Technophile Monkey

Jesus Christ, this is a tough one. Swiss-German is officially dying, and I want to do something against it, so I started translating our applications to Züritüütsch (Zürich-German). The trouble is that I don’t even know proper Züritüütsch to begin with, I grew up with Khûrertütsch. It’s tough, tough, tough.

If you have a good grasp of English and Züritüütsch, want to help me out? The project uses standard-issue gettext .po files, so you can use any of your translator tools. Heck, you can even just pencil your translations on a piece of toilet paper and mail them in.

Contact me and/or check out the source code if you’re interested. Also, if you know Bärndütsch or Bavarian, I’d be equally interested

Just look at the glorious aura of Swiss-German buttons:

Long live the dead and the dying (languages)!

There’s a little piece about Jim Keyzer — the bribed cop, over at Spectrial.

As you might remember, Warner Brothers basically bought police investigator Jim Keyzer in the investigation against The Pirate Bay some time ago. Now Jim Keyzer — the bribed cop — has disappeared! He didn’t show up in court. Better that way, he might have tarnished the entertainment industry’s image. Wouldn’t want to think of them as corrupt, would you?

The poor entertainment industry. Such righteous individuals.

For years, Microsoft’s abuse of their desktop web browser monopoly has caused no end of headaches for web designers/developers worldwide. Refusal to make MS Internet Explorer adhere to standards and deliberately introducing incompatibilities meant that anyone making a website faced a choice: Do it properly, or do it so that Internet Explorer can still display it.

The FSFE has joined the European Commission’s investigation on Microsoft’s browser abuse. They hope to create a similar situation as in the CIFS/SMB server market, where the Samba team and Microsoft engineers are finally allowed to exchange thoughts again, and where interoperability becomes possible. Previously, management had made it impossible for them to talk to each other and it took the European Commission to order Microsoft to play nice again.

It is possible for browser makers to adhere to the standards, which creates healthy competition. Look at Mozilla, Apple and Opera. Of course Microsoft wouldn’t want any of that, but after this investigation I hope it might be forced upon them.

Und noch etwas zur Sprachkultur: Das Wort “Ansprechspartner” gibt es nicht, trotzdem höre ich es immer öfter. Man findet es sogar schon in Schriftform. Wie die Pest geht das um.

Igitt. Da hat jemand sein Sprachgefühlt engeschläfert, mit dem Holzhammer. Der Gerichtsprozess ist der Prozess des Gerichts, deshalb heisst es nicht Gerichtprozess. Es ist aber nicht der Partner des Ansprechs. Ansprech klingt höchstens wie ein Nachname aus einem Buch von Philip K. Dick (so wie z.B. die Anteils).

Also: Geschlechtskrankheit, Untersuchungsbescheid, Verbindungsnachweis, Handelsbefugnis aber bitte nicht Ansprechspartner.

(This is another post about the decline of the Swiss-German language, so it won’t make much sense to translate this to English. But if you’re interested in what’s going on, drop a comment and I’ll give a summary )

Heute in 20 Minuten gelesen: Die UNESCO stuft Schweizerdeutsch von “nicht bedroht” neu als “unsicher” ein. Ich fühle mich bestätigt, denn ich motze ja schon lange über die schleichende Unterwanderung der Dialekte durch Germanismen. Das wundert ja auch nicht, wenn doch die Schweiz seine Dialekte freiwillig und schon im Kindergarten zerstört, z.B. indem sie Kindergartenlehrer dazu zwingt, mit den Kleinen Hochdeutsch zu sprechen.

20 Minuten zitiert ausserdem ein weiteres schönes Beispiel: Fernsehmoderatoren sagen germanisierte Dinge wie “insbsunderi” statt des schweizerdeutschen “bsunders”. Da fallen mir die Nasenhaare aus.

Wenn man sich den UNESCO Atlas der bedrohten Sprachen ansieht, ist die Schweiz damit die Heimat einer unsicheren (Schweizerdeutsch) und drei bedrohter Sprachen (Romanisch, Lombardisch und Francoprovençal).

Verlieren wir das Schweizerdeutsch, verlieren wir auch einen Teil unserer Identität. Schaut euch doch mal bei unserem Nachbarn im Norden um: Dialekt wird nur noch im Dorf gesprochen, gestandene Bayern säuseln zum besseren Verständnis in bühnenreifem Hochdeutsch vor sich hin statt mit fröhlich rollendem R und gutem Beispiel voranzuschreiten und halt auch einmal ein Wort zu benutzen, das ein Fischkopp vielleicht nicht kennt. Habt doch Mut zum Dialekt, dann ginge es dem Schweizerdeutsch vielleicht auch besser.

Dabei haben die Deutschen “nur” ihre Dialekte zu verlieren. Die Schweizer, die Westösterreicher und die Südostdeutschen verlieren eine richtige Sprache, das Allemannische.

Blinder Protektionismus ist sicherlich auch doof, aber ich fange einmal mit einem Projekt an, das ich schon lange starten wollte. Ich suche mir jemanden, der noch richtigen Zürcherdialekt spricht und übersetze die Applikationen der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste ins Züritüütsch. Wenigstens die, für die ich zuständig bin. Klar, das hat keinen praktischen Nutzen, aber vielleicht fällt den Leuten so auf, wie gleichgültig sie ihre Sprache opfern.

Ich würde ja lieber Khûrertütsch verwenden, aber erstens kommen die Applikationen ja aus einer Zürcher Hochschule und zweitens habe ich schon so lange keine richtiges Khûrertütsch mehr gehört, dass ich es weder richtig kann noch glaube, dass der Khûrer Wortschatz das Sterben der letzten Generation überlebt hat

Kann jemand hier Züritüütsch? Und vielleicht auch schon von gettext gehört? Das wäre die Idealkombination

Everyone’s favorite game develoepr 2D Boy have released World of Goo for Linux this weekend. It’s the most charming game EVAR, so I couldn’t help but buy it.

One interesting special feature that the Linux version has: You can use multiple mice at the same time, up to four players simultaneously! This is somewhat like the multi-pointer feature present in the Wii version, but out of all the PC versions (Mac, Windows, Linux), the Linux one is the only one to get this.

Great fun! Now let’s see more developers release native Linux versions. If a tiny company such as 2D Boy could do it, what’s stopping the big names?

Valve, the company behind the Steam game download system, recently forced people living roughly in European territory to pay in EUR. This is silly all on its own, as a bunch of countries in the European territory don’t use the Euro. What’s worse, Valve converted prices with an exchange rate of 1:1 against the USD (instead of 1 EUR = ~0.69 USD as they should have).

There has been a lot of unheard protest, and now an interesting new site is available that shows just how much Valve is overcharging European customers: Steam Repowered. The site gives you a direct comparison between European prices on Steam and prices in retail, saying that on average, Steam is now 42% more expensive than retail stores. You, as a European, pay more for less, and Steam Repowered shows how much of a rip-off Steam has become, in real numbers.

Brick and mortar games stores will be happy to hear. Not only are games cheaper there, you also get more: A physical disc, a box, extras like maps, perhaps a manual — it’s a better deal overall. With the inflated prices on Steam, you can even purchase the collector’s editions of most games and still pay less.

Another problem is that for Swiss, Norwegian, Danish people (etc.), who are not part of the Euro currency zone, prices are messed up even further! I want to pay in the weak US dollar, not in the strong EUR. CHF vs. USD is almost 1:1 sometimes, which would give me a USD 49 game for CHF 49, instead of the CHF 74 (!!!) it costs at the moment. I even pay less if I order a physical copy from Germany, a full CHF 20 less, with box, shipping, taxes, customs and all.

There are still game download services that possess the important property of “not being completely brainfucked”, such as Greenhouse and GOG.com. We need more of those, and Valve’s messup is a good window of opportunity for the competition.

I will be giving a short-ish (1 – 1.5 hours) presentation and a workshop about text-based gaming at the Open Saturday Switzerland this Saturday.

I’ve rambled on and on about this topic before, but I think it doesn’t convince anyone if it’s just given in text. Which is weird. So I’m going to give people a small intro into roleplaying game mechanics theory (it’s even more boring than it sounds!) and then foam out of my mouth in front of a 2 x 1.5 meter MUD client display.

There will be live workshops after the presentation where we sort of play a MUD together or drink mead from hollowed-out animal horns and yell “’tis so” and “for sooth” from time to time, like proper medieval dual-wielding rangers did.

If you want to witness any of that (or just have a beer on the house), come to the Silhquai 131, the rooms of the Vertiefung Mediale Künste of the Zürich University of the Arts in Zürich on Saturday, 14th of February. Doors open at 14h, presentations start at 15h and you can bring your own laptop and typing skills if you want to try the stuff.

The presentation is in Swiss-German unless the majority of the audience objects. All games shown are Free Software or at least free.

As the world has learned this week, Apple asked Google not to include multitouch functionality in their Android operating system (the OS that runs the Google/T-Mobile G1 mobile phone). And Google complied.

The problem is of course: Apple did not invent multitouch. People like Jeff Han have been working with multitouch long before, but the brain damaged US patent office granted Apple a patent on this technology.

Now Apple is threatening to kill, maim and destroy anyone who dares implement a technology that Apple hasn’t even developed in the first place. And multitouch is not the only thing Apple falsely claims ownership of.

This is no isolated incident. We are seeing such acts of patent aggression from IT companies everywhere in the world, but Apple and Microsoft are probably some of the worst offenders.

The software patent problem needs to be solved. It is developing into a serious hurdle for innovators. Instead of encouraging inventions and innovations, it makes sure that only those with a large array of IP lawyers can bring anything to market without being destroyed by companies claiming IP ownership. The real purpose of patents, to protect the rights of small inventors to an idea, to protect them from exploitation by aggressive companies, was completely lost.

One of the reasons for this is the brainless way that IT and technology patents are granted in the USA — many patents are simply allowed because the patent office employees lack the time to thoroughly research prior art. It’s well-known that the US Patent and Trademark Office is broken in terms of IT patents, now someone fix it. Oh, and let’s see a large enough company challenge Apple on multitouch and all the other ideas they’ve stolen, then patented, when implementing the iPhone.

It’s time someone spanked them around a bit.