Obiective
Invalides – 9€+6€ audioguide pentru muzeele armatei si sarcofagul lui Napoleon, care l-au facut cat sa incapa si el impreuna cu toti stramosii lui de la Adam si Eva. Lenesii astia inchid muzeele de aici la 16:45 deci nu va recomand sa veniti mai tarziu de 12:00, pentru ca e mult de vazut. As zice ca fara audio ghid e pacat. Hint: incercati sa cumparati un spliter audio din timp

Notre Dame – dupa ce am gazut prin Italia, asta e cam micutza, dar totusi foarte frumoasa. Data viitoare o sa si urc sus. Nu l-am zarit pe cocosat, probabil in off-seazon e fi si el in vacanta, sau somaj tehnic.

Gradinile Luxembourgh – întrucât nu erau înca înverzite nu au fost de neuitat, mai reîncercam în sezon.

Versailles – am vazut doar interiorul, frumos dar parca am început să mă plictisesc de palate, probabil trebuia sa incerc cu ghid :p. Interior 8€ sau gratis pentru <25 ani (cu dovadă) - eu am încercat dar nu ține. Trebuie sa recunosc ca m-a impresionat mai mult exteriorul si pizitionarea palatului decat continutul vizitabil.

Musee d'Orsay - gratis cand am fost eu, frumoasa cladire - o fostă gară transformată în muzeu, am văzut și câteva Van Gogh-uri aruncate pe acolo :p

Tour-Eiffel - nu am putut urca pănă sus de tot pentru că era închis, recomand să luați bilete de pe net pentru a scuti cam o oră de stat la coada, cumparați și aplicatia oficiala de pe App Store, merita si se poate face la fata locului pentru ca au un hotspot ce permite accessul doar la App Store (e un fel de super audioguide). Mergeti pe înserat sau noaptea, e mult mai frumos decât ziua.

Bateaux-Mouches - probabil cei mai bine cheltuiți 11€ în Paris, pleacă la fiecare jumătate de oră, durează o oră și recomand să-l luați când s-a înserat sau noaptea cand arată super.

Catacombes - înainte de deschidere coada are deja cam 100 de turisti, dacă nu apari înainte de deschidere ai șansa să pierzi 2-3 ore la coadă doar ca să ai ocazia să stai 45 de minute sub pământ, ca să te obișnuiești cu el. Se deschide la 10, ultima intrare 16, lunea si in zilele de sarbatoare inchis, maxim 200 de suflete acceptate la un moment dat, nu au toalete, aviz pentru cei cu vezica mică! temperatura 14 grade, si scari vreo 200 in total. Desi vezi o groaza de oase stivuite dupa diverse modele, pe care poti pune mâna (nu ai voie), nu as putea spune ca este ceva impresionant.

Defense - Nu am putut urca, se pare ca au oprit vizitele pe perioada nedeterminată dar toată zona merită vizitată doar pentru arhitectura moderna a cladirilor, din care parte sunt si centre comerciale.

Internet – nu am reusit sa cumpar in prepay desi ma documentasem inainte: doi mari operatori mi-au zis ca trebuie sa astept 48h ca sa activez netul. Am gasit net gratis la Starbucks si McDonalds, prize de incarcat telefonul greu, recomand un juice-pack. Daca prindeti vreo WiFi orange, poti obtibe

Experientele de care nu vrei sa-ti aduci aminte
Ce nu as fi vrut sa vad si aud, conaționali veniți la cerșit și ciordit.

De cum am coborât din Eurostar ma abordeaza o tiganca si ma intreaba daca vorbesc Engleza, fluturandu-mi un formular cu niste date personale de completat. Doua zile mai tarziu situatia se repeta la sosea, langa arc.

În metrou cand plecam de la turnul lui gustav, s-au urcat si doi mai spălați care discutau pe tema ultimului telefon ciordit cu cinci minute in urmă.

În drum spre Sacre Coeur, doua fuste ne depășesc, ca sa le vedem mai tarziu instalate la intrare.

De muzica nu mai spun, asta nici nu ma mai deranjeaza, ba chiar incepe sa-mi placa.

Pe strada, o altă fustă lungă, se apleaca in fata mea si gaseste ditamai verigheta de “aur”, si vrea sa mi-o dea mie ca ea nu are nevoie de ea,…. a fost interesant sa o vad cum repeta trucul cu altii. Oricum Parisul e jegos rău și realmente plin de hoți și șarlatani. Poate deasta imi place mai mult noaptea, ca nu se vad gunoaiele la fel de bine.

In prima seara, cand am ajuns in gara mi-a fost dat sa vad o turma de vreo 30-40 de non-europeni ce sareau peste barele de la tren, cred ca doar doi sau trei aveau bilet, restul il faceau si pe nasul. Se pare ca mersul ca nici mersul cu nasul nu ne e specific, iar ca sa va faceti o impresie legata de amploare, la ce am vazut eu estimez ca in medie 1/4 merg pe naspa.

Prin oras in afara de politie mai vezi si trupe speciale cu semi-automate, si asta nu era vreo ocazie speciala.

O alta chestie interesanta este ca am putut face o comparatie a nivelului de trai bazat pe telefoanele mobile vazute in transportul in comun: Londra, smartphone 95%, iphone 80%, Paris: smartphone 70%, iphone 25%, pentru Bucuresti nu am idee.

Au mai fost câteva obiective atinse dar nu mai am rabdare sa scriu despre ele: Place de la Concorde, Louvre (de unde timp sa mai si intru), Grand and Petit Palace, … trebuie sa mai fac niste vizite neaparat, asta a fost doar un preview.

Cateva secrete: la muzee te cauta in rucsac dar doar superficial, daca ai mancare pune-o in buzunarele alternative, nu se uita decat in cel mare, pe criteriul asta cred ca puteam sa urc si in turn cu vreo 3-4 kilograme de C4 fără să mă prindă. Nu incercati treaba asta la Versailles aici aveau x-ray, cutia de suc a trecut cu success dar cu C4 cred ca va alegeti cu o vacanta de neuitat.

Parca vad ca vreun retard de la vreo agentie ia in serios paragraful de mai sus si ma trezesc cu nu stiu ce probleme.

Vin zi pozele in curand, doar sa ajung acasa ca sa pot face upload, de aici nu pot ca francezii stau prost la capitolul tehnilogie… internetul gratis de la hotel este: 200mb/zi si nu permite nici voip, in prima zi dupa o juma’ de o ora nu a mai mers, apoi m-am prins… iCloud photo stream.

They are not so mainstream because they are developing only tools for developers, but I have to confess most of these are the best in they area.

If you are a Java developer you may already know about IntelliJ IDEA or if you are developing in Python, PyCharm. They also have products for many other technologies but I’m not able to say how good are they.

Considering the average salaries for software developers it would be a big mistake to be cheap about the development tools you are using. When compared with free alternatives like Eclipse, you should be able to have your ROI in less then a month, if not in a week.

No, I have no relation with JetBrains, other than having the opportunity to use few of their products in the last two years and trust me I’m an open-source enthusiast and I try to use open source tools whenever is possible,… ops better to say “whenever it makes sense”.

Best issue tracker alive

There is another product that got my interest, their issue tracker, YouTrack, and I think this is probably the issue tracker with best user experience I ever encountered, and trust me I used over a dozen of trackers over time.

If you considered JIRA a good issue tracker, let me tell know it is not, personally I call it “goJIRA“, just another too big, slow and hard to use issue tracker, similar with Bugzilla, but commercial. I do know only two products made by Atlasssian, but both of them do provide a really bad user experience, JIRA and Confluence.

The only thing I’m not sure about YouTrack, is its scalability, does it scale for millions of bugs and thousands of products? BTW, if you want to taste the look and feel of this tracker check their own instance, user for their products.

What is the secret recipe used by JetBrains?

I always asked myself what makes the difference between a company that makes the best products from one that makes average products? It’s clear that it’s not about money because SUN with NetBeans or IBM with Eclipse had considerably more to invest in their products. I think that the secret is the product management combined with the adaptability of a small company.

Future acquisition of JetBrains?

I think that during the next 12 months or so, JetBrains is going to be bought by a big player probably Oracle or Google. Let’s see if I’m right or not.

Still with current iOS there are few problems with the Voice Control and romanian diacritics. Romanian language has only a small number of diacritical characters but it looks that speaking fails to recognize them.

English voice recognition and voice over used in iOS could be easily be tuned to support romanian diacritics.

• ș – reads like sh in shut
• ț – reads like zz in pizza
• ă – reads like a in above
• î – close central unrounded vowel
• â – reads the same as î

More details regarding phonetic reading of romanian characters can be found on wikipedia.

In addition to the voice issues listed about there is another very annoying bug inside the Romanian keyboard dictionary. Inside the default dictionary there is the word “La“, with the first letter uppercase. This is an extremely common work in Romanian and the auto-correct function will try to replace every “la” with “La”, making typing very hard. Probably this is one of the reasons why most romanians are disabling the auto-correct functionality.

I contacted Apple again and I hope they will solve these bugs soon. And from my Romanian friends, I expect some replies with their experience and maybe some likes on Facebook if they encountered the same problems.

Update #1 – Also I have to mention the the Romanian keyboard lacks the Romanian quotation marks:

• U+201E , U+201d – first level
• U+00AB , U+00BB  - second level

Take a look at my configuration below, it is supposed to spellcheck in English when you are in “EN” mode but instead it always using Romanian.

Worse, even if you try to disable the auto language detection and set the default to English it will still use Romanian. Sad, probably this is happening when you do the QA without people specially trained for internationalization.

Cred că de când il am timpul petrecut acasă pe laptop sau desktop a scăzut cu mai mult de 50%.

E drept, nu este bun pentru scris, dar pentru consumat informație este foarte bun. Uităndu-mă în jur cred că tabletele vor omorâ cu adevarat netbookurile și vor afecta semnificativ vânzările de laptopuri. În doi ani mai toți vor avea o tabletă.

Încă sunt curios cum o să prindă cele cu Android, vor fi mereu în urma iOS-ului sau vor reuși să adauge o experiență mai bună înainte ca Apple să o facă?

Scris de pe ipad, din cadă!

Here is how the latest iTunes 10 application under Windows 7 on a computer that has the DPI setting set to 150% (“Larger”) also known as 144ppi.

Steve, what kind of QA is the iTunes team doing? As you can see this is not a minor/cosmetic issue anymore.

Acum vine și partea negative, experiența cu două din routerele vândute de Emag…

Linksys WRT120N

Pe primul l-am cumpărat ca produs resigilat cu un discount de aproximativ 30%. A mers bine timp de vreo 7-8 luni până într-o zi când am început să aud că produce mici sunete (pârâit), de atunci a mai mers bine cam o săptmână și apoi a început să piardă pachete în draci. L-am trimis de două ori în service întrucât pe bancul de probă se manifesta bine, doar că în cazul meu îl foloseam pe um cablu ecranat de 60m, caz în care nu prea mai performa. A doua oară, atunci când mi-am dat seama de contextual în care se manifesta defecțiunea mi l-au schimbat cu unul nou dar din păcate și routerul nou producea sunele de la început și manifesta aceeași defecțiune.

Culmea este că Linksys, companie CISCO, este recunoscută ca producând unele din cele mai bune routere pentru utilizare casnică – încă îmi mai aduc aminte cu dor de WRT54GL-ul meu anterior. Totuși dacă dați o găutare pe google după “Linksys capacitor” veți avea ocazia să aflați că au început să folosească componente electronice de calitatea foarte slabă care mor repede.

Dlink DIR-600

Ca marcă Dlink este una medie, sub Linksys dar peste multe altele. Am cumpărat acest router ca să-l folosesc temporar pe perioada cât aveam Linksys-ul în service la Emag. A funcționat decent până când a trebuit să mă conectez la muncă prin VPN, caz în care VPN-ul a fost imposibil de folosit deși clientul de VPN (Cisco AnyConnect) se connecta. Practic routerul alterna între o stare în care pierdea cam orice pachet pentru 10-20 secunde după care avea o scurtă perioadă în care mergea…. Imposibil de utilizat.

Am investigat la greu problema și se pare că firmware-ul este extreme de instabil, chiar și alte modele mai bune manifestându-se similar.

Final

Dacă nu era subînțeles, pentru fiecare din routerele prezentate am folosit ultima versiune de firmware.

Acum am returnat ambele produse la emag și am comandat un model mai scump, un WRT160NL, sper că acesta ar avea niște componente ceva mai bune că am cheltuit prea multe ore din viața investigând diferite defecte grave dar mai puțin evidente ale celorlalte routere.

Aștept cu nerăbdare și impresile voastre legate de ce routere ar merita să fie folosite, în special de utilizatori mai cu pretenții (VoIP, VPN, 802.11n).

In order to give a real measurement regarding the support for multi-language I created a multi-language support-scorecard.

To properly evaluate a solution you need to find the answer to the following questions. Most likely you will have to install it and play with in in order to find the answers.

Can you declare the language of a specific page?

Any CMS should allow you to declare the language of a page.

Can you define different menus for each language?

The navigation menu is not just another thing that needs to be translated, in many cases it will need to be customized for the target audience, meaning that it may be very different from the original one.

Can you link a page from another language?

In the real word you will never achieve a 100% translation and you will have to link to pages that are available only in other languages.

When a page is translated are the links to it updated?

This should be explained, a website is never fully translated and is normal to insert links to pages in another language if these are not translated. A smart CMS will update the links if you add a translation later.

Later, some translated pages may become obsolete and you may want or need to remove them. A smart CMS will redirect the links to the same page in other language if the original translation was removed.

Are the links updated inside the articles?

For SEO purposes you want to update links inside the pages instead of doing redirects. Anyway even the redirects are much better than 404s.

Can you easily insert links?

It is something very common to insert links inside pages. The CMS must allow you to do this without requiring you to know the URL of the target page. Still listing all the pages in all available languages can easily became an issue even for small sites. In order to simplify your work the system should present you a list that will contain all pages translated to current language *and* all pages not available in current language. This means that if you have a page that is already translated in your language you will not see its translations listed again.

Can you customize the URL, html tile or attributes?

Probably these features do not require any explanation.

Does it generate properly ASCII text for the URLs?

Unicode URLs are supported now by most browsers but simple ASCII ones are preferred for most languages, especially for those that are using the Latin alphabet and where it is easier to type them without diacritics. The CMS should be able to convert the Unicode page title into a simplified version that does include Unicode characters.

Scoring example

For the moment I created a scorecard as a Google Document and computed a score for WordPress + WPML + EasyLink WPML plugins. I’m sure that there are people ready to say the WordPress is not quite a CMS and I can tell them that are many declared CMS solutions on the web that are less a CMS than WordPress.

Update: Included information about SPIP based on feedback received.

[gdocs st_id=0AuAbgmBsosYRdGNFNHRqWldvSmpqWDFwVU05ODQxOUE wt_id=od6 type='spreadsheet']

With your help I will try to add solutions to the table. The first ones that I’m thinking about are Drupal and Joomla so if you do have multi-language experience with them please send me your opinion and I will extend the article.

This scoring card is at its first version so if you have any comments, hints or observations please send them, I will be happy to include them in the next version. Also if you want I can add you as an editor to the google spreadsheet with the scorcard in order to be able to add scoring for other solutions.

Hudson does not support different timezones by user so I needed a compromise and the initial one was to use UTC because it’s…. universal.

Even if this server is used by people from 4 or 5 timezones from all over the world, I had to give up and change it to PST because the company has its headquarters in PST.

Have you observed that all the software is configured to use PST as default time?

I will tell you why: just because most software companies do have their headquarters in California.

Limited support for ignoring files or directories

If you used Subversion, Git or others probably you are already used to mark some files or directories to be ignored. On these systems ignore patterns are stored on the server and they do apply for all the users. This does make perfectly sense for me, if you want to stop your SCM from looking for .pyc files or temp directories you add the rule and everybody will benefit from it.

Now if you try to obtain the same behavior in Perforce you will be surprised that what their support for ignoring files is not what you would expect.

First, you can define the ignoring patterns in your clientspec, so they will be available only to this clientspec, meaning that you will have to multiply them in all your clientspecs. Sharing them with others? … yep copy/paste.

Now lets try to have a deeper look on how they really work:

• partially supported only in GUI (p4v) – for example they will continue to show in file tree and even when you use the Reconcile Offline Files. In fact the only place where they are working is on Advanced Reconcile – a place that you probably do not need/want to use.
• forking? …. you just have to recreate the ignore pattern in the view.

Now imagine that I do work a lot with Python and that entire source tree is full with temporary .pyc files.

Mapping the same repository file/directory to multiple locations on disk

Nope, this is not something you can do – you can try but it will fail to work properly. Trust me, it will save you precious time.

Having workspaces mapped to the same directory

If you do not want troubles, do not forget to keep each workspace (clientspec) in its own directory and be sure that these directories do not overlap, even partially.

Running as root under OS X, not quite

The login is not working well on OS X if you run perforce as root, this is happening because the system does not have HOME environment variable for this user. Do you what what was the response from support: why do you run Perforce as root? WTF!

I don’t want to imply that perforce support in not good, in fact I have to confess that they are very well prepared and give well documented answers and really fast. In fact the above case was the only mistake they made.

Workspaces (clientspecs) that are too hard to maintain

Do you have a big projects with tens of developers if not hundreds, and you change the project structure – now each developer will have to update all his workspaces to match the new one.

It was so hard for Perforce to add something like an @import to the clientspec, so it could just base a workspace on another one?

Now another “cool”, feature is that it is not possible just to copy and paste the view definition from one workspace to another because you will have to do some find-n-replace on it to replace the original clientspec name from each line with your name.

It’s true that there is an option to clone a clientspec, but this will create a new clientspec and you will still be required to move your customizations to it.

Personal conclusions

First, I want to say that even with the problems presented above, Perforce is a very reliable tool and I am not aware about any open-source solution that would be able to deal with repositories of hundreds of gigabytes and a changelist history of 6 digits.

If you know other workarounds for Perforce let me know.