A woman sat down across from me on the train, pulled out her knitting needles and went to work on what appeared to be a scarf. I briefly pondered the fact that she chose to busy herself with constructing a scarf the hard way when it’s obviously faster and cheaper to buy a scarf off the shelf.

Then I immediately pondered how many of my personal programming projects fall into this same category of wheels that don’t need to be reinvented. There are still plenty of projects I want to take on that would surely serve no practical purpose in the grand scheme of things, particularly when evaluated against what I could be spending my time on.

Video game console programming springs immediately to mind. I was interested in Sega Dreamcast programming long after the system had become obsolete. For that matter, I’m still interested in Sony PlayStation 3 programming, even though that community is about to be driven underground. I have long been interested in the technical aspects of the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and have always wanted to write software for that console as well. A few years ago, I even purchased RetroUSB’s PowerPak, a CompactFlash-based game cartridge, probably the easiest method for testing code on an actual system. Mercifully, I recently gave away that item (and the console, an SNES-style top loader), so that’s one less area on which I can waste my spare dev time. I still have the DC and the PS3, though.

My FFmpeg colleagues should be pleased to hear that I do try to make my FATE work a priority above these arguably more frivolous pursuits.

A little while ago, an article made the rounds which detailed a visit to The Weird Stuff Warehouse in Silicon Valley. Since I have a thing for weird, obscure stuff, I knew I had to pay a visit.

I didn’t find much interesting material there, though that’s probably more an indication of my own changing interests (there was a time when I would have enjoyed buying up vintage hardware for cheap). They did have an old MPEG-1 ISA bus video decoder board. There wasn’t much in the way of old entertainment software, which is my current interest. However, I did find an old SGI IRIX OS CD-ROM. Since SGI was more or less synonymous with multimedia back in the 1990s, I thought this disc might have some classic multimedia examples.

The manual that comes in the jewel case seems to focus exclusively on using FlexLM.

When ripped, ‘file’ identifies the disc image as “SGI disk label (volume header)”. Is that the same as SGI’s XFS? I installed Linux’s XFS module but was unable to mount the filesystem. Scanning through the image, I didn’t fnd any strings that would indicate more common multimedia types from the era.

Weird Stuff Warehouse also had an SGI Octane machine for running the OS. You have no idea how hard it was to resist the urge to buy it and run the FATE client on it.

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.