I’m strangely fascinated by inappropriate, colloquial error messages. Some software teams insist on smuggling them in despite what the user interface guidelines say about clear, useful error messages. Such is the case with the Google Chrome web browser and its “Aw, Snap” error message when a page crashes.

I had been seeing this message with inordinate frequency (3 guesses why) when I started to wonder how this translates into some of the other 50 languages that Chrome supports. I switched my environment’s language to ‘fr’ and saw what appeared to be Francophonic squealing:

My goodness, did they really task their translation team with finding a culturally accurate yet wince-inducing exclamation phrase for this screen in every supported language? Probably not, considering the en_US and en_GB phrases are the same (I’m assuming the phrase in question is an American expression but it could very well have crossed the pond by now). If it seems like I’m putting a lot of thought into this, imagine how much consideration various Google committees had to exert; Google is famous for not making moves unless the data says it’s okay (e.g., testing 41 shades of blue). I guess from that perspective, the translation team is lucky they didn’t get stuck with translating “Oh no this web page di’n’t just crash on you!”

While I’m fairly certain that “Aie aie aie” is not a literal translation for “aw, snap”, the following languages do feature literal translations (at least according to Google Translate): Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Korean, Slovenian, and Portuguese (Brazilian, while pt_PT translates to “Ah, balls!”). A number of other languages (like German, Spanish, and Croatian) feature translations that quite clearly seem to be “Oh no!”. Turkish’s exclamation is simply “Error” which might be the most appropriate of the bunch. Vietnamese’s phrase translates to “Sorry”, which is also reasonable.

In yet another in a long series of useless exercises, I have assembled a gallery of all the Google Chrome translations for “Aw, snap”. See what your favorite language uses for the message and whether in makes any sense (alphabetical by language code): Continue reading →

As with every summer since 2006, FFmpeg has been accepted as a mentor organization in Google’s Summer of Code. With the GSoC program, college students are able to earn up to $4500 for successfully completing a task for an open source project.

Visit this year’s FFmpeg GSoC page at the MultimediaWiki for more details. According to the program timeline, the student application process begins on March 29.

Here’s one of those projects that you dream up just to avoid doing more important/useful work: FFmpeg SVN to Twitter gateway. I, too, am now contributing to the notorious fail whale.

All the kids are talking about this Twitter thing these days. I have read up on some kind of open API they offer. I’m not really that keen on these modern web-based APIs. I had a feeling that someone must have a Python API for it and sure enough: python-twitter. So that takes care of that half of the gateway.

The other half is interfacing to FFmpeg SVN. I already have this part reasonably figured out thanks to FATE— my current method is to simply execute ‘svn’ via shell and parse the stdout. It seems that there are a few cleaner Python-oriented solutions for this. But all I really need is to parse the current revision number from ‘svn info’ and then parse the output of ‘svn log -r <rev>’.

Perhaps the craziest part of my solution is that I’m using an sqlite3 database to store a single piece of data– the revision. Hey, I just find it to be the simplest solution, oddly enough.

I imagine it would be possible to engineer the Twitter update as a function triggered during a commit. However, I tend to think it’s not a good idea to have a commit trigger that is dependent on an RPC call to a web service that has a tenuous uptime reputation.

Now to sit back and see if anyone actually follows the account (besides spammers).

I came across this Typealyzer web site which purports to assess a blogger’s personality type based purely on the written word. I have 3 active blogs and I apparently manage to write using a different personality type on each blog:

• This blog — my personal technical blog — pegs me as “INTJ – The Scientists”.
• My Gaming Pathology blog — where I write about usually obscure video games — marks me as “ESTP – The Doers”.
• My corporate blog — where I speak in fairly careful terms about what I do at my day job — earns me the distinction of “ENTJ – The Executives”.

I suppose all of those make sense. Each blog is written with a slightly different tone. This is in keeping with the website’s explanation that “This is about exploring social roles (or personas) that are expected to be different in different situations.” I think it’s frustrating that I have to write my corporate blog in an executive, often vacuous tone (and I know it frustrates the readers to no end as well); I would much prefer if it could lean toward “The Scientists” end of the personality inventory. Alas, it is not to be.

I popped in a bunch of blogs I read but they all seem to learn toward certain areas of the brain chart. According to that chart, I don’t seem to read any blogs by people heavy in the sensing or feeling departments. I have a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it. On a hunch, I plugged in the blog produced by the top Google search for “angsty teenager blog” — Teen Angst Poetry. That scores as “ISFP – The Artists”. Sure enough, I don’t think I would enjoy reading that blog.