Thursday, June 13, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Words of wisdom from Joachim Tuchel. Glorp expects your model to be internally consistent. I've had a number of questions from people who expect, when working with databases that it's enough to modify one side and then the database refreshing will take care of the other side. If you have a bi-directional relationship, and the two sides don't match, Glorp will complain when you try and write. Unfortunately, it complains when it gets down to the level of writing rows and sees that there are two different sources trying to write different values to the same field, which isn't always the most helpful in figuring out the original problem.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Internationalization, whether you want it or not...
This week I'm in Denmark, and noticing some interesting software behavior that I've also seen on some previous trips to places where English is not the native language. Software companies are slowly figuring out that not everyone speaks English, and adapting the software based on the location. But they can be a little over-broad in applying it.
For example, if I open a new window in Chrome and type a search into the taskbar, it by default searches on google.dk, giving me all the auxiliary text on the page in Danish. It does this on my computer, which has a locale setting that is not Danish, and even though I am both logged into my google account and signed into Chrome. If I click "Search" from the black bar at the top of the window it goes to the right place, but who actually does that instead of just opening a new tab and typing in the omnibox?
Oddly, this only happens on the Mac laptop, not on the Chromebook.
We also have Netflix, and as part of my determined attempt to stay awake until something like local bedtime I was watching it yesterday on the iPad. It warned me that some content might not be available, but generally worked well, but had decided that it needed to turn on Danish subtitles for me. Of course this a setting, and there's a button to change it in the upper right. I can't turn them off, but I have my choice of subtitles in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian Bokmål, or Swedish.
For example, if I open a new window in Chrome and type a search into the taskbar, it by default searches on google.dk, giving me all the auxiliary text on the page in Danish. It does this on my computer, which has a locale setting that is not Danish, and even though I am both logged into my google account and signed into Chrome. If I click "Search" from the black bar at the top of the window it goes to the right place, but who actually does that instead of just opening a new tab and typing in the omnibox?
Oddly, this only happens on the Mac laptop, not on the Chromebook.
We also have Netflix, and as part of my determined attempt to stay awake until something like local bedtime I was watching it yesterday on the iPad. It warned me that some content might not be available, but generally worked well, but had decided that it needed to turn on Danish subtitles for me. Of course this a setting, and there's a button to change it in the upper right. I can't turn them off, but I have my choice of subtitles in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian Bokmål, or Swedish.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Friday, November 2, 2012
Chromebook
Writing this on my new Chromebook, which I got yesterday. So still very early impressions at this point, but it seems pretty nice. It's light, but feel sturdy, and the display doesn't feel cramped - unlike the netbook. And it seems pretty decently responsive. Kirsten complains that the trackpad makes too much noise clicking, but she says the same about the MacBook Air. Clearly not a primary machine, but for the price it's quite remarkable, and seems like it'll be handy to have around. Now to figure out how useful it would be on a plane.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Life at Google
It's getting close to being two weeks at Google. First week was in Mountain View, this week in Seattle. Beginning to feel less lost, the people on the team seem great, the perks are pretty cool, and I actually wrote a little teensy bit of real Dart code that got integrated, even if it didn't actually do anything (yet).
Along with the technology learning curve, lots of fun paperwork to deal with. Here's a bit of trivia: Name the three places outside of the U.S. whose driver's license is accepted by Washington State as sufficient to get one of their drivers licenses without going through the whole testing process? Hint: Ontario is not one of them.
Starting to get the hang of Seattle a bit, though living (spouse-less and cat-less) in corporate housing until we get our house later this month. Tends to make one spend too much time at work, especially as there's free dinner at 6:30. This weekend I need to see if I can find a rec soccer league half as good as the one I left behind in Ottawa and try to get some exercise.
Along with the technology learning curve, lots of fun paperwork to deal with. Here's a bit of trivia: Name the three places outside of the U.S. whose driver's license is accepted by Washington State as sufficient to get one of their drivers licenses without going through the whole testing process? Hint: Ontario is not one of them.
Starting to get the hang of Seattle a bit, though living (spouse-less and cat-less) in corporate housing until we get our house later this month. Tends to make one spend too much time at work, especially as there's free dinner at 6:30. This weekend I need to see if I can find a rec soccer league half as good as the one I left behind in Ottawa and try to get some exercise.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
"Light Table" IDE
Chris Granger talks about the "Light Table" IDE prototype. It doesn't remind me of anything :-)
The core interesting idea is presenting code with the values replaced based on evaluation as you're coding. That's pretty neat, but it's not clear to me how that scales up when the list of things you're executing doesn't fit on the screen any more, or when you start having loops that call the same code many times. But interesting ideas.
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