers to this blog who’s personal data indicates their home page is in .ru domain or their email address comes from a .ru domain.
Using the Vistor Maps and Who is Online plugin I’m able to see where my visitors are coming from, at least the country where their IP address is located. Most of the .ru commentors are actually coming from Latvia … from Preili Latvia in particular.
Maybe they’ve put my site on some social networking location in Russia? How is it they’re able to write comments to my blog without appearing in my google analytics report? Why aren’t they writing comments in english, my language? Are my blog entries being translated to Russian where these people are reading them, and if so how good a translation is it?
Since so many of the comments coming from Russia are spam I’ve had to place the .ru domain in my Aksimet filter, but just as many seem to be honest comments coming from regular people. So I go through the comments flagged as spam this way, and on occasion will approve them for the post. I go to translate.google.com to see what they are saying, and to have a look at the website they claim as home page.
Often some innocuous comment such as “good post” comes with a link to some porno or warez site, so I just delete those.
But a they are in Russian, I have to translate all of them this way. So I’m going to try something new. I’ve done a google search for “wordpress google translate plugin“, and have arrived at the following two plugins (links open in new window):
It looks like the Global Translator is more fully developed, and able to use 4 different translator engines (at least claimed on the plugin site), so this is the one I’m going to try.
There is a pro version available, but let’s see how well this plugin works on a site such as mine, with these Russian-language and cyrillic charset comments.
….
Ok, I’ve installed the global translator and I have to admit, it doesn’t do what I want in this case. I only want to be able to translate the comments, not the entire website. The Global Translator has lots of nice options, and it might be useful for my readers who come from those various countries to get a translation of my website in their language, but hey – than can do what I’ve been doing, go to translate.google.com and enter the URL and see the translation.
So I’m going to deactivate that plugin for now, and try the Google Ajax Translator.
….
Very nice. This does what I want. I’m not offering translation of entire pages or posts, I only want to see for myself what these Russian comments are saying. So we’ll see how it works.
And if any of you commenting on my blog entries would like to tell me – where are you seeing my blog? Are my entries translated into your language, is this why you’re writing comments in Russian? I’d like to read your comments about these questions.
[Translate]