Majarkeun

Maintenance Work Yahoo Messengers System Down

Ada apa dengan Yahoo ! Messenger..


Berikut penuturan dari Sarah Bacon :

Kami akan melakukan pemeliharaan pada sistem kami. Selama ini, beberapa versi dari Yahoo! Messenger dan fitur - fiturnya, seperti Pingbox mungkin untuk sementara tidak tersedia. Kami menghargai kesabaran Anda dan mohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanan. Kami berharap ini terakhir pemeliharaan untuk beberapa jam.

Sarah Bacon | Product Manager

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Localisation with VS2005 will slow you down

In my previous blog about a localisation that went sour, I mentioned that the time for building a localised application takes longer and longer for every language that is added. I have now quantified my feeling and found out that adding a language adds 15-20 seconds for each language. Now that doesnt sound that bad right? Wrong, If you develop an application that takes one minute to build and adding languages almost triples that time, then it becomes tedious very quickly.

This is what I found out (table and graph):

• Default language took 69 seconds to build
• With two languages it took 85 seconds to build (16 extra seconds)
• With four languages it took 118 seconds to build (49 extra seconds)
• With six languages it took 144 seconds to build (75 extra seconds)

If a normal developer compiles 10 times an hour to test something, he/she will waste 12 minutes, just sitting to wait for VS2005 to build. I meanthat is an outrageous extra time, and I wonder if we can send a invoice to Microsoft for those hours that we just wait for the build complete? And I guess we have to make the work day longer as we get much less done.

For this project, the solution was to remove all language resource files from the project file. This means that the only language that is supported in mid-development is "default" and nothing else. So fixing those too narrow labels for localised texts has to wait for another day. The tool do add/remove all those languages to/from the project file is developed in house and can not be shared unfortunately. The tool is very simple to create, but in my view unnecessary.

Here we have a grave problem with the localisation in Visual Studio 2005. If it is done as MS wants, the build time to a project can (and probably will) go up for every language added. What is the outcome of that? Either the developer will stop adding localisations, constrain the development by only showing the default or sit and do nothing while the project builds. This is not a good solution. I would rather have a one-file seperate from the GUI, which reads on the fly when the application is started. That way the language files does not affect the build at all, and it will be a minor load time added for the user which probably will not be noticed.

Measurement notes:

• This is an observation of an application that has been under development for 3-4 years.
  
• They have tried to follow MS design guidelines.
• Clear case is used with dynamic views, which could have an impact on the result as it needs to access 200 new files for every added language.
• The application is not divided up into more than 2 GUI projects. Perhaps adding more sub projects could make the build quicker?
• I used a C# application to measure the time it took to execute a bat file containing "devenv app.sln /build debug"
• I measured each language addition at least 4 times
  

Available link for download

Looking Down March Self Portrait Challenge

My blogging buddy, Amy from While Wearing High Heels, has a great self-portrait challenge each month. I was excited to participate for the first time and loved the theme for March - Looking Down.

This is me today, looking down.



Its playtime and Im looking down at my little man whos enjoying the color matching game I made him earlier this week. He is my creative muse and it makes my heart smile to see him playing happily with something I made for him. Before Jake I never finished my creative projects. I would get too caught up in thinking that Im not an artist and that my projects had to be perfect to be finished.  Jake has made me realize that my projects dont have to be perfect, they just need to be fun.

Time for our walk. Im looking down at an unhappy Jake. Hes sad that I wont let him go further down the street because its time to turn around and get ready for his nap. Hes great at stalling. Right after I took this picture he jumped out of the car and started to run the opposite direction. Good thing Im still faster than him, but I dont think that will be the case much longer. I carry all 32lbs of him the rest of the way home as he screams, kicks and cries past all of our neighbors.


Ah, its nap time. A chance to sit down and rest for a moment. I actually need to work on a marketing project for a client but I take a quick break to look down at my laptop keyboard and start this post. Im feeling a bit stressed thinking about the laundry I should be folding and the mail that seems to be accumulating on our kitchen counter. Sometimes I feel like there is just not enough time in the day. The minutes are rolling by too quickly. How do I stay in the precious present?


Woohoo, I am blessed with a long three hour nap. This rarely happens. We are playing outside in the front yard and Im looking down at my toddler son who has turned our makeshift truck ramp into a toddler ramp.

Its now almost 10:00pm and Im beyond ready for bed but I want to finish this post as I give you a glimpse into my everyday life. These photos arent perfect and neither am I, but I do my best to create my life the way I want it while enjoying the moments I have looking up, down and all around.

Available link for download