Graham Glass, etc.

AppScount: Nice Review of EDU 2.0

AppScout, written by the editors and analysts of PC Magazine, recently wrote a nice review of edu 2.0. One quote:

Many Web sites and Web services offer online classroom environments and learning management systems that allow teachers and instructors to create digital classrooms for students to read material, interact with one another, and respond to assignments and quizzes, but San Francisco startup Edu 2.0 takes the digital classroom a step further. The service does much of what the traditional online classroom does, but focuses on collaboration and group learning, areas in which other services often lack.

I was particularly pleased that they covered most of the main features of the site, and included some nice screen shots. I'm looking forward to the coverage we'll get when we start releasing versions of our site in languages like Spanish, French and German.

McClain Tennis

McClain is an awesome SF tennis instructor. Here's a pic of him and I from a recent photoshoot:

Take the Red Pill

Take the Red Pill and see how deep the Rabbit hole goes.....

EDU 2.0 Internationalization

The first phase of edu 2.0 internationalization is almost complete, so I thought I'd write a little more about the process and infrastructure works.

As anyone who's gone through internationalization knows, it's time-consuming and tricky. So investment in a nice infrastructure to support it usually pays dividends. Since edu 2.0 supports community-contributed content, we decided to make the translation process itself something that the community could contribute to.

Here's how it works.

First of all, we maintain a database of languages. To streamline the initial phase, we only currently support common left-to-right languages. Here's a screen shot of the language table, which includes various items for each language including its flag and country code.

Each language has an associated set of translators, who are usually volunteers from our site. These translators have permission to translate the labels associated with their language. For example, here are the translators for Spanish:

We maintain a master database of labels with their English values; it currently contains 998 entries and will probably grow to around 1100 entries by the end of the initial translation process. We add new labels and their English values via a web form; translators don't use this form, since they translate labels rather than adding them. Here are the first 5 entries in the labels table:

When a translator wants to translate some labels, they log in and select the category of label they'd like to translate. For example, to translate the labels for all the buttons, they'd click on "Button text" in the following screen, enter the translated labels, then press Save.

Here are the first few entries for the Portugese version of the site:

When the system is started, the labels are loaded and cached together with all their translations. In addition, a global variable (which start with a dollar sign in Ruby) is created for each label with a name equal to the name of the label and value equal to the label itself. For example, $accept points to the label "accept" whose English string is "Accept" and whose Portugese string is "Aceitar".

All the Ruby templates and code use $accept whenever they want to include the text meaning "Accept", and the runtime system selects the string associated with the user's session.

For example, the Ruby code:

link_to $accept, :controller => 'moderate', :action => 'accept', :id => @material

creates a link whose text is set to the user's native translation for "accept".

Of course, there are other aspects of internationalization that have to be dealt with, such as:

• passing appropriate flags to third party code such as the FCK Javascript editor
• translating dates and times
• detecting the prefered language for the user's browser
• allowing the user to change and save their preferred language
• alerting translators when new labels are added or old labels are changed

We didn't originally intend to translate our site for about a year, but the number of foreign visitors to our site combined with our invitation to present in Spain changed our plans. It's taken about 4 weeks of hard work so far, but I think it will be worth it.

Mmmmmm.... Coffee

This is a visual ode to all the coffee beans in the world.

Thank you!

Meditation and Mindfulness

One of my good friends has been recommending that I try meditation, and suggested that I read the book Mindfulness in Plain English. I started reading it today and its message strongly resonated with me.

Recent events have convinced me that there's a more open, honest and connected way to live the rest of my life. So I'm searching for ways to help myself down that path. Based on what I've read about meditation so far, it sounds like it could teach me a lot.

I'm going to finish reading the book and then start practicing the techniques it describes. The author explains that it takes discipline to reap the benefits of meditation. That's OK with me.

I'll blog about my experiences with meditation in case anyone else is interested.

Startups: The First Desk

For me, the most exciting thing after getting my first office was getting my first desk. There's something very official-feeling about coding behind a real desk versus hacking from your living room couch (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Here's a picture of my first wrap-around desk at ObjectSpace:

Startups: The First Office

One of the best moments in a startup is when you get your first office, which means that you've grown to the point that you need a place for employees to work and for customers to visit.

Here's a picture of the very first office I rented. The company was ObjectSpace, my second startup. I'm on the left and the co-founder David Norris is on the right. Those were happy times!

 

Dealing with Worry

I consider myself a pretty confident and easy-going guy. However, ever since I was a kid, I've occasionally found myself worrying about something way out of proportion to the thing itself.

For example, when I was 10 years old I used to use my bed as a trampoline and enjoyed bouncing up and down on it as if I was in a circus. Then one day I noticed that my bed was leaning a little. When I investigated, I found that my jumping had damaged the legs of the bed and the wooden supports had broken. Rather than doing the usual thing - telling my parents and offering an apology - I spent about a month worrying about it and inventing tons of excuses that allowed me to hide the state of the bed. When I finally got up the courage to tell my Dad, I was braced for the worst. But all he said was "don't worry, we'll get it fixed". Imagine my relief!

There have been several times during my life where I've worried heavily about something and gone through contortions to avoid talking about it. And every time I've finally spoken about what was on my mind, it has seemed silly and small.

When I was a kid, the consequences of this behavior were relatively minor. But as an adult, they have become major, and my recent heartache has been the worst of the lot. The question is: how should I deal with this tendency in the future? How can I learn from my mistakes?

Based on my experience, it seems like the best approach is to talk about something early on so that it doesn't have the chance to take hold and fester. It sounds easy, but for me this will take a lot of courage. Right now, I'm willing to try anything to improve this part of myself before it does any more damage to my well-being.

Lords of the Lawn

If you like tennis, you will love this video!

And this video is just insane....