Just finished watching Joyeux Noël, the movie about the WWI Christmas Truce. Beautifully told.
It’s one of those stories that makes you think that humans don’t suck. But then you look around and realize that 90 years later, nothing has changed.
OMG I just canceled our TV service and of course also TiVo, which I’ve had for 5 years. We’re going cold turkey.
I used to only watch Jon Stewart, Colbert and the Family Guy, so I’ll have to catch those somewhere else…maybe.
And so goes the legend:
ALBERT EINSTEIN WROTE THIS RIDDLE EARLY DURING THE 19th CENTURY. HE SAID THAT 98% OF THE WORLD POPULATION WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO SOLVE IT.
It’s probably just legend, but regardless, it’s a fun puzzle to solve. I did it in less than an hour and have no idea if that’s slow, fast or about average. Someone let me know.
1. In a street there are five houses, painted five different colors.
2. In each house lives a person of different nationality
3. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.QUESTION: WHO OWNS THE FISH?
HINTS
1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the White house.
5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the center house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.
A friend of mine from when I was in school in Belgium, sent me a “merry christmas/happy new year” email. That’s cool, so I replied “thanks bro! you too” (or something to that effect).
Unfortunately however, he must have sent that email right before he left for the weekend/vacation, so I got this auto-reply:
I’m out of office until 2007, 8th of January
For ### project and/or #### ### helpdesk matters, please contact #### (+32 2 ### ####)
For all other subjects, contact IS - #### #### #### (+32 2 ### ####)Regards,
#### ######
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Legal Notice: This electronic mail and its attachments are intended solely for the person(s) to whom they are addressed and contain information which is confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure, except for the purpose for which they are intended. Dissemination, distribution, or reproduction by anyone other than the intended recipients is prohibited and may be illegal. If you are not an intended recipient, please immediately inform the sender and return the electronic mail and its attachments and destroy any copies which may be in your possession. ### screens electronic mails for viruses but does not warrant that this electronic mail is free of any viruses. ### accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this electronic mail.
———————————————————
Several things you should notice about this email:
3- The ###s are mine :-)
2- Ima be sued since I’m obviously breaching the agreement I didn’t know we had, by distributing their email.
1- The most important thing though, is that you can read what the message says. Yes, it’s in English. This is Belgium, where people speak French and Dutch (okay, okay, a few also speak German) but English is *not* the national language. And yet, it’s assumed that if you’re dealing with technology, you can read basic enough English.
Eric makes the observation the localization doesn’t really matter. I have to concur, at least when it comes to development tools and Europe. I don’t know anything about how things are in Asia for example, so maybe it matters there - though I suspect not. See below.
I couple of years ago I had to fight tooth and nail not to waste time with localization on a tool I was writing. This was a tool for programmers, and I *knew* localization was not only useless, it would actually hurt (we would be late and not ship the tool).
Who am I to know that developers don’t want their tools localized? What qualifies me as such an expert? I’d say mostly my background.
I’m a developer, it’s even the only thing I know how to do (though I’ve been known for preparing a mean “Garlic Pasta” and my Caipirinha rocks - I know it does), and in addition to being a developer, English is not my first language. In fact, it’s not even my second language. I’m what they call an ETL. :-)
All the time I spent programming in places like Portugal, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and yes, even Congo, I have never seen and even less used a development tool that was not English only. I would NOT have it any other way.
The question really is, why would anyone want a translated version?
- The English version is more recent
- If a product ships in many languages at the same time, the competition already shipped the English version
- The folks translating the text don’t know the technology, the folks who know the technology only speak English. Don’t even bother, just stick to the language that the people *building* the tool know. This is probably the main reason most developers around the world stick with original versions - you are butchering our language! Stop it!
- 93.4% of the documentation is in English
- APIs *are* in english (if I don’t know any English, I’m going to have a hard time using most programming languages, and therefore I’m not a programmer)
- It’s indicative that the people requesting translated tools, aren’t the ones using those tools
- Technical English is easy! If you’re smart enough to learn how to use computers, you’re more than qualified to learn “technical” English
I can think of a few (bad) reasons for software makers to I18N their development tools:
- Like Eric, they feel guilty. They don’t want to be the ugly American. (little does he know that no one cares)
- Managers are buying the development tools, and the people actually using those tools have no say (poor bastards…I hope they will be able to install the English version as soon as they can…if they can, they will)
- Deciders@BigCorp apply some flawed math. It goes like this: “most of our sales are not in the US, therefore we need to translate our tools”. But for all the reasons above, that other non-US market likes the original version, though they’re not being asked.
Anyway, companies should stop making a fool of themselves, when trying to translate their development tools. No one cares. If those tools were free they would make people laugh. Because usually they have some sort of cost, they make people cry.
Finally got me a new webcam as the one I had was 10 years old. Only slightly smaller than the laptop. The new one is not the best, but works and it was cheap.
Had some quick fun with it and put this animated gif together. Because I’m nice and I like you, you actually have to click the image to see the animation - and then again to stop it.
The first time I read this book I didn’t really any EMF stuff, and was just curious. I didn’t like the book at all, I said so here. At the time, I decided to give up about 20% in the book.
I’m working on a new project that could benefit from EMF and had been avoiding ever going back to this book. I figured that learning from doing was the way to go. Also online tutorials I guess. Unfortunately there’s only so far I could get with that more adventurous approach, and I finally decided that maybe I was ready for another try.
This time I started reading the book less casually, actually putting some effort into it. Really trying to understand what the authors were saying, and I must say that I think I got it. The book is not an intro to EMF (and even less to Eclipse) and the quicker you understand that the better.
It reads like a code review of what’s going on when a model is used to generate code. I think this was the breakthrough for me, understanding that I was not learning about EMF the typical way, where the author(s) start slow and easy, and build up from there. Instead the authors take the approach that there’s a gazillion lines of code here, let’s explore it.
Knowing this, the book is not so bad and I actually managed to learn from it. Grab it if you need to learn EMF, and don’t be a fool like I was, dropping it as soon as it became hard to read.
I still want to complain about the 300 pages of APIs though.
If you’re reading this or any of the other posts, and would like to comment, I have to apologize to you. Getting a sea of daily blogspam is no fun, and forcing people to register is the best I could come up with.
Edit: Per Luke’s recommendation, I’ve installed 2 anti-spam plugins which means that you shouldn’t need to register to comment.
New service from Google. I looked for “xml dom” and got this right at the top. Woot.
server client render only gets the first page, but not the top.
