Windows Live Localisation Failure

I find most of Microsoft’s top-down, design-by-committee products to be insufferable and Windows Live is no different. Sign up for Windows Live and they force products, features and most of all “upgrades” that usually function less well than the original product, down your throat.
But reality is, there are a lot of people attached to the MS Live network and sometimes it is the the most functional point of contact for some people in my networks–so I use it when I need to.

What drives me absolutely crazy is that when you go many Windows Live web pages from an IP that is mapped to Thailand, they automatically serve a page in Thai. All in Thai. With no option to change the language unless you can read the menu–in Thai. (I can read a little and it’s not often easy to figure out how to do it–and if you do not read Thai–it’s impossible.)

So if I want to use Windows Live and I want to change a setting, download an app or register a new account, I must do it in Thai–or fly to Australia, England or the USA so I can log in form an English speaking country.

Isn’t there anybody at Microsoft that can see this is a problem? Didn’t a usability person look at Windows Live and say “if you are going to default the language, at least have an option to change it in some other (more common) language so people who are having problems with the default language can take an action?”

I guess not. MS and their arrogant “take what we give you and like it” attitude is all pervasive.

Three (Maybe Four) Degrees of Seperation

Social networking has multiplied the number of connections people have and the number of channels they have to build networks. Thought the connections through these channels are more tenuous, there are far more of them.

Surfing through friend’s profiles on Facebook, I was struck by the numbers of high profile people that were connected to my friends and friends-of-friends. It’s no longer six degrees we are separated by, but three, maybe four, from any person on the planet.

Is it more valuable to have a chain of six strong links or be connected by three weak links? I suspect three links is more useful because in a short chain the odds of finding that you are connected to some person is far higher.  Connections six degrees separated are all but useless and the social capital that remains after negotiating that chain has dropped to approximately zero. So finding the person, no matter how tenuous the connection, is probably more useful overall.

Barcamp Bangkok Wrap-Up

Barcamp Bangkok is over. It was a huge success. 200+ great people, lots of great conversations. Barcamp carried on until well into the night; the after party had about 70 people eating, drinking, laughing and talking until 10:00pm.

The topics were eclectic, the audience was intellectual, the whole place was energetic. You could feel the excitement in the air; the geeks were having their Woodstock. What struck me was that Barcamp was more than a tech conference, it was a cultural event, a coming together of people that are inventing a new culture. That was tremendously exciting.

The morning started out filled with dread and fear; the venue was a mess from a party the night before. As much as we had all planned out what we were going to do, nobody had done it before and we ran into a cartain amount of problems as the unexpected and unanticipated reared it’s ugly head. But people just appeared and pitched in and things unfolded rapidly and extraordinarily well. We started the first sessions on time and things got easier from there on. Amazing!

I did one presentation. Drupal App Development with CCK and Views. I did not start preparing until after the topic was selected (it was one of the most highly voted topics). Running on 2 hours sleep, un-prepared–it was going OK until my web broswer froze. 25 minute topics don’t give you much time for recovering from problem! At least a few people (Julie, Sajal, Anoop) threw me a rope and asked some questions while I was restarting my browser. Thanks guys!

I did not even sit through one presentation! Not that there were not topics I was interested in, it was that I was occupied with other things; it was partly because I was so busy running around and checking that things were running smoothly, partly because the people there were so interesting I kept getting drawn into passionate discussions and I could not tear myself away.
Lots of requests for a second Barcamp Bangkok. I think everybody is up for that.

There is a lot of talk about a BeachCamp: throwing an International “Pacific Rim” Barcamp at a beach resort here in Thailand. I am really excited about that prospect and starting to take Barcamp to a new level and make international connections.

Now it’s time for all of us organizers to start a post-Barcamp analysis of what went right and what could be improved. I think we all see lots of areas for innovation and improvement and we are a little shocked at how “right” a lot of it went despite the concerns we have up until about noon the day of Barcamp!

Thanks to all the organizers and to all the participants: you made it a great Barcamp!

Barcamp Bangkok in Progress

I am dog tired but so excited. Up until 5:00am doing last minute prep, wake at 7:30 to go to Barcamp.

Everything started as chaos–but people pitched in and order slowly gained the upper hand. Somehow, at 11:00, as promised, the sessions started and pretty much everything worked. Wow!

What I realized is that Barcamp is not about technology, it’s about culture. It’s about a cultural revolution, a new way of organizing and communicating and relating.

Technology is the platform and the conversation is about technology, but the real transformative power of Barcamp is in getting together people that are tapped into the new culture. It’s a Woodstock for nerds.

I feel energized and very excited. I have had some of the most exciting conversations I have had in years today. I am tired–but I am energized.

This is the network of people that I wanted to tap into in Thailand for years. I don’t know that there was a gathering point for them–until now.

More Barcamps to follow, for sure!

There is a lot to process. I learned quite a bit–and it has nothing to do with the room talks–I did not attend one of them (except the one I gave where my computer locked up). The realizations are all from the process of creating Barcamp, how it unfolded and the conversations I had outside the talk rooms.

Barcamp Bangkok: The Home Stretch

I could use some sleep. A few hours to go until Barcamp Bangkok starts and still things to do. No chance to prepare a presentation. Kinda ironic.

I am excited–and terrified. So much has been planned and executed by the fabulous Barcamp Bangkok team, so much is still in flux. Roll the dice and see how it plays, I say!

But the T-shirts look great:

and so do the signs:

BIND to the Rescue

I have been too busy to do much development on my own stuff with Barcamp Bangkok taking up most of my free time lately. But I am ramping up for some serious development time after Barcamp finishes.

The fact that Microsoft hosed my hosts file has meant that I cannot access my SVN repository from my desktop development environment–the only one that is on a fast computer. So I have installed BIND to run DNS on my development network. Yes, running and maintaining a DNS server is probably overkill, but MS forced me onto this corner.

BIND to the rescue! Yay! Now I have to spend a bit of time to remember how to write zone files–not that hard as I recall. There’s probably a lot of sample zone files out there already–I should search for one and set up DNS while I am on the train.

I wonder how often people have set up DNS servers while on the train from Laos to Bangkok? Probably not many. It may be a world first.

Lao and Back

Quick trip to Laos to get the visa sorted; leave Monday night and back Thursday morning.

At the Lao border crossing.

Not the best time with Barcamp Bangkok around the corner, but there was no other date I could do it. Luckily, everybody working on Barcamp is wired so as long as I have an Internet connection, I can do as much as if I were still in Bangkok.

Vientiane is changing fast. More tourists every trip, more guest houses and upscale eateries, more paved roads. Still, it has it’s charms. Slow pace. Tree-lined streets. I love the cafe society here; lots of cafes and coffee houses and people are there with books and laptops thinking, dreaming, meeting, working. You don’t see that much in Bangkok, sadly.

Prices on the rise in Vientiane as well. I am not sure if it’s the high season so prices are up or it’s that demand is outstripping supply, but a room that is a box with a bed and nothing else is now pushing B300 a night. Pretty pricey by SE Asian standards.

But the highlight is still the food. Foot-long sandwiches on crispy baguettes that are stuffed with red pork, pate and bologna for US$ 1.60. Vietnamese Pho and Bun. Swedish bakery. Cheese. Wine. BEER LAO.

Every time I have a Beer Lao it strikes me that it really smells and tastes like a lager beer. Yum.

Two days here is too long to be away with Barcamp coming up, but not long enough to eat everything I want to eat.

Flickr Blows

I have rarely played with my Flickr account that has been in existence (though mostly dormant) for about 2 years.

And after playing with it for a few hours, I am not feeling very motivated to waste more time on it.

1. No support for an official Linux uploader. Grrr.
2. Limited to 100MB photos uploads a month – unless you buy a pro account for $24.95. If Google can give you 4GB of disk space for GMail, why is Flickr giving out space in 100MB drips and drops? Zzzz. Just as you get going with Flickr you have a “Oops, can’t do that!” moment. Don’t frustrate users too early.
3. Only allows free users 3 sets. Stupid, stupid, stupid. A set has zero cost. More sets = more pictures. More pictures = affinity for Flickr. Affinity for Flickr = incentive to purchase a paid account. Sets are zero cost to Flickr / Yahoo (zero storage and zero bandwidth for all practical purposes); why not let people go wild with creating sets? Limiting users to 3 sets gives them a frustrating cap on Flickr’s usefulness way too early in their user experience.

Advice to Flickr: don’t whack new users with limits so fast–you piss them off way before they have time to fall in love with the product.

Nice Ajaxy interface. But “wow” interfaces don’t get me addicted to a product–usefulness does. Hitting arbitrary limits too early is a buzz kill.

Ubuntu Frustrations

Lots of little oddities as I tried to stretch my Ubuntu wings.

From small things like Flickr’s advanced uploader (Flash based, I gather) not working right to Firefox occasionally locking up when I opened a new Window, using Ubuntu has not been the smooth experience that I was hoping for. Maybe it’s a bad day, maybe Ubuntu is just rougher around the edges than it’s polished exterior leads you to believe.

I am not giving up. I want to give Linux on the desktop a fair shake, but I am seeing clouds on the horizon. Will they build–or dissipate?

Ubuntu Calling…

OK. I have had it with Windows. Really, I have. The annoyances, the arrogance, the in-your-face-f**k-you attitude they have for their users… It’s time for a change.

I would love to buy a Mac or two (An iMac / MacBook Air combo would be nice), but looking at the bank statement, that ain’t gonna happen any time soon.

So I guess I am going to go with Ubuntu. I love Ubuntu, I really do, and it would probably have been my first choice if Adobe apps ran on it, but sadly, there are no Linux versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. (So I guess I will still be running Windows, but only on rare occasions.)

So, let the experiment begin!

I am trying to, wherever I can, switch my apps to open source versions as well.

Let’s see how this goes.

So far, most days, I can seem to run Ubuntu all day and not ever have to switch back to Windows to do anything.

Still looking for some killer replacements for my old-standby Windows apps. I guess I will find them as I need them. I can’t say I have played with many Linux desktop apps outside of server and network tools and the occasional editor; my Linux experiences have mostly been using it as a server, not a desktop. So there is a lot of opportunity to find some cool desktop apps I have not been exposed to before.