We’re using diesel for our heating, and guess what… it costs now more than a euro a liter in Chile. We’re at 1.0175 a liter…
Esso is coming to our place to fill up the tank. 500-700 liters… pain in the wallet.
(Source: csmonitor.com)
This post is a bit of a rant… but hey, I’m pissed off…
An power outage is one of the most disturbing events you can get in a business, especially if your job is to create computer software. Here in Chile we have power outages about once every 4-8 weeks, often of a short duration, sometimes they take somewhat longer.
The problems with outages is they always come unexpected and always surprise you when it happens. Here we are well prepared for them, having an emergency backup to keep my PC, servers, modems, telephones and other critical devices running whenever there’s a problem. Still, when we do have an outage work stops immediately and the preparation for recovery begins immediately.
What do we do when there is a power outage?
The reasons we keep a few light circuits on is that we can easily see when the power comes back. (Hey, light’s back on!) Also, replacing a light bulb isn’t that big of an issue if the power company decides to put 500V on the lines for just a few seconds, etc.
Once we notice the power is back, there’s a 5 minute wait time before we turn on anything else. The reason for this is power gets interrupted (more often lately) after recovery… putting even more stress on everything. 5 minutes passes without problems? Good, time to start everything up again.
The recovery process (especially the computer stuff) takes all in all about 20 minutes. Servers are put back on, everything is checked, workstations are going back on and finally we do a few checks if everything is back up and running.
In total an outage of 5 minutes can cost us easily an hour of work. So the next time someone goes out here and crashes their car against a pole… Ah well, you’ll get the idea.
Translate a scientific problem in plain English -
This Stack Overflow question has an answer to put in a frame. The problem is about as complex as the solution, nevertheless this has been one of the best answers I have seen in a while…
[video]
[video]
Felix Baumgartner, Daredevil Skydiver Seeking Altitude Record, Makes 13-Mile Test Jump -
“Fearless Felix” Baumgartner has jumped 2,500 times from planes and helicopters, as well as some of the highest landmarks and skyscrapers on the planet. Now, he’s making a 13-mile test jump.
The jump lasted 3 mins and 33 seconds, (accourding to the austrian news source, not the linked article). A Dutch version of this story here.
Rubber Duck Problem Solving - By Jeff Atwood -
Jeff explains how to solve a problem by reformulating a question…
Microsoft is calling unwanted newsletters that you have subscribed to… “Graymail”. Right… Wasn’t “Graymail” something like blackmailing the government to evade prosecution? Silly that Microsoft’s marketing gurus overlooked that… or didn’t they?
In either case, I think that any newsletter that does not provide a one-click opt-out… is spam, simple. No matter what kind of tools your mail client provides, news that I’m not interested in should not get delivered into my inbox.
In all fairness, Microsoft does provide good spam filtering on my Office 365 hosted mail. Outlook does provide enough means to sort out mail when it arrives and so on and so forth. But keep it simple fellows… Unwanted mail is just spam, nothing else.
Microsoft is one of the few software companies to actually get localization of their software right. If you have an English version of your OS (i.e. Windows), you will get English installers, English speaking software basically everything else in English.
Several other companies simply don’t seem to get this. I live in Chile, so my location is set to Chile, the keyboard layout is US, the dates & times are in Chilean format and my webbrowser is set to the English language, because that’s what I prefer.
So I downloaded a piece of software and I get… everything in Spanish. Then I download the english version of the software, the installer is somehow still in … Spanish. Hello?
Living in Chile does not mean I want to have my PC talking Spanish to me!
Looking at this from a developer’s perspective:
using System;
using System.Globalization;
namespace LocalizationOneOnOne
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine("Current Culture: {0}",
CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Name);
Console.WriteLine("Current UI Culture: {0}",
CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.Name);
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
Guess what the output is…
Conclusion: Never use CurrentCulture for UI localization, it is simply not a good design practice. If someone installs an english version of Windows, your best bet is that they want the rest of the software in english as well.