With all the techniques that we have at our disposal, with all the education that developers got, still we see websites that handle internationalization poorly. I noticed the problem recently on a minor website, but even Flickr and/or Yahoo got it badly wrong.
This August, as I was vacationing in Malta, I grabbed Guns, Germs & Steel at a bookstore in the airport. It is a fascinating book that explains how the European civilization basically ended up dominating the rest of the world.
After completing it, I dived into Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, another captivating essay that tells how some companies manage to reach a inflection point where they start making a lot more money than their competitors, and never go back to their previous mediocrity.
What is most intriguing to me is the parallel that can be drawn between each of these books, and the facilitating technique of the Five Whys.
One thing that we teach in Agile courses is estimating. One technique is taken from Steve McConnell and called Count, Compute, and Judge. The idea is that, to make an estimate, you have 3 options. First, if you can Count, do so (ie. do not do any estimate at all). Second, take a value that you know, then count it, then Compute the resulting value to obtain the estimate. Finally, if all else fails, use your Judgment. It is a good idea to mix compute & judge.In two recent instances, I have heard outrageous figures when talking with friends. One mentioned that “the average pregnancy age is 13 years old”. In a separate discussion, another asserted that “the price of baguette has increased 6-fold since the introduction of the euro”.
Obviously, in the context of this post, it sounds trivial that these sentences are nonsense. However, in the heat of the conversation, they can pass unnoticed. Both persons seemed actually convinced that they were true, and used them as proof to further the debate.
How often are we taking random figures at face value? (”we have estimated this project to cost this much”) We should always be at least critical.
The idea is to think of other things to judge the figure against (”the laws of economics would probably prevent the price of bread to increase so fast in such a short time”). Intuition helps, naturally.
“Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world” (Descartes). It seems that it is still not enough. Let’s keep in mind that others can be wrong, and that we ourselves can be wrong. Judging people and behavior is foolish, but judging data is not.
So, when hearing figures, always keep a critical mind, especially if this figure is used to take decisions. Conversely, do not show figures as hard facts. Be as honest as possible and make clear that “well, I heard this on the radio, but I might have misunderstood”. Giving a wide range of possible values helps too (”the most probable estimate is 1000 man-days, but plausible estimates range from 500 to 5000″). You’ll be helping others, and yourselves.
I’ve just learned that Telelogic, one of my former employers, is to be acquired by IBM.
From 1998 till early 2000, I used to work for Verilog, a French software company (I was based in the Dallas office) that was doing pretty well with its IDE targeted at the SDL world. One fine day of December 1999, I arrived in the office, only to learn that Telelogic, the other major player in SDL, had acquired us. Telelogic was no worse, nor better that Verilog (though certainly more commercially aggressive), but I needed a change and in April, I went back to Europe and joined Valtech (in London for a few years, then Paris).
When we were at Verilog, we used to worry about Telelogic (which we thought was using disloyal means to take business from us), and also, though less, about Rational (for its real-time software IDE), i-Logix, and a few others.
Well, Telelogic snapped Verilog, then i-Logix (among others). IBM acquired Rational (among many others), and now Telelogic.
It’s a strange feeling to hear about a company you used to work for. It’s a bit like hearing about long-lost high school friends: how did they do? and, inevitably, did I do any better?
Every now and then, I come across people that used to work for Telelogic, including the project manager of my current consulting gig at EDF, and Pascal Roques, a UML guru and a colleague at Valtech (the proverbial small world).
I just tried: it works reasonably well, though a bit slow (as one could expect).
More here.
Every once in a while, I stumble upon a new list of tips to hiring someone. Since I am actively involved in interviewing candidates technically, I always read them in detail.
If you don’t know them already, here they are for your reading pleasure.
The original briefcase-style bag that came with my laptop one year ago was finally so torn that I decided to buy me a new bag. My criteria were the following:
I discovered only yesterday about Pandora (yes, I know, I’m late; it’s being talked about since 2005), a really neat website that is able to play songs similar to those you suggest.
You suggest a song (or an artist); it figures out the characteristics of it (tone, rhythm, instruments, style) and plays automatically more like it. Later, you can tune the selection by approving or rejecting suggestions. It works really quite well. Well, they apparently have an army of 50 people analysis every single song with hundreds of criteria (!). A bit reminiscent of the beginnings of Yahoo!, though I doubt they will make it as big.
Give it a try with songs in the style of Brian Eno.
A BarCamp is taking place in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, near Paris, this WE. The topics include Web 2.0 (of course), as well as social networks and other things. As always, attendance is free, though participants are expected to contribute by coding, throwing ideas in the air, debating, etc. You could say it is rather geeky ;-). I notice Eric Mahé from Sun France among the attendees.
More details on BarCamps.
Register by editing the official wikipage.
A few month ago, free.fr, the second-largest ISP in France, stirred things a bit in the French server hosting arena when they introduced their debibox solution: a dedicated machine with unlimited bandwidth for 30 euros per month!
Just a few days ago, the response came from OVH, one of the largest hosting company in France (and a partner to free.fr through their FreeIX interconnection service). They now offer a similar machine (with the exception of RAM) for 20 euros per month! The amount of RAM in this one is 256M, while dedibox has 1G. But 256M would be more than enough for a personal or semi-professional usage, especially when using Linux (Windows 2003 is also available).
20 euros for your own machine! In the US, I couldn’t find any offer below 65$ / month. I admit I didn’t look very much, and the machines are usually more powerful. But where are the cheap options?
This is also a valid alternative to Amazon EC2 for cheap hosting.
I’m currently with Cécile in Bénin, where her parents have been living for a couple of years.
I’m seen relatively amazing things been shipped by people on the way to Cotonou. Here is a sample, apart from the usual huge crates, TV sets, etc:
I was definitely not blending in well with my trusty Karrimor.
I have just finished reading Freakonomics. It’s a great book, but it’s gone too fast! It took me about 3 days to complete it. Also, the authors are right to indicate early on that there is no real unifying topic. Maybe a longer discussion on how they obtained those data would have been useful.
Anyway, it just happens that I read recently about Mass Observation in the New Yorker. It strikes me that the data collected by MO is exactly the kind of data that Steven Levitt would use. I wonder if he has already consider it? Or maybe the data are simply not formalized enough to be useful.
I was using Blogger so far, but I have decided to move to WordPress, mostly because of the support for Categories (similar to tags).
I had to host WordPress on my site, which is unfortunate, as it means that it will take more work (and risk) to upgrade to newer versions in the future.
However, it feels much faster (probably because I host it directly, I guess) and easier to customize.
I always make a point of using an application or a website in English. This helps getting the “real” experience, as the developers intended it, and avoid crappy translations. I don’t go as far as changing the local settings of my machine, though I do remember one instance where a Java application running on a Swedish PC was failing, while it was working smoothly on British PCs (since the application was to be deployed only on British-based computers, it was not an issue, so we never looked into it).
Just today, my friend Guillaume Tardif was pulling his hair out. He was sending emails with text attachments, and those attachments would never appear in his email client, though they were perfectly visible in the email source.
However, those same emails displayed fine on my email client. And my email client is EXACTLY the same as his (it’s webmail, run by our ISP)!
Fortunately, I had the good luck of thinking about changing his language preferences from French to English, and voila, text attachments visible again!
I checked: there does not seem to be a bug for that recorded in IMP.
Seriously, when you hear about things like that… can you still afford *not* to use a piece of software in English?
Eventually, I logged a bug with free.fr (I cannot do that directly on bugs.horde.org, as I do not even know the version being used). We’ll see.
Update (05/07/06): Free.fr has now fixed the issue! Excellent responsiveness.
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