Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

Working With A Translator
Well I messed that up.

I’ve never been on a panel before, and I’ve never worked with a live translator before, except once and that was ASL which is different. This time, at WordCamp Tokyo, I was on a panel to talk about the Worldwide Community of WordPress, and other things, and we had a wonderful translator with us, Shinichi Nishikawa. But I’m afraid we made things very hard for him.

My father, who’s more experienced, gave me a critique later and I have some points to share with everyone.
- Speak one sentence, wait for it to be translated, then move on.
- Keep your English simple.
- No cliches, idioms, or slang. Not even technical slang.
- No jokes. They won’t translate. Don’t even try.
- Don’t laugh at yourself either.
It’s remarkably hard to do this. I’m getting a little better at it, because my father’s wife is Japanese. While she understands some English, I would say her English is better than my French, and she’s mostly fluent in French. So we dance between three languages to try to communicate. With that in mind, I find myself trying for the smallest, easiest, most common words when I want to explain something.

For example, at dinner she was trying to say that my father has no sense of direction. This is true, but in Japanese there’s a word to mean ‘you lack this skill.’ You can apply it to anything, and as we were talking about it, she asked what the word was, in English, for someone who has no sense of music. We explained it was ‘unmusical’ or ‘no sense of music’, but I also mentioned ‘tone-deaf.’ This lead to us saying things like “You are tone-deaf in driving!” Where English will put a modifier on the word, the Japanese have a second word to add in front that puts the proper emphasis.

Understanding that one, small, thing changes what words I want to use when explaining WordPress (or anything) to someone who doesn’t speak my language natively. I’ve done this before, with normal conversations and travel, but doing it for WordPress was very hard because we’re used to things like ‘doing_it_wrong()’ and even ‘Howdy, Ipstenu.’ Those are small words we think of as normal and simple, but their concepts are so large they lose something in the translations.

Besides just words, I’ve learned we definitely need to translate our brochures into the language of the country we’re in. Not having the pamphlet be in Japanese was a killer. Also our little DreamHost Robots need names!

Everyone thought our mascots were adorable, but they needed names. Since we have three stickers, one of them being tiny, I said we should call the little one “Yume-chan” because Yume (夢) means Dream in Japanese, and ‘chan’ is a diminutive. My father calls me ‘Mika-chan.’

Just for an example, Wapuu is the mascot of WordPress in Japan. So really anything small and cute like this needs a name.

Knowing that, I feel more prepared next time not just should I come again to Japan, but also in general for how I present at a WordCamp. Every time I come to one, I learn a little more and a little more about myself, WordPress, and how we all communicate.

WordPress democratized publishing in more than just your website, after all.
20 October, 2014
Portable Charging

I travel a lot, and as of last WordCamp San Francisco, I realized I needed a way to charge my phone on the go. The issue was that I wasn’t always in a place where I could easily use a plug, and outlets didn’t always work. So I wanted something I could carry with me, plug in while at a restaurant and charge when I wasn’t using it.

After asking around, I picked up an Anker, which claimed it could charge my iPhone 5 twice. I’ve tested it at 1.75 charges, but that’s usually good enough for me. This year, I got two more types. An Anker from WordCamp NYC and a PowerBank from WordCamp Miami.

Hands down, the Anker wins. The PowerBanks don’t hold as much of a charge as the Ankers, and they don’t retain their charge quite as well. They’re smaller, so this makes sense to me. Less battery capacity. But the fact that they lose their charge faster means I have to always remember to charge them up. The Anker? Well I didn’t charge the WordCamp NYC one after I got back from NYC, and when I went to charge it up almost 2 months later, it was still half charged. In the same time span, the PowerBanks were dead.

The downside for all chargers is I have to remember to charge them, which is why they’re pretty useless for my wife who never remembers to charge her phone, and asking her to remember to charge another device won’t work at all. But for me, I toss the two Ankers into my purse and about once a month I charge them up. Or if I’ve used one, I charge it right away. That way, when I get stuck in an airport for god knows how many hours, I’m doing just fine.

17 October, 2014
Automatic Geolocation

Traveling outside the USA always reminds me of how annoyed I am when I go to websites.

Like most of you, I have a bevy of websites I visit regularly. In my case, a large number of these sites are image or video related, and due to the legality of those things, I find myself restricted based on my current location. It annoys me, because if I pay for a service like my cable TV, why can I not watch it outside my home? Restricting my content based on my location is frustrating. I get CSI at home, but I can’t watch it while I’m here in Japan. This, of course, leads to things like illegally downloading movies, because there simply is no easy, quick, efficient way to acquire those things.

But worse than that is the tacit assumption that just because I’m in Japan, I want to visit the .jp version of a site. The number of sites that auto-redirect me to my current location’s language are not few, and most of them don’t have an easy way for me to click back and explain I’m not able to read Japanese.

For many years I’ve told people that forcing a language choice on users based on their IP is improper and unpredictable. It’s for the same reason I tend not to recommend blocking entire countries from your websites. The probability that you will hit innocents with a broad attack is very high. It’s higher than the chance of rain in Southern California.

So how do you do it right? You have to start by asking the right questions.

What language does the computer use?

You can detect that, you know. If my computer uses English, the odds are that I want to use English. Of course, a French speaker might use my laptop, but that’s on them, and one hopes they know to go to google.fr instead of google.com. Speaking of that…

What URL did I type in?

If I go to a URL directly, I may actually want that URL. This goes for you mobile apps too. If I go to Google.com right now, I get this:

That’s a nice, friendly question in English asking if I’m sure.

Have I been here before?

Cookies. When I go to a site, I get cookies. Those cookies can tell you what language I used the last time. So if you have a flag system where I can pick my language, please do try to honor that. There’s nothing a visitor hates more than having to reset their preferences every time. Facebook, this means you.

Where is my IP?

I know I said not to use this, but there’s a reason I want to ask this. If I take into consideration the URL, the browser locale, and the IP, I have a clearer picture of who’s visiting the site and what they want.

15 October, 2014
It’s Not GPL and That’s Okay

I’m probably starting a wildstorm here, but I want to put this out there. I don’t always use 100% GPL products on my sites, and that’s okay.

Please put down your pitchforks!

I am a happy Open Source person. If you give me a choice between two equally good products, one being Open Source and the other not, I’ll pick Open Source any day of the week. But. There’s a reason I use Apple Pages and not Open Office. Pages works for me. It fits my workflow, it fits my brain, and it makes me write more easily. Since I’m often sprawled on the couch writing with my thumbs on my iPad Mini, it makes perfect sense to use Pages and iCloud.

But there’s another place I don’t worry too much about GPL or Open Source, and that’s when I’m coding something that is only ever going to be for me.

I was working on a new site and we were looking for icons to properly represent how we felt. We needed a toaster. We didn’t have one in Font Awesome or Genericons, so I pulled up Symbolicons! The catch? It’s not GPL. But the thing was, we knew we’d never be distributing these icons. It was for one website, so why did it matter?

And the fact is that for this use case, it did not matter at all!

Understanding what I’m doing, who it’s for, and where it’s going to be used is highly important. And understanding what I want to support and maintain is equally important. For the most part, open source doesn’t come with Apple Care or companies like OWC who specialize in bailing people out or helping them extend things. WordPress doesn’t come with that, for good or not, it’s really a ‘figure it out as you go’ sort of product.

There are use cases to consider. Who’s going to use the computer? What do they know? Is it worth teaching them Linux or can they keep using their Mac? Much like I do when I’m mentoring someone, I don’t try to push my ideals on someone, or assume my way and my solution is the only solution. When I look at GPL, yes, it’s my default. I always start there. But I don’t stop there and I don’t let it blind me to what things need to be, because the best solution may not be open source, it may not be GPL, and it may not be WordPress.

So long as you’re not violating a license, use what suits your needs. But do pay attention to those licenses.

13 October, 2014
The Bias of Transparency

When I was in elementary school, we used to go to SeaWorld all the time. I loved seeing the animals, I loved being able to pet and feed dolphins. I loved the whole data dump of the ocean information. I went back in the days where the trainers were in the water with the orcas. I fed one once, and patted it’s nose. I danced with a seal (and sea lion). I really fell for the whole “Humans and animals together!” patter.

And then I grew up and read about how SeaWorld got those animals in the first place.

Your personal feelings on movies like Blackfish aside, even SeaWorld admits today that they were wrong in how they captured orcas back in the day. They were cruel and wrong, and SeaWorld hasn’t done that in 35 years. But the part of me that is upset with them is the part that wants to know why it took Blackfish to make them step up and say that. And the part of me that’s livid is the part who asks why they don’t disclose their history as a learning experience?

Transparency in development is not a new thing. Technology used to be a magical black box, but the more people embrace open source, I feel they’re more willing to express their issues and explain things that have happened. Even when you don’t understand the whole explanation, being told something like “Yes, the outage was caused because some electrical work caught fire” is much more satisfying than “The outage has been resolved.”

When I talked about why an outage didn’t inspire me to change my webhost, much of the reason was because of communication. While it could have been better, my host was transparent with me such that I knew what was going on. Perhaps not as fast as I wanted it, but I did, at all points in time, know what the deal was.

Being up front about problems gets messier when you start to talk about things like security. Earlier in the year, MailPoet had a security vulnerability. They fixed it, pushed the fix, and then it was reported on and everyone found out. People were surprised to find that the exploit was hunted down by people now that the information was in the wild, and others pointed fingers at the reporters for publicizing of the issue.

It’s a double edged sword. If they don’t report on the situation, people don’t understand how important it is to update. If they do make it public, the bad guys know what to look for. That’s why you get things like the accidental DDoS from TimThumb. People knew to attack for it, and they did. It’s the same thing with the HeartBeat vulnerability or the recent Bash issue. Once a vector is found, it will be exploited.

There isn’t a perfect answer here. There isn’t a perfect balance between information and education and secrecy. We want people to know “Hey, fix this!” but we don’t have a way to tell them without telling evil people. This ends up making us want to keep secrets and hide the truth, which just isn’t going to work in the long run. The only practical answer would be to fix this as soon as possible and hope no one hits us in the meantime.

8 October, 2014
WordCamp Tokyo

There was something about me being busy this year… I’m headed overseas on the 7th to my second international WordCamp (Montreal being the first, back in 2012).

WordCamp Tokyo, I will be on a panel discussing the Worldwide Usage of WordPress. Representing America, I’ll be on an international panel to explain where I see WordPress being used and where it’s going here (and in Canada, I can speak for them, I am half-Canadian, I’m my own hat!). I am highly delighted about getting to say ‘international panel’ to some of my family. This is my first time on a panel for WP, though!

This is my second trip to Japan. The last time was in 2008 when I spent 12 days hiking around Shikoku with my father and brother, visiting the temples of Henro in Awa Prefecture. One day I’d like to get the chance to finish the hike. It was beautiful and amazing and blew my mind.

Also this is why I had to decline WordCamp Europe and Dallas/Fort-Worth, both of which I really wanted to attend. I can’t do that much travel in that short a time, seeing as WordCamp SF is right around the corner. I’m really excited to be going to Japan and getting to talk about WordPress while I’m there. This is one of those things you hope will happen when you get a job with a company as cool as DreamHost.

I know I won’t see many of my regular followers there, but I will see some wonderful new faces and I can’t wait.

3 October, 2014