Technophile Monkey

Ich bin zwar Schweizerdeutsch- und Alemannisch-Verteidiger, aber es gibt da schon Grenzen. Helvetismen im Schriftdeutsch einzubauen, das ist herzig. Aber manche Auswüchse aus der Mundart sind nur falsch.

Kürzlich in einem Forum gelesen: “[...] ich war überhaupt nicht überzogen [...]“. Das scheint aus der Zürcher (?) Mundart zu kommen, wo viele Leute “ich bin nöd überzoge gsi” sagen würden. Vielleicht liege ich falsch, aber im Khûrertütsch sind wir näher am Hochdeutschen: “i bin nit überzügt gsi”. “Überzoga”, das gibts dort nur im Konditorei-Jargon, obwohl man da wohl auch eher “mit XYZ-überzug” sagen würde statt den Passiv zu bilden.

Deshalb zum Merken: Überzogen ist man höchstens mit Schokolade, und wenn das bei einer geneigten Leserin einmal der Fall sein sollte, bitte unbedingt anrufen, ich kann da helfen. Ansonsten ist man überzeugt von etwas.

Everyone has pet peeves. Mine often have to do with language. Let’s formulate rules about that!

Rule #1 of not making yourself look like a complete fool: If you have to postfix each and every one of your sentences with “lol”, at least insert a comma in the appropriate location.

Another huge disappointment from the US Patent and Trademark Office: They let Microsoft patent a feature that has been part of UNIX systems for almost 30 years (Original source: Groklaw). sudo allows you to execute a program with the privileges of the superuser (root, admin etc.). Also, remember that su (e.g. via su -c) has this functionality built in as well, just without the beautiful configuration options.

This should once again demonstrate why software patents are a dangerous, stupid thing.

I use a bunch of Google services, but what if the whole thing comes crashing down and I lose my data? That’s why I back up everything I can back up. I have scripts to automatically pull my calendar data out of Google and stick it in my incremental backup, I’ve set up mail systems that route my mail so that I always have a local copy of whatever has gone through Google and I even back up my RSS reader subscriptions.

Here’s a small thought, though: If Google offered a guaranteed service, where they would be required to provide a certain level of safety for my data, I’d pay something for that. Maybe USD 100/year would be the sweet spot.

They offer similar things for corporate customers where e.g. Google Apps (and associated calendar and mail functions) cost USD 50/year per person, but I’d like this sort of thing for private users.

I just heard Brad McQuaid’s voice for the first time in the Vanguard Director’s Cut video. Wow, he has a slow and unexcited way of talking. Sounds just like Strong Sad. Now I know why Brad’s games all have such slow player advancement

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.

I realize it’s a tough world for a company coming from a place with a binary understanding of languages (“English” and “Foreign”), but this has nothing to do with cultural differences. It’s about understanding web technology. Or your users, for that matter.

When you visit most of Google’s services, their interface will change its language based on Google’s guess of where you are. If you’re a businessguy travelling in Korea and want to access your e-mail via the web, even from your own computer in the hotel, you’re in for a fantastic learning experience. Puzzle for hours over the interface, wondering whether that button says “Delete” or “Squid sandwich”. Marvel at the new Arabic positioning of interface elements. Get ready to learn German even though it appears nowhere in your browser’s accept-languages list. Millions of people already speak German, might as well catch up to see what all the hype is about. And when you’re subscribed to a Swedish company’s ADSL service (like I was), Google cheerfully serves results in Swedish. Men det är inte so god för de som talar inte svensk.

Google seems to geotarget languages. They try to guess your IP’s location, then serve you some language that they pick from a conveniently located black top hat like the struggling little bunny it is. Living in a country with four official languages, Google’s behavior becomes especially rude. Can they tell whether my IP is from Chur or from Domat/Ems, two towns only a few kilometers apart but with different languages? What about bilingual places such as Biel/Bienne? Oh, that’s right, languages are binary, so that situation would never come up.

Google, here’s an idea. What if the user told you what language they want to accept? There could be, say, a field in the GET request header that tells your servers what languages the user wants to see. This would be a miraculous innovation if it hadn’t been in the HTTP spec since 1999. If you implemented that, perhaps your news groups wouldn’t be filling up with eight pages of user requests to turn off the darn geotargeting since at least September 2007. It would also help if Google services didn’t completely ignore the language settings in users’ accounts, as they do right now. I get German sometimes, then English, perhaps this is a quantum situation and every time I am not googling for anything, my results turn Swahili.

If you’ve reached this page wondering how you do change your language settings for Google’s services, here’s a quote directly from the horse. Err, I mean Graham:

That preference page actually just sets a cookie — language
preference isn’t stored permanently in a database or anything. If
there’s no cookie set, we’ll go by your browser’s language
preferences, which is probably what’s happening for you.

So if you want to get around this, you can do one of the following:

• Set Firefox to not automatically delete cookies on shut down.
• Change your browser’s language preference to English.
• Bookmark http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en and use that link
  for accessing Reader. (The “hl=en” forces it into English, regardless
  of any other settings.)

-Graham

Jumping through hoops? It’s the new web experience. Trouble with this approach is, there still seems to be some geotargeting involved, so if you forget accessing the services via hl=en, you might still end up googling in Sanskrit from time to time.

Now is the time to download stuff that comes with price tags in US Dollars. Grab games off Steam (if you can agree to their odd privacy statement), buy e-books from fantastic publisher Pragmatic Programmers or get music from CD Baby or Magnatune.

Because these things are all downloadble, you won’t be hurting the environment (much) with your imports.

PC games on Steam are 30% to 50% cheaper than in Swiss stores since the USD weakened so much. And the store-bought ones have come down about 10% in general over the course of the last two years anyhow. Yay for downloads!

Because every respectable piece of gaming media calls Bioshock “the game that brings gaming back to its old glory” (and other such niceties), I decided to try out the demo. A few minutes into the game, I could see what all the fuss was about. The atmosphere is truly breathtaking and unique, and I hadn’t felt this urge to uncover something, something that feels substantial, since Half-Life came along.

A few more minutes into the game, SPOILER ALERT one of the splicers guts someone with something that looks like a pair of large fishhooks or scythes. The guy screams and drops a few vital organs. I didn’t think much of that, since I’ve seen worse in other games and this one is quite definitely marked “mature”. However, my girlfriend left the room at that point. And she wasn’t even watching, she was just listening.

Now this is something most gamers might never notice, but the screams (at least in Bioshock) are frighteningly realistic. Stomach-churningly so, for someone who has actually heard actual humans actually scream with pain before. And that’s the girlfriend connection — she is in the unfortunate position that she hears that sort of thing from time to time due to her job in a hospital.

So now, at least with Bioshock, but probably before, we have reached the point of realism in gaming where the screams of game characters can get you to the edge of vomiting. Just by being realistic! And all the time, this went past me like so much smoke. I didn’t notice anything special about it; previous games have had similar screaming, similar noises and nowadays they don’t even touch me anymore. I didn’t even think they sounded particularly realistic. Is all of this weird?

Should we ease off on that and go somewhere else? Would Bioshock’s intensity and atmosphere be possible without the death-screams, the violence etc.? It’s something I’ve been asking myself for quite a while: Is the violence necessary, the realism of it, in order to make a game work? Just after I gave up trying to find out, the question materializes again in my mind.

Every single day at the office, I hear people complain about their operating system. Most of the time, these comments are aimed at Windows. I’m not biased at all when I say this, it’s a simple fact that I can prove empirically. People complain that the system gets unbearably slow after a while, that their hard drive space disappears even though they’re not using it for anything, that the machine does things they don’t want it to do and that they’re not sure whether it’s some sort of malware doing this or whether it’s a malfunction of the system itself.

Very small thought: If people aren’t happy with their operating system, why don’t they switch to a different one? Why do they just complain day in and day out instead? Human nature?