I'm looking for a source that describes the standard address format for most of the world's countries. I've found sources for the more prominent Western and Asian countries, but these sources tend to peter out pretty quickly when you get away from larger/more influential countries.
Ideally I'd like to see something similar this book book, but more up-to-date, and not in dead-tree form. Does such a data source exist?
Found a couple of useful links:
http://www.usps.com/international/addressingintlmail.htm
http://pe.usps.gov/text/imm/immc1_007.htm
This site has TONS of country based information:
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/postal.html
Also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_%28geography%29#Mailing_address_format_by_country
This companies services seem interesting and related also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_d%C2%B4adresse_mondial
UPU Standard:
http://www.upu.int/acts/en/2_letter_en.pdf
Related
Are there statistics or even estimates anywhere regarding the sizes of the various sectors of the software industry (e.g. desktop, systems, embedded, business, games etc.)?
Here is some information on how each country does globally and the different sectors affected.
And some more details from 2008
i think you can find the information from the links on the wikipedia page about the "software industry". But for good information/statistics/reports, you probably have to pay for it.
I found something. China only, and the breakdown isn't very detailed, but it is relevant data: http://tmt.interfaxchina.com/news/2609
On stack overflow, I see that there is referred to Wikipedia a lot. However, I'm often not sure whether they are the definite authority for very specific software development related concepts. For example, I have recently looked for definitions of the terms web server/service and RPC/IPC, and the responses I get very often refer to Wikipedia (directly and indirectly).
Hence my question: which sources do you trust the most for definitions of software development jargon?
http://www.google.com
And no, this isn't being tongue-in-cheek.
Personally I used to trust Wikipedia, and I still read it to get an idea about the subject. But definitely books are better choice. Because they not only have a "compressed" explanation but also provide an examples and give broader description. As professors of my university say, don't trust wikipedia, search for an authorized source. For example a huge information about web service technology you can find in the book Building Web Services with Java - Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI - 2nd Edition 2005. It contains information you'll never find in Wikipedia or even in Google (Unless you'll find this book using it ;) ).
Hope this helps.
Google and technical & non-technical software development books.
"A Story Culture" may be a useful read for you as you want something other than a dictionary, IMO. You want something with the knowledge and wisdom of the topic rather than simply what does this mean. For example, there are a couple of blog posts about Technical Debt that I really like to use for reference about the subject, one from Steve McConnell and one from Martin Fowler.
While I can generally suggest going to the source for the term, there is something to be said for a term getting overloaded or overused so that it can have little meaning. There are a few folks' blogs that I can say I trust to get some understanding on a subject including Joels and Jeffs, but don't forget that each of us has a brain and we shouldn't be afraid to use it.
I need to find a technical reviewer for a programming document.
I have looked on Craigslist and various freelancers' websites (RentACoder, Odesk, Elance, etc) but it's difficult to determine who is qualified to act as a reviewer.
The last thing I need is to have the document reviewed by someone who either doesn't know what they are talking about or is not willing to go to the trouble of reviewing the document thoroughly.
An ineffective review might be worse than no review at all since it might generate a false sense of completion.
Any tips on selecting someone qualified & reliable?
The easiest way to determine if someone is qualified as a reviewer is to have them show you they can do the job:
Ask for a portfolio of previous
work, or
(better) Give them a sample
of your current project and ask them
to do a review.
Another option is to ask your contacts for any recommendations.
I strongly advise against relying on a dead-tree (CV/Resume) for making a determination, as it will distract you from weeding out those who "have experience" but cannot do the job, or you can miss finding those who can do the job, but lack the experience.
You could look on SO and see if you can find some people that give answers that give you an idea that they know what they are talking about, though this could be a slow process.
I actually like BryanH's second response, let them review something non-critical and see how they do, but have an idea what it important to you.
Are you looking for someone to be able to make decisions as to what you wrote is technically valid, or do you want someone that can also check the writing and see that the grammar is correct, for example?
There are several things to look at when reviewing a document, you should be very specific about what you are looking for.
Linkedin
Linkedin is a popular network for pitching contracts to documentation freelancers. It's also a fantastic way to procure interest from full-time technical writers at large organisations that might be looking for side-projects (if allowed), or case study projects to leverage their existing skills on new methods.
Mailing Lists
Depending on your geographical location, there are also popular mailing lists with a high volume of contract communications (and passionate technical writers). In Australia, the ATW mailing list is a good resource.
Industry Bodies
If you're in the US, contact the Society for Technical Communication. Other nations will have other bodies (or regional chapters).
Summary
I focus more on the question of "where to find writers" than I do of "how to get a competent peer review", but the right person is always the biggest hurdle. In this way I admit to having a bias in preference for communities of active and engaged participants over something like a bidding website or outsourcing mechanism. The latter is fine, but these islands of technical writers are vocal and active because they are interested, and often give back to the community that makes it available to connect talent to projects such as yours. Good luck!
Have you tried asking a publisher? (O'Reilly, Manning etc)
Obviously publishers need to find technical reviewers and indeed peer reviewers for a number of topics, so they may well be able to put you in touch with someone. They'll probably suggest that you write a book for them, too.
As the question states, is there any point adding Dublin Core meta-tags to your HTML head? Or has sitemap.org removed the use for most of this (though it only replaces some of the tags)
I ask this as most sites I visit don't seem to use DC metatags in their source.
I'm interested in whether I need them for a site that will be used mostly for developers, however the discussion can be broader than this category.
To quote Google (from 2002):
"Currently we don't trust metadata because we are afraid of it being manipulated"
I would rather say that the time of rich metadata hasn’t come yet. In fact technologies like RFD are just on the way up. Tim Berners-Lee – you know, the guy who invented the web – quite recently spoke at TED about The next Web of open, linked data. So Dublin Core and other metadata formats are anything but out.
Dublin Core is still very important in certain industry sectors. Here in the UK, government organisations use DC to provide standardised access to tags.
META tags are not the only place you can put DC metadata. You can integrate it more with HTML using RDFa.
Now, as for proliferation — well, the only incentive it currently gives to webmasters is satisfaction for job well done, but does not yet affect SEO. As soon as this changes, you'll see outburst of sites tagged with RDF and microformats. And it will come. Yahoo already started working on that: http://ysearchblog.com/2008/03/13/the-yahoo-search-open-ecosystem/
I was looking on the web for information about the Dublin Core and if search engines used them and I came across the academic paper "Search Engines and Resource Discovery on the Web:
Is Dublin Core an Impact Factor?" by Mehdi Safari:
http://www.webology.ir/2005/v2n2/a13.html
To quote his conclusions section: "it was found that using Dublin Core elements did not improve the retrieval rank of the web pages" and that "Dublin Core metadata, as a well-known metadata schema, is not widely accepted and used by search engine designers and the spiders do not consider its elements while ranking the web pages".
This was back in 2005, but I am assuming this is still true.
Semantic web efforts are still sputtering along. I've run across a couple of research efforts to use RDF triples including the Dublin Core... but nothing close to commercialization.
However, as a general organizing principle for the world wild web? Don't bother. My guess is that folksonomies will deal with some metadata management, but that site tagging will need to be handled through ontological deduction of some sort. I get the same feeling around DC and RDF that I get around general-purpose globally open UDDI registries: nice idea, but that's not the way the world works.
It would be kinda interesting to know whether DC tags increase your Google Page Rank (and how reliably): that could be a strong incitament for many!
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There are examples online with web select boxes that have a huge list of countries and that probably will be good enough for me to use. However, by Murphy's law, there's bound to be some random country that someone is from and isn't on my list (and probably someone else also ran into this and has updated their local list). Also, when new countries are added, I won't know about it.
Basically, I feel it's better practice and a better smell if there is some centralized list of country names that I can use / trust. (also it could set/follow standards for exact namings "United St..." vs "USA" etc.)
I would prefer a solution that isn't IIS specific if possible
There are many list of countries, check this wikipedia article; there you can find some lists like:
ISO 3166-1 countries codes
IOC country codes
Alternative country names
And more...
We maintain a list of 'PUBLIC DOMAIN' Worldwide Country names in all official formats. The information comes from the ISO 3166-1 Maintenance Agency for offical English and French short names, the US Board on Geographic Names (BGN) for english short, long and local short, long names, and United Nations Group of Experts on Geographic Names (UNGEGN) format (long) English, French names, short and formal local names and Spanish names.
There still is a problem representing some Arabic characters as romanized characters (will see ?). But these are limited to the local names of a few Arab countries.
Note, the English, Spanish and French cover the 3 Western languages of the UN's official 6 languages. Metadata, information on the sources, and download can be found at:
http://www.opengeocode.org/download.php#countrynames
The Open Geocode Team
OpenGeoCode.org
Jan. 26, 2014.
We updated the list to include country names in Italian and German. We used the UN Food & Agriculture list of countries in Italian and the German Government's Federal Foreign Office's list of countries in German.
I recommend pulling data out of the Unicode CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository), which include a professionally-maintained list of countries and country name data.
Grab the data from there once, and do updates once in a while; the CLDR data will come in a consistent format, so you won't need to fuss over it once it's part of your workflow.
An answer to this question contains a useful link to a Github project that has lists in various formats and the script that produced them, making it easy to obtain updated versions.
No list is comprehensive.
"there's bound to be some random country that someone is from and isn't on my list"
If that was all there was to it, it would be simple.
There's no "world law" or "world constitution", so there's no single list of countries, republics, territories, protectorates, autonomous regions, independent governments, and disputed territories.
Indeed, it's not possible to come to an agreed-upon definition of "country" which would lead to a final list of country codes. The definition of "country" is politically charged. What, for example, is Tibet? Country or region of China? Northern Ireland? The Holy See?
Pick a list, and know that it's subject to some dispute.
You could, for example, use the IANA country code database: http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/
It's as good as any, and since it's part of the IANA, it has some standing as a standard. Further, it's pretty accessible as easy-to-parse web content.
I have a recent list ready to go on my website at http://www.john.geek.nz/index.php/2009/01/sql-tips-list-of-countries/
It's both at sql and tab delimited - The original list was sourced from wikipedia
I don't know what IIS is, but ISO 3166 specifies 2-letter codes for each country; AFAIK, their list is comprehensive. ISO 3166 site
This is probably way too late, but there's a web service that you can call that would theoretically allow you to automatically databind your controls:
http://www.webservicex.net/country.asmx
May give you another approach and would be better than hard-coding a list yourself.
I've posted a few files to github:gist
Including:
The HTML Select enumerations for the Alpha-2, Alpha-3, and Numeric-3 values, as well as an XSD snippet of those values as enumerations for a simple type restriction.
Check on this link
The CIA world fact book has this information, however, just as you point out in your question there are some disputed countries that are not on their list sometimes, ie. Palestine.
Another source for country names is Natural Earth Data and their cultural map download links which come as shape files ready to be plotted as maps. Here is a direct link to the medium quality map data download page.
Check out angrymonkeycloud.com/geography to get the full list of countries.
It's a free .Net client and so easy to start with, and it uses an API to retrieve values so you should always get the latest updates.
Much, much easier is to use a web service for this task rather than holding your own data store. This way its updated and you can do things like have country-state ajax dropdown sets. http://geodata.solutions is the best one to use, and it has lots of cools stuff like being able to pre-select the user's country based on their IP, and ordering lists by their population.