Working on my first operations story, configuring new switches for the data center, and being really annoyed and amused by the amount of acronyms in the manual.
My favorite is:
GVRP,
- that’s GARP VLAN Registration Protocol
- and that is Generic Attribute Registration Protocol and Virtual Local Area Network
That makes a total of “Generic Attribute Registration Protocol Virtual Local Area Network Registration Protocol”. Wow.
We are using Groovy on Grails for an incubator project, which is incredibly refreshing! Groovy as a dynamic language with optional type annotations doesn’t quite rock my boat though. With static type checking the types you define are an essential element of design. I like to point out that Groovy’s creator wrote:
“I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I’d probably have never created Groovy.” >> more…
While improving our translation process we got some inconsistencies in arabian properties files. Below is a small example (1). Suddenly in the unicode escaped files parantheses balance was broken (2), while in the editor everything seemed to be ok (3).
How could this happen? There’s no voodoo going on, just bidi (bidirectional text) algorithm operating in the dark and someone editing the file without knowing about this algorithm. >> more…
Not everybody understands English and anyway for native speakers it’s much easier. conjectPM is available in 18 languages, however it wasn’t that easy to administer them, which resulted in our users not being fully satisfied:
- In some places we had a mix of native language and English
- Some translations didn’t match the context anymore
- Wrong country-specific mail addresses and telephone numbers showed up
- Special characters were displayed incorrectly
- New functionalities weren’t translated until weeks later… >> more…
