I’ve been doing some messing about over the last week or so with the Google maps and Fickr API’s, to get photos on Flickr displayed on a map.

After much tinkering and hacking around, I finally got it working. You can see the results on my beer website at http://www.oldmanales.co.uk/feat_OktoberFest07.asp

While writing this I came across a strange bug that seamed to effect IE6. I only started noticing it the last couple of days though, so maybe Google have been messing with the code.

Anyway, what would happen is when I loaded my map I got the little error icon at the bottom left corner of my browser. Double clicking it gave this error:

GIcon is undefinded

GIcon was the variable I was using to create a marker on the map that you can click and it would show a pop-up window.

I looked at a few posts, some suggested changing the version of the maps api, some building the icon differently and a couple more. However, the only one that worked for me was going into IE’s advanced settings and turning on allow HTTP 1.1 through proxy connections option.

Once this had been turned on I know longer got the error and my map is displayed without ant problems.

Once I thought about the error I realised that I noticed it first when I checked the map at work, using a proxy server, and judging by the name of the setting it probably only happens when using a proxy to access the web.
I’m not entity sure what the setting means but i will look into it.

On the topic of the map, once I have finished it off all the features i want to put in it and I’ve tested it as much as possible i will post the code for it on here.

If you look at the right hand side off my blog now, you’ll will see that you can now translate my blog into different languages. The idea came about when I was looking on FeedBurner at the different places visitors were coming from, and all the different languages they were using.

I had a quick look around the web to see if there were any ‘widgets’ I could steel to accomplish this. The only one I could find was using Babel fish by Alta Vista, you can get it at http://www.altavista.com/help/free/free_searchbox_transl the only thing that put me of using this was the Google translate tool supported more languages.

So I headed over to http://www.google.com/translate_t, and basicly looked at the source code of that page and created a form of my own. Now if you click on one of the flags it will translate the blog page your are looking at to your language. Simple but effective!

If you are in the UK try and get hold of a copy of this weeks IT Week, on page 27 there’s a really interesting article about a company doing some interesting research into the future of power consumption. Unfortunately I can find it on there website so you’ll have to get hold of the magazine.

I learnt something about readingXML file’s today, using VB.net and XPath.
I had an xml file, and some of the data in it were tags similar to this:

<CustomField name =”title” type=”str”>This is a Title</CustomField>
<CustomField name =”titleDate” type=”dte”>01/01/2007</CustomField>

So, couldn’t just navigate to the CustomField tag, as there was more than one of them. I’ve never really gone to much into how to navigate round an XML file, i’ve always just gone straight to the node I was interested in and pulled out the data.

This time, I had to delve more into the XPath navigator. I found out I could use the following in my XPathNodeIterator, to return me only nodes that contained the attribute title:

/Story/StoryData/CustomField[@Name="Title"]

I could then iterate round all the retuned nodes and process the data. Some of the XML processing tools and classes in .Net do take a bit of time to get your head round, but they do seam to work well and are very fast.

On another note, I went over on my ankle playing football (soccer if your in the US) on Sunday, it swelled up pretty bad so I went to the hospital.
They sent me for an x-ray, and it turned out it was just badly sprained this time, but i’ve broken or chipped it before and didn’t notice. How the hell did that happen!
I’m now stuck at home for a couple of boring days to let it heel a bit, they said i shouldn’t even drive for a week. Not bloody likely!

Got another article on aspfree.com its about controlling Windows 2003 fax services through an application, you can read it here

Had a bit of a problem that was quite easily solved today. I was trying to substitute a curency pound symbol for a euro symbol in a web application, so I decided to make it configurable in the web.config file.
When I added it in however, I kept getting an error saying:

There is an invalid character in the given encoding

If I took out the line, or replaced it with another string, it worked fine. Turned out it was the encoding set in the top of the web config file. I changed to to read:

xml version =”1.0″ encoding=”windows-1252″

And it started to work fine. Not sure what that encoding refers to, but ill find out. I know I should really get the currency symbol from the local of the machine, but I don’t know how!