Tuesday August 17, 2004

This is why the i18n is so important...

During the demonstration of the Sequoia machine last week, the machine worked fine when the company tested votes using an English-language ballot. But when the testers switched to a Spanish-language ballot, the paper trail showed no votes cast for two propositions.

Wrong Time for an E-Vote Glitch

This happened at the demo for the state Senate staffers in California. It seems that the company has not designed/developed/tested languages other than English, and the i18n glitch was revealed at a very bad moment.

BTW, I believe in E-Voting, but I guess it is still in a premature state.

Wednesday August 04, 2004

Guess what

I've just seen James Gosling wearing a suit with a tie at our all hands meeting. That was because he was supoosed to sink in a Dunk Tank at the party after that. And he did :)

James spoke about this at his own blog with a cool picture!

Monday July 26, 2004

I'm back

From my vacation, i.e. Las Vegas. It was nice except the temperature there, which was over 110F. We went to see a magic show by David Copperfield, and my wife was lucky enough to be selected to appear on stage and got lost into the thin air. She seemed to be put a seal upon her lips about how she got lost, by being given an autograph from David.

I have avoided to open my inbox till this morning. I expected a couple of hundreds emails were there, but that was not quite right. It turned out to be a couple of thousands :( However, soon I figured out that that was not because of my vacation, but the new virus (a variant of MyDoom) which spread out this morning.

My main machine has Java Desktop System as its OS, so there was no fear that it got affected by that virus, but the problem was the team email address we exposed to the public to solicit comments/questions. Looks like the virus was trying to extract email addresses from major search engines, such as Google, and that's why Google was down this morning as a result of DoS attack. It was kind of irony that Google was down when they announced the share price range for their IPO.

Anyway, I am back on business!

Tuesday July 13, 2004

In the middle of two vacations

I was back from last week's shutdown, and will be off again next week. Believe it or not, I am going to Las Vegas for the first time in 6 years being here in the Bay Area.

So, I expected this week was calm and quiet, and planned to do some prototyping for the release after Tiger. However, when I got back, things has changed and I ended up fixing a bug for the Tiger release candidate build. You never know what's going to happen...

Friday July 02, 2004

A quiet day today

Of course! Because :-

• JavaOne has ended
• TGIF
• Just before the July 4th weekend
• Our site will be shut down for a week next week

Monday June 21, 2004

Just IPO'ed at BlogShares

I happened to find my site out on BlogShares.com. According to the site, my blog valuation is currently priced B$16,543.01, which has jumped from B$1,000.00 just 10 days ago! I wish my real stock holdings rallied like this :) (2004-06-21 18:49:42.0) Permalink

Friday June 18, 2004

A hectic day

Murphy's Law: High priority bugs come in late product cycle, and several at the same time.

Tuesday June 15, 2004

GMail

Recently, I've got my GMail account. By now, most of people know what it's like, such as providing 1G space freely, searching with Google engine, and the last but not least, the controversial advertisement policy.

But among those, what I like it most is its UI. The first impression of it was just "cool", but as I keep using it, I tend to think that they aim the email paradigm shift to the instant messaging. They don't call it "mail" or "email", but they call it "conversation", which sounds close to the IM.

The other thing I've been impressed was its "label" functionality. Traditional MUAs create so-called "folders" to store emails in, but GMail's "label" has completely blown "folders" away. You can specify as many as different "label"s to a single "conversation", so that searching/managing "conversation" will be much easier and faster.

It seems that Google has decided to increase the number of the beta testers exponentially, maybe to do stress testing. I've got a couple of invitations already. I noticed that their servers were down this morning, so I guess their purpose (to stress the system) may have been achieved :)

BTW, It would be nice if this blog system would adopt GMail's "label" like capability in its "Category".

UPDATE

The reason that GMail site was down this morning may not be the result from the stress testing, but might be due to the following:

The attack caused problems for more than two hours--from 5:30 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. PDT. Many of the world's most popular sites suffered from widespread outages, according to Keynote Systems, which compiles statistics related to Web surfing. On a typical day, the top 40 sites measured by Keynote rarely dip below 99 percent availability. On Tuesday, however, Keynote saw availability drop to 81 percent.

Blackout hits major Web sites

Friday June 11, 2004

Playing around further...

I am eating my lunch now, and playing around about non-ASCII entry a bit...

First thing I noticed was that, each blog entry is stored with the URL that contains its title string as its URL address, without escaping non-ASCII correctly. So if the title contains non-ASCII characters, the behavior is unpredictable. It seems that it happens to work in some cases, e.g., clicking links, but apparently you cannot use the trackback URL correctly.

The other thing is that there is no "charset" set in the HTML header, it should at least use "utf-8" as the default one. (I could set it manually in the Templates setting, though).

Hope these are addressed in the 1.0 release.

テンプレートに"charset=utf-8"を加えたんで正しく表示されるはず。 (2004-06-11 13:04:32.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday June 07, 2004

Just wanted to say "こんにちは"

I am Naoto Sato, working in the Java Internationalization team at Sun.

こんにちは。 (2004-06-07 14:38:44.0) Permalink Comments [5]