From the moment you sit down, you notice how cheap it feels. It has that hard, nasty, cheap plastic they’ve chosen for the steering wheel and dashboard. It isn’t comfortable, either. I’m not tall, but the seat feels too high. The gearstick seems a long way away down where they’ve placed it. It doesn’t feel good to drive, either. The brake pedal has very little travel and doesn’t give proportional resistance. The turning circle is too big for such a small car. The engine doesn’t deliver, either – you put your foot down and wait for something to happen; at least with an Echo, when you put your foot down it revs eagerly, and you definitely feel the pull at 6,000 rpm.

Sure they’ve thrown in lots of features, like power windows, power mirrors, audio controls on the steering wheel (which are on the wrong side – they belong on the left) and an MP3/WMA compatible CD player. But it doesn’t change the fact that that the car is lacking where it matters; extras don’t make a bad car better.

But it was also the worst day so far, because it was the last day I’d be working with Bruce. I really do wish you all the best in what you’ve chosen to do, but selfishly I wish we didn’t have to let you go. We’ll all miss you, both professionally, because you have so much knowledge of the industry and company, and personally, because you’re a great guy to have around.

In so many ways, you’re my polar opposite: you’re softly spoken, non-confrontational, vegetarian, tee-totalling and you like to develop in interpreted languages. From the interview onwards, you gave me a great introduction to the company, and you’ve taught me a lot in the short time we’ve worked together.

I’ll miss the conversations; I’ll miss pairing with you; I’ll miss having you there at lunch time; I’ll even miss biting my tongue to stop myself singing along when I can just hear the percussion of Smooth Criminal leaking from your headphones.

I hope things work out for you with the new job in Sydney, and that your family handles the transition well. All the best from psycho Vas!

However, after installing it in my car (a 2007 Toyta Corolla Seca, which is called an Auris anywhere but Australia), I am quite dissatisfied. In rearward-facing orientation, the seat is not held down adequately. The “stabilising bar” is supposed to serve this purpose, but it doesn’t even come close to touching the seat back in my car. I think it’s designed to work in cars where the seat backs are close to vertical, but that doesn’t help me. I don’t think I’d trust it enough in that orientation to put a baby in it. In forward-facing orientation, it’s considerably better. The combination of the anchorage strap and seatbelt hold the child restraint in the seat securely both vertically and longitudinally. However, there’s nothing to stabilise it laterally, and there’s a lot of play in that direction. I don’t think it’s unstable to the point of being totally unsafe, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Now my car is equipped with ISOFIX (ISO-13216 1990, aka LATCH) anchor points. This was actually a consideration for me when buying the car. I asked around about the availability of ISOFIX child restraints, and was told that they aren’t available “because they don’t meet Australian standards.” If that’s the case, then Australian standards are a joke. Attaching a child restraint to ISOFIX anchors is far more secure than trying to hold it in place with a seatbelt. The two anchors at the base of the seat effectively secure the child restraint both laterally and vertically, while the tether holds it securely against the seat back (longitudinally). ISOFIX has been a requirement on new cars in the USA since 2002. It should be a requirement here, too.

This experience doesn’t instil much confidence in Australian standards. In this case, it seems to be about protecting certain businesses while paying lip service to safety. Meanwhile, children’s safety is actually compromised.

Meanwhile, I’m in South Kensington. I manage to walk to Kensington and get a taxi to where she is (and overpay the driver for speeding) and the cops still aren’t there. When they finally show up, the bunch of Africans all tell the cops that my wife started it. The cops tell us they can’t do anything, because they’re just kids.

Now I’m really fucking pissed off and considering becoming racist for a number of reasons:

• First of all, why can’t the cops do something? It isn’t just the kids – it’s their parents, too. They bring them up to act like this, and they support them in it.
• Why is it OK for Africans to be racist? They get away with it all the time. Come to think of it, why do they get away with all the things they get away with all the time? I saw, just tens of metres from me, a bunch of young African guys kicking an white woman and yelling things like, “Fucking Aussie bitch!” They get away with everything.
• Speaking of which, what’s the point of cops when they’re always too late to do anything? The local cops only ever have one car available, and it never gets anywhere in time to be useful.
• Why do people try to insist that Australia is an accepting country? It’s full of fucking racists. I get called a terrorist and spat at by whites, and my wife gets abused and threatened by Africans.
• What the fuck am I meant to do? Arm myself? Then if I hurt someone in self-defence, I’ll be the one who’s charged. But I swear if an African messes with me in the slightest, I’ll smash them so bad they’ll have the scars for life, and I’ll tell them that if they mess with me again, I won’t just flatten them – I’ll rape their sister, too.

Fucking hell I’m angry.

Sorry for the profanities and the out of character rant. I’m really not happy right now. I don’t really intend to assault or rape anyone. But if someone did attack me on the street, I would fight back, and I’m strong and fast enough to do a lot of damage. I don’t look for trouble, but if you mess with me, I’ll definitely dish it out.

It’s a pretty big change of direction from what I’ve done in the past: I went to uni to study something I knew I could do (electrical) and worked in an area that I knew I was good at (software). Now I’m studying something that I think I would enjoy doing. I’m doing an advanced diploma in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). I’m also studying by correspondence with a private education provider. Wix and Rusty, back in high school when you told me I should be a teacher, I never thought it might actually be possible.

Oh, and I have two pieces of advice for anyone considering studying. First of all, paying full fees is a good incentive to do well, because you want to get something for your money. Secondly, this something I came up with, but it’s too cool not to quote: “three things are needed for study: time, space and a brain. If you don’t have the time, make the time; if you don’t have the space, make the space; if you don’t have a brain, go for a surf!”

Getting the top off the case was easy: just three screws on the back and one on each side. And then came the first surprise: the thing was actually designed to be easy to service! There in front of me were the four circuit boards and drive mechanism. The boards all had component overlays with marked values. The connections between boards were all labelled. The mechanism was plainly exposed. Now this shouldn’t be a surprise – it would be nice if all DVD players were made like this. But in this age of disposable everything, a lot of equipment isn’t made to be fixed (Sony and Pioneer, I’m looking at you).

The first job was to get the two discs out. I removed the four screws holding the mechanism in place, but it was still being held in by the front panel. I didn’t want to unplug any cables or take the front panel off if I could avoid it, having had bad experiences in the past. But there was enough play in it to tilt the mechanism up, so I could push the tray out and slide the discs out. With the discs out, I was pleased to see that the lens didn’t appear to be scratched.

With the discs out, I crossed my fingers and powered it up (these DVD players have a guard over the laser, so there’s no interlock to defeat before you can get it to power up with the case off). But no joy. Still no video out, no display on the front panel and the motors just kept whirring.

This didn’t look good. I’d have to get the mechanism out to take a closer look, and that meant removing the front panel. There was one cable from the front panel to the display controller board. That was easy. The panel was held on with seven clips (three underneath, one on each side, and two on top holding it to the mechanism). I kept waiting for that sickening breaking sound as I removed each clip, but it never came. I had the front panel in my hand and nothing was broken! Now I could easily disconnect the two cables that go to the mechanism (one to the laser assembly and one to the loading mechanism), and lift the mechanism out.

Now I could see what had happened clearly: the tray was in the closed position (pushed in), but the rest of the mechanism was in the open position (laser head and drive motor dropped, tray cam out). This meant that the tray motor could spin all it liked, but the tray wasn’t going to move because the rack wasn’t contacting the sprocket. I could pull the tray out and push the actuator so that it could pull the tray in when I powered it up again.

So I screwed the mechanism back in, clipped the front panel back on, connected the three cables and held my breath as I powered it up. Yes! It pulled the tray in, the mechanism moved to the closed position, and it started spinning and focusing! Victory was mine! To make sure there wasn’t another problem lurking, I connected it to a TV and played a disc. Everything was fine, so I put the top case on, and congratulated myself on a job well done.

At the end of it, I had a sense of satisfaction, and my sister-in-law had a working DVD player instead of a lounge room decoration. But I couldn’t have helped thinking about what could have happened if I didn’t fix it. She could have taken it to the service centre; that would have cost her $45 for establishing the job and $45 for an hour (or part thereof) of the serviceman’s time – a total of $90. Considering that minimum cost (not to mention the possibility that it could cost a lot more), she probably would’ve just gone and spent $120 or so on a new one and thrown that one in the bin.

It’s sad that we’ve come to the point where people really are often better off throwing things out than getting them fixed. It’s just so wasteful. It’s also ironic that this cheap DVD player that’s often more cost-effective to replace seemed to be designed to be as easy on the serviceman as possible, especially when some far more expensive ones seem to be designed to make the serviceman’s hair turn grey.

Incidentally, I’ve changed the look of the site a bit. I’m now using CSS to simulate the look of a frameset, so the sidebar scrolls independently of the content. The sidebar is automatically suppressed when printing, and the background of all the boxes is set to white, so I don’t need to create special printable versions of pages.

Oh, and the only browsers that seem to render the site properly are Firefox and Safari. Opera made it all look a bit weird, and I didn’t try Internet Explorer, but I don’t expect it would work.

In Leopard, Input Managers are no longer supported, and are severely restricted. Now I know why this is being done – there is great potential for Input Manager malware. Also, Input Managers were never suitable for system-wide input because they didn’t work with Carbon applications. But I’m sad to see them go. Mac-style Input Method components are a far less elegant way of performing the same task (albeit with far lower potential for evil), and the APIs Apple themselves use for writing new-style input methods still don’t seem to be documented on ADC.

The other thing that’s disappeared is NetInfo. It’s been replaced by Directory Services. I guess it’s time for us to learn to configure static hostname resolution, DHCP/BootP/NetBoot servers, unusual account settings, and all the rest of it all over again.

Now with WordPress 2.3, all that’s in the past. WordPress now seems to be able to do the right thing with text encodings. It’s just too bad the upgrade script can’t clean up the rot left from previous versions. After running the upgrade script, I found that every piece of Japanese text, every typographical quote, every accented character, in fact everything outside 7-bit ASCII, was horribly mangled. Now I had a number of options for going forward:

• Go back to a previous version of WordPress
• Leave it and hope no-one minds.
• Delete every post that got mangled.
• Manually fix every affected post.
• Come up with a l33t way to solve it without manual effort.

Now the first option would have been easy. I had a complete backup (like you should, too), and I could have rolled it back in a matter of minutes. But I like to be on the curve, and I like to have all the newest features, even if I never use them. Also, having the latest security updates is nice.

The second option wouldn’t fly, because even if the readers wouldn’t mind, I’d mind. The third option would probably mean deleting every post, since I’m in the habit of using typographical quotes, non-breaking spaces and dashes (as opposed to hyphens). Deleting all my posts after an upgrade would defeat the purpose of keeping a blog. The fourth option would be excessively time-consuming, and I’d have to play fill the blanks, which may not even be possible if important things were mangled.

So the only way to fix it would be to call on my inner geek. I had a quick look at the database contents in phpMyAdmin, and had a look at the database code in WordPress. I noted that the new tables created by WordPress 2.3 had the collation utf8_general_ci while the upgraded tables had the collation latin1_swedish_ci, and WordPress was asking MySQL to communicate in UTF-8. Armed with this, I downloaded a UTF-8 SQL dump of the database.

The rest of it was actually reasonably simple: I opened the SQL dump in TextWrangler, which correctly identified it as being UTF-8 with no “byte order mark”. I then found all references to the latin1 character set and replaced them with utf8. That would fix the issue with the upgraded tables having the wrong collation, but not the corrupted data.

So here’s the trick: you need to convert the UTF-8 representation of what was in in the database back to its old binary representation, and then interpret that as UTF-8. I tried to save the file as ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1), but TextWrangler complained about unmappable characters. It turns out that MySQL’s latin1 is actually Windows Latin 1 (code page 1252). So I saved the file in this encoding, and then told TextWrangler to reinterpret it as UTF-8. It all went smoothly, and I had my data back! I could play the SQL dump back on the server, and everything is as it should be.

So what are the morals of the story?

• Always keep backups – particularly when you plan to do something drastic like an upgrade. Even though I didn’t actually need the backup this time, it was comforting to know it was there.
• Don’t trust upgrade/migration scripts – always check the result to ensure it’s actually what you want.
• Store data in appropriate formats – hacks will always come back and bite you. I shouldn’t have been using WordPress when I knew it was doing the wrong thing with my data.
• When you’re writing a migration script, try to ensure that it actually works! Then you don’t risk infuriating and/or losing your users.

• I like having a mechanical keypad – say what you like, but you can’t use a virtual keypad without looking at it.
• I like being able to use Java MIDP applications.
• I can’t tolerate the lack of performance you get without 3G.

The iPhone isn’t a smartphone – it’s a feature phone. The defining feature of a smartphone is the ability to run user-installed applications, and the iPhone forbids that (it’s priced like a smartphone, though). Now if you want a smartphone, buy one – there’s no point buying an iPhone and trying to hack it. Apple doesn’t care about people who hack iPhones – they already have your money.

I have no issues with the price drop – that’s standard practice for mobile handsets. You make as much money as you can to begin with, and then lower the price to keep sales up. Everyone does it. If you complained about that, you’re a crybaby. What I really don’t like is the amount of crap coming from Jobs and the fanboys.

First of all, the argument that you’re better off without user-installed applications because they could bring down a mobile network. Well all I can say is that it would have to be a very flaky network for that to happen. We’ve had mobile applications for Java MIDP, Symbian, Windows Mobile and BREW for years and there hasn’t been any trouble. Mobile networks are designed so that a badly behaved device won’t bring them down, and mobile handsets are designed so that one bad application won’t bring them down. And if that was the real reason, the iPod Touch would allow you to install applications. No, the real reason is presumably due to the way Apple have got a deal where they get a cut of revenue from the mobile carriers – if you could install your own applications, it could erode this.

Next up, all the crap about why 3G isn’t any better. It’s true that early 3G handsets had poor battery life, but they’re much better now, and at least as good as EDGE handsets. But even if 3G really did give poor battery life, it would be worth it. The data rates and round trip times on 3G leave EDGE for dead. EDGE is a hack on top of a hack – GSM wasn’t designed to provide packet-switched data. Also, voice call quality is far better on 3G. It sounds clearer, and sounds great up until the point where it drops out. Contrast this with GSM where the conversation starts to break up and get noisy long before you lose the connection. And last but not least, you can’t roam in Japan without 3G.

The very aggressive SIM locking is a bit of an interesting issue. Now the reason for it is obvious – Apple gets a cut of the revenue from the carrier, so they want you to stay. None of the other handset manufacturers have deals like this, so they don’t care anywhere near as much about whether you can unlock your handset. You may be able to get away with this practice in the US, but EU regulations clearly state that carriers must allow customers to buy their way out of contracts and unlock their handsets if they do. If they’re perfectly fair and balanced, they will enforce this, and compel Apple to provide a means of unlocking iPhones. Let’s hope they don’t have to be dragged through the courts first.

Last of all, there are ringtones. I do have a variety of ringtones on my handset. I assign different tones to different contacts, so I can tell who’s calling immediately (although I have it set to vibrate only most of the time, anyway). I didn’t pay for any of my ringtones. My handset will accept any AAC, MP3 or MIDI file as a ringtone. Assuming I am not violating copyright by possessing the files to begin with, I am entitled to use them as ringtones. I have no idea how anyone can say that iPhone ringtones are a good deal: paying for a song twice or more so you can hear it when someone calls is just stupid.

After twenty-five minutes of waiting, we asked a waitress how our meals were coming along. She went off to the kitchen, and came back to tell us, apologetically, that whoever took our order didn’t put it in properly, so our meals weren’t being cooked at all. Now that’s pretty poor service, so we decided we’d go somewhere else.

But before we left, I thought I’d let the manager know that I wasn’t happy. And his response? No apology; no offer to make it up to us; just a justification. If he’d been nice about it, I might have forgotten the incident and come back next time I feel like pizza. But that just goes to show how little regard he has for his customers. Well, I won’t be coming back. Next time I want La Porchetta, I’ll go to Braybrook or North Melbourne. I’ll also go out of my way to let other people know, and encourage them to take their business elsewhere.

(Oh, and we ended up eating at the Pancake Parlour – the main/dessert/wine dinner package was quite good value, not to mention delicious, and the service was a lot better.)

Take its text rendering, for example. Since the primary purpose of a web browser is to get text on the screen, you’d think they’d have that right. But no, apparently version 2.0 is still too early to expect decent text rendering. Compare these two snaps:

Firefox	Safari

How has Firefox managed to screw up the fixed-pitch text so badly? It’s just plain illegible! I have absolutely know idea, but however they really should have fixed this kind of thing before version 1.0 – not left it in at 2.0. How about italic text. Maybe they could get that right:

Firefox	Safari

Once again, Safari has rendered it beautifully, but Firefox looks like it’s using a synthetic oblique style, the way System 6 used to when you didn’t have an italic version of the font available – it’s most noticeable in the capital S. And then when you select the text, some of the last italic letter gets cut off. Come on, this is pretty basic stuff, guys!

On the topic of selection, Firefox won’t use Mac conventions in handling double-click and drag. It’s supposed to select whole words, but Firefox selects just one whole word. The same goes for triple-click and drag for lines. (Yes, I know Safari’s selection behaviour isn’t quite standard, and there’s no excuse for that, either.) And speaking of things being non-standard, why can’t Firefox use standard OS widgets? For example, the drop-down menus from items on the bookmark bar don’t respond to clicks in the same way as regular menus (items with submenus, in particular). The controls on forms just look like horrible Windows wannabes:

Firefox	Safari

Safari is more usable, too. In Firefox’s bookmarks window, why can’t I drag object from the tree view in the left-hand pane? Why can’t I rename or edit a link in-place, rather than clicking the Properties or Rename button? Speaking of which, why are there two buttons, when both of them bring up exactly the same sheet, with exactly the same text field selected? And on the topic of bookmarks, when I try to drag the URL to the bookmarks bar, Firefox puts a tooltip in the way to thwart my efforts:

When you have lots of tabs on the same site, Safari cuts off any common prefix it can find in the titles, so you have more chance of knowing which is which:

Firefox
Safari

And on top of this, there are the small things. Like ripping a YouTube video, for example – in Safari, you can easily find it in the activity window, and hold option and double-click. Firefox won’t use the system-wide spelling dictionaries. Firefox takes longer to launch.

So if I hate it, why do I use it? First of all, on Linux and Windows there’s no meaningful competition. On the Mac, Safari has three flaws that are too bad to live with: it can’t deal with table cells spanning multiple rows in XHTML (although it can in regular HTML – this mystifies me), it doesn’t deal with character entities correctly in XHTML and it gives you the spinning pinwheel of death far too often.

• I think the new keyboard is just plain ugly, but that’s purely subjective. I think the PowerBook keyboard feels better than the MacBook keyboard, too, and would have preferred a desktop keyboard based on that.
• The wireless version is obviously designed for using on your lap, rather than on a desk. The lack of a numeric keypad allows you to have it both physically and logically centred on your lap.
• Dashboard functions/exposé on the left are interesting – here’s my theory: on a PowerBook, it makes sense to have it on the right, since you need your left hand to get to the fn key while you hit the F9/F10/F11 key with your right hand (otherwise you get keyboard illumination control); however, on the desktop keyboard, you need to use your right hand to get the fn key, so it makes sense to have the multiplexed F-keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard.
• I was sad to see the help key fall into disuse, and I’m sad to see it ultimately disappear.
• I won’t get one of these keyboards. I don’t like wireless input devices that need batteries (hence by Wacom Intuos3 with wireless power to the pen and hamster – it can’t be a mouse without a tail). I’m also very happy with my Sanwa IceKey keyboard, which has very nice notebook-like key mechanisms.

OK, that’s enough random garbage for today…

So what’s it like? It’s a comfortable car. You couldn’t describe it as exciting. My previous car was an Echo hatch. It was 400 kg lighter, and 30% less powerful, but you felt the road, and when you were doing 150 km/h, you really felt like it. In the Corolla, you can speed without noticing. You need to use the cruise control, or your speed just creeps up. The seats are comfortable, too. You have plenty of space in the front, and enough in the back. It’s a bigger, more serious car.

It’s all round better than the Echo – more power, more grip, more space, more features. I went for the Conquest, so it has a few nice bits. I like the fog lamps and the leather steering wheel. It’s nice being able to play MP3 CDs. The audio controls on the wheel aren’t that useful, or maybe I’m just not used to them yet. Being able to talk on the phone through the stereo is great. I don’t know how I got by without it.

I have mixed feelings about the instruments. It has classic dials in the traditional position. The Echo had a big, bright vacuum fluorescent display positioned higher and closer to the centre. I actually have to look down to see my speed in the Corolla, while in the Echo, it was easily visible. This makes it easier to speed without noticing. The fuel consumption meter is irritating, as it lets me know just how inefficient my driving is, but it’s nice to know. I like the outside thermometer – it’s another one of those nice things that isn’t particularly useful.

What annoys me? Most of all, the convex driver’s side mirror. You just can’t judge distances. Since they’ve removed the ashtray, there’s nowhere for me to put change for parking meters (I’m being silly, I know). The reversing sensors annoyed me, too, until I found out how to mute the beeper. Now I quite like them. I’m still getting used to the six speed transmission (I keep putting it into sixth when I want reverse), but that’s a problem on my part.

So, I’m loving my new car. I’ll probably get over it soon – maybe when they release the V6 all wheel drive model from Japan here…

Now you can clearly see that my position is at odds with the unions. They’re claiming that the federal government should do more to help Ford keep the Geelong engine plant in business. But I definitely don’t want the tax money that I pay going to prop up a poorly managed foreign company.

I don’t think the closure of the Geelong plant is indicative of the state of the automotive industry in Australia at large. Both Toyota and Holden seem to be doing fine. In fact, Toyota exports more than twice as many Australian-made cars as they sell in Australia, and within six months, Holden will be exporting more Australian-made cars than they sell here, too. Building engines in Australia seems to be viable, too. In fact, while the Holden Captiva’s body is made in Korea by Daewoo, it’s fitted with an engine built in Melbourne.

So what’s Ford’s problem? I think what we’re seeing here is indicative of the bigger problems Ford as a whole is facing – they’re losing market share and losing money. They’re strategy to get out of the hole seems to be to employ less people and build less cars – not attempt to regain the market share they’ve lost. When you squeeze, something has to give.

In a way, I do feel sorry for Ford Australia. The biggest export market for Toyota and Holden is the Middle East. Unfortunately, Ford Australia have been blocked from selling a Falcon in that market, because Ford Detroit don’t want them competing with the Crown Victoria. The Territory was a successful attempt to boost local sales, but with rising petrol prices and Euro IV emission standards, it doesn’t look sustainable. They probably could develop better engines that are Euro IV compliant if given the R&D funding, but the decision probably comes from much higher up. The hard workers at the bottom pay for the mistakes of the fat cats at the top.

Will Ford bail out of Australia entirely? I doubt it. They have a strong loyalist following. But if they want to remain successful in any sense of the word, they need to make some major changes to the way they operate. In the end, saving Ford is Ford’s responsibility.

A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs.

Now Sullivan has decided that this means the battery becomes completely unusable after 400 cycles, and written a whole article about it. So yes, he’s guilty of spreading FUD, and I guess you can call him a jackass for that.

But Gruber has gone to the opposite extreme. Notice the use of “properly maintained,” “designed to” and “up to” in that quote. Gruber seems to think that this means the iPhone battery will hold 80% of its original capacity after 400 cycles. It doesn’t say that at all. It also doesn’t say how much of the 80% capacity that’s retained might actually be usable. Remember, too, that because we carry our phones around with us, we just charge them when we can. None of us are really in a position to “properly maintain” their batteries. In this case, it would appear that Gruber is spreading fanboyism.

Is the built-in battery really such a big deal? To me it is. I like to be able to carry a fully charged spare battery and swap it in. I wouldn’t be able to do that with an iPhone. But it’s a well-known fact that iPhone batteries are non-removable, and the performance figures and price don’t really look that much worse than the competition. So for people all the people who only use one phone battery anyway (I imagine this is the majority case), it probably isn’t an issue.

While I’m on the topic, I’ll put in a plug for my hosting provider Selpaw Services in Perth. Their support is always speedy and first-rate. Thanks for everything, Luke.

Planning

You can easily plan for localisation. Maybe you have a list of rules or guidelines something like this:

• Externalise all text and images that are visible to the user
• Don’t depend on word order or grammar
• Leave 30% to 50% of the space empty to allow text to grow
• Never perform lossy text encoding conversions

The trouble is, people won’t follow them, and you won’t find out until it’s too late, and the release is slipping. The dialog with barely enough space for the English text, the place where “…file i of n…” is composed by concatenation, the conversion to some ANSI code page for processing, the attempt to pluralise something by adding an “s”…

You must factor in time for dealing with this kind of thing in your release schedule. No set of rules ever works. Fixing things at the end seems to be an inevitability.

Translation

Translation is definitely tricky. Ideally the translator should be fluent in the source language, fluent in the destination languages, familiar with the relevant jargon and familiar with the product being localised. Realistically, this just won’t happen. You might get two out of four, or three out of four if you’re really lucky.

Reviewing translations is a particularly painful process. You might have two hundred translated sentences to review, and there might be less than five bad ones in there, but you still have to check more than a hundred and ninety good ones while finding the bad ones. And bad translations are by no means simple. The fall into a number of categories that are quite different:

Garbage in, garbage out

Sometimes you wonder how the original text got into the product at all. If you give your translators garbage to work with, as a general rule, you’ll get garbage back.

Terminology

Real-world example: think about the English words “computer”, “machine” and “device”. These words are often interchanged, but there are places where only one will do. The situation is similar in German with “Computer”, “Rechner” and “Geräte”, but you can’t do a one-to-one mapping with the English.

Lack of context

A translation may look perfectly good at face value, but actually be useless because of the situation in which the text is used. These aren’t usually the translators’ fault — they often don’t know the product well enough to get these things. Catching these is one of the most important parts of the review process.

Literal translations

We all know about this kind of thing. Sometimes the literal meaning is not the intended meaning. This is another thing you often can’t blame the translators for.

Just plain bad

Sometimes you get translations that are just obviously wrong. You try, but you can’t understand how they came up with it.

Catching any of this requires a good review process. Of course, the requirements for the reviewer are similar to the requirements for the translators, and such people are hard to find. It’s also rough because you’re usually reviewing the text in some kind of resource file, so you have to use your knowledge of the product and imagination to picture it in context. Not to mention that looking at string tables all day is boring and repetitive, which in itself can lead to slip-ups.

Testing

Once you think it’s all there, you need to test it. This should be done by a native speaker of the destination language, and preferable one who isn’t particularly familiar with the product — you don’t want them to fly on memory and not actually read what they see.

But at the same time, you need the test to provide maximal coverage. Every possible UI, error condition, generated output and log message should be tested, to ensure that they make sense in context.

Is this possible? Maybe, but it isn’t likely to happen. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, though. You want to ship a product the feels “natural”, “comfortable” and “right”.

End users

What happens if you ship a product that isn’t localised perfectly? It depends on the nature of the imperfection.

Something like lossy text encoding kills you. It makes the product useless for all practical purposes. At the other end of the spectrum, a few less-than-perfect translations are probably just going to make people smile.

In the middle of the scale, there are things like text that doesn’t quite fit, and UI elements that aren’t positioned properly. These will make a product feel unprofessional or annoying.

So how long will it take? Is it worth the risk? How big is the potential market? All big questions without simple answers.

But besides the obvious irony, does anyone else see the glaring double standard that’s applied? It’s OK for all the gangsta rappers to talk like this, but as soon as a white shock jock says it, then it’s racist and degrading to women. Or should we look at it another way. Is this a different kind of racism at work? Is it OK for black guys to call women hos, because we know all black guys are a bunch of dirty bastards, anyway, but higher standards apply to decent white guys? Either way, something’s seriously wrong.

Is it OK to call women hos? How would you like it if someone called your sister (substitute mother, daughter or girlfriend if that works better for you) a whore? I wouldn’t refer to women as hos. But then I do know people who address each other as “гадна пичка” in a perfectly friendly manner (if you don’t know what that means, ask a Serb or Croat – suffice to say it doesn’t sound nice).

Image

I regularly read complaints about negative images of black people being presented in the media. I regularly see negative images of black people presented in the media. But who’s presenting these images? For the most part, it’s black people. You can’t be a rapper if you aren’t a gangsta. The bad boy image makes you cool. Before blaming the white boys for negative stereotypes, go and have a word with Fifty Cent, Snoop Doggy Dogg and the rest of them. They aren’t doing you any favours.

The “N” Word

I’m half wog, half curry and I act, for the most part, like a ricer. Oh yes, and I’m proud of it. Wouldn’t have it any other way. So why is it so bad when white people say nigger? I mean black people call each other nigger all the time. Even worse, black people call white people crackers, and that’s supposed to be OK. I say nigger occasionally, and mean no harm by it. I’ll keep saying nigger until African-Americans stop saying nigger and cracker. Fair?

In Summary

In the words of a very famous African American (who I can’t call black, because he isn’t any more):

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

Ten Canoes is a dramatisation of a native Australian folk story/legend or whatever you want to call it. It’s slow paced, interesting and humorous at times. It opens a window on the indigenous culture and way of life in what’s now the Northern Territory. On top of that, it’s well produced, with good locations, acting and camerawork.

So if you’ve got the time, and you want to watch something slow, rent a copy of it. You won’t be disappointed.

Playing it now, I like it more than ever. The game is a true work of art. It doesn’t have high-definition video, it doesn’t have three dimensional graphics, it doesn’t even have stereo sound, and yet it still provides a better experience than many of today’s latest and greatest. The music is creepy, and the graphics have a superbly implemented Gothic theme. You shiver playing this thing.

Back when hardware was limited, the game developers put more effort into artistry. There were about 80,000 pixels on the screen, and they made every one of them count. They made sure everything fit together, and provided the gamer with a true experience. Now it seems they just try to blow the gamer away with big, flashy graphics and little or no substance.

What happened to the people who developed games twenty years ago? Did they become corrupted by having access to more powerful hardware? Were they replaced with a younger generation that doesn’t understand? I want them back! I want to see what real games would be like with today’s hardware.

Suppose I’m a bot herder (I hope it’s obvious that this is purely hypothetical). I unleash malware that takes over computers and “calls home,” allowing me to send spam for my paying clients. Since the number of people who read spam is very low, and the number of people who buy products advertised in spam is even lower, I need to send huge volumes of spam to make my services worthwhile for my clients. And sending lots of spam requires lots of compromised computers.

As software vendors patch vulnerabilities in their software, I have to find new vulnerabilities and write new malware to exploit them. This requires considerable effort on my part, and takes away from time I could spend doing things I enjoy. Also, as more users become more security-conscious, there are less machines left open to attack.

Suppose for a moment Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are all equally exploitable, and writing a piece of malware for each takes the same amount of time. What am I going to do? Am I going to write three sets of malware to attack the three platforms, or will I pick one to concentrate on?

Of course, the answer depends on market share. The more even the market share, the more likely I would be to write malware for multiple platforms. Also, it’s worth thinking about where the machines are primarily used.

Linux is used primarily in server and professional environments. Machines that are critical for business operations run by tech-savy operators means the machines are more likely to be secured properly and suspicious software will be removed promptly. So scratch Linux. I want to target home users with DSL or cable internet.

So I’m left with a choice of targeting Windows or OS X. What do I do? I look at market share. I know these figures are probably wrong, but suppose OS X runs on 5% of my target machines and Windows runs on 90%. What am I going to target?

The answer should be obvious. I’ll target Windows. I could target OS X as well, but then I’d be spending twice as much time writing malware for less than 6% more compromised machines to send spam from. It just doesn’t make business sense.

First of all, the bad:

• Intel GMA950 graphics chip – this gives me all kinds of trouble with external monitors. After using iMovie, it won’t detect external monitors until I restart. After waking from display sleep, external DVI monitors can lose synchronisation with the video signal and need to be disconnected and reconnected (this messes up window positions). The performance isn’t bad, though.
• Reflections off the glossy screen – when that happens, it ranges from really distracting to just plain unusable. Matte screens are never that bad. Sure, it looks great when the light is OK, but it’s all or nothing.
• No internal modem – hey, people still like to get faxes, so I want to be able to send them. Sure, the USB modem is funky, but it’s one more thing to buy and carry around.
• Only FireWire 400 (IEEE1394a) – if you’re only giving us one FireWire port, can’t you make it a fast one? We can always use adaptors for slower devices.
• MDVI video output – this wouldn’t be a problem if they included adaptors, but they expect me to go and spend another $100 or so to be able to plug in to external monitors and TVs.
• No 802.11a – like it or not, Steve, 802.11a is far more efficient than 802.11g. I know the number is the same (54 Mb/s for both), but there’s a lot more to it than that.
• Temperature – this thing gets a lot hotter than my wife’s old iBook G3.
• Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” – Spotlight is useless, Dashboard is a waste of memory, the font rendering is nowhere near as good as Panther and the input menu behaviour is really weird. How does it order the items in the menu, and why does Kotoeri keep deciding to change the underlying keyboard layout for kana input mode? I liked old, mbox-based Mail.app with the mailbox drawer, too.
• Apple Remote – it’s a useless piece of junk. Why couldn’t they include some video adaptors or a modem instead?

And to balance that, all the really good things:

• The case – I like not having a latch (like the original iBook), the keyboard is far better than the iBook keyboard, it’s small and light and it looks great.
• MagSafe power connector – why didn’t anyone think of this before? The is one of the best things about the new Apple notebooks.
• The glossy screen – white on black text in terminal windows is a thing of beauty and arcade games in SDLMAME look so good! The brightness and contrast are excellent. Too bad about the reflections, though.
• Dual CPU cores – it’s great to have the system loaded down and still have a really responsive UI. Two physical CPU cores really helps with that.
• Battery life – it’s very good if you aren’t doing anything too heavy. But they’ve jammed a pretty big battery in to get there.
• Gigabit Ethernet – it’s about time that was standard on low-end machines.
• Video spanning – fixing another silly limitation on the iBooks. Spanning is far more useful than mirroring most of the time.
• The video camera – at first I couldn’t get excited about this, after all I can make video calls on my mobile phone, but 3G coverage isn’t available everywhere, so it’s occasionally useful.
• Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” – yes, it makes both lists. Xcode just keeps getting better, Rosetta is brilliant, Tiger is faster than Panther overall, you don’t notice that this is the first release on completely different hardware, Jabber in iChat let me get rid of another IM program and there are some very nice additions like the ability to re-map modifier keys without hacks.

Now before I say anything else, I just have to say that if you develop for OS X and you haven’t used Shark, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s performance profiling how it should be done: simple to use and easy to understand the output. Any non-trivial application could do with optimisation. Even if CPUs are fast enough to run slow code at acceptable speeds, users appreciate snappy applications. And what’s to say they don’t want to use spare cycles for something else? I’m compiling SDLMAME in the background while I blog, for example. And CPUs use less power when idle, so notebook batteries last longer with more optimised applications.

Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand, using Shark was a very interesting experience. I was quite surprised at some of my findings.

First of all, on the topic of libxml2 (the Gnome XML library). Now libxml2 is really cool. It can read an entire XML file into a friendly structure that you can walk forwards and backwards, and edit and even write out as an XML file again. It also validates the document as it goes. I wasn’t using it for any of these reasons, though. I was using it because it’s included with OS X so I could conveniently dynamically link to it. But libxml2 was turning out to a major performance bottleneck in my application. The interesting thing was it was taking about twice as long to deallocate an XML document structure as it took to pare the 24 MB XML file in the first place!

Now my first thought was something along the lines of, “Gee, garbage collection really is a good idea!” If you think about it, garbage collection would let you completely side-step the deallocation step: when the heap is swapped, there are no references so the objects aren’t copied. Using a custom allocator in libxml2 could solve the problem, too. But I side-stepped the issue in a different way: I switched to Expat which doesn’t build a structure from the document to begin with. The trouble with that is my application has now grown by a few hundred kilobytes because of the statically linked XML parsing code.

The second think is that Core Foundation is considerably faster than Cocoa when it should be doing the same thing. In critical areas, I could get a speed gain of twenty to fifty percent by casting my Cocoa collection objects to Core Foundation objects and calling the C APIs.

So where’s the catch? Core Foundation is less forgiving than Cocoa. For example, if you try to get an value from a nil dictionary object with Cocoa, you just get nil. Core Foundation will crash. Core Foundation also has no concept of autorelease pools (but that won’t stop you from casting a CFTypeRef to id and autoreleasing it).

All in all, I can’t recommend performance profiling enough. It’s always interesting, and often surprising. And admit it, everyone loves trying to make stuff go faster