Facebook

Why a non-english speaking friend of mine should share something like this about her husband on Facebook?

Seriously?

We are building a web application for testing some features of Hibernate for a database course. For the final presentation, I asked my teammate if he can make a pretty style for our web app, so that our presentation makes a good impression. After he committed the code, I updated and restarted the server. This is what I got:

I'm just speechless. Seriously?

هم خونه ای احمق

امروز بعد از ظهر هم خونه ای هلندیمو تو آشپزخونه دیدم، میگه که نیلز اومده دیدیش؟ میگم نیلز کیه؟ میگه همون پسر آلمانیه که گفتم مسافرته. اتاقش کنار اتاق منه. بعدش می گم نه کسی نیومده! میگه چرا امروز داشتم رد میشدم دیدم صداش میاد با دوست دخترش حرف میزنه. گفتم که امروز فقط صدا اون لهستانیه میومد (دوست دختر هم نداره)! بعد یه تیکه هم اومد که زبان آلمانی با لهستانی رو تشخیص نمیدی از هم؟ می خواستم بگم آخه احمق من داشتم با اسکایپ با دختره فارسی حرف میزدم تو شنیدی. تو که فرق فارسی و آلمانی رو نمی فهمی، چرا تیکه بانمک میای؟ ولی گفتم ولش کن. اولا که نمی گیره چی میگم باید علمی توضیح بدم بهش، ثانیا همه باید با حماقت خودشون زندگی کنن و بمیرن، اینجوری واسشون بهتره!

Google+

I have seen quite a few status updates from friends in Facebook, saying that they've disabled their Google+ account, because of unknown people who add them to circles, which is indeed very annoying.

Some people never ever get how to write a program, while some programmers never get how to find a girlfriend. I think the same holds true for companies: Google simply does not get Social Networking (Orkut, Buzz and now +), while a company like Microsoft does not get how to build a search engine. There are many other examples of this kind...

دست دادن

خیلی از رفتارهای ساده هست که سالهاست برامون عادت شده و برای اولین بار توی یک محیط اینترنشنال تازه می فهمیم که اکثر جاهای دنیا اینجوری نیست. مثلا همین دست دادن ساده رو در نظر بگیرین.

ما ایرانی ها خیلی زیاد دست میدیم. موقع سلام و خداحافظی که استاندارده. حتی اگه یک نفر رو ۲ ۳ بار هم تو روز جاهای مختلف ببینیم باز هم دست میدیم. معمولا توی فرهنگهای دیگه دست دادن خیلی به ندرت صورت می گیره اونم برای مواقع رسمی یا دیدن یک دوست بعد از مدت ها یا یک معرفی... تنها افراد غیر ایرانی که با من هر دفعه دست میدن (و حتی موقع خداحافظی) اینجا اسپانیایی زبانهای امریکای لاتین هستند که خوب انصافا مایه هم میذارن محکم دست میدن نه شل و ول مدل ایرانی.

نکته بعدی اینه که دخترها معمولا فقط تو موارد رسمی یا اولین معارفه دست میدن. تنها دخترایی که برای سلام احوالپرسی دست میدن ایرانیها هستن. حالا من به خوب و بد قضیه کار ندارم ولی یه اکبر داریم اینجا اینجا هنوز نگرفته که این دست دادن مدل ایرانی همه جا مرسوم نیست. تقریبا به سبک تو ایران موقع هر سلام خداحافظی به زور به همه دست میده. یعنی حتی پیش اومده که توی کافه همه دور میز نشسته باشن، وقتی که میرسه دور میز میچرخه و با همه دختر و پسرها دست میده (موقع خداحافظی هم همینطور). خلاصه خیلی صحنه به قول معروف awkward ای (کلمه معادل فارسی براش نیافتم) به وجود میاد...

Google+

A platform for uploading and sharing animated GIFs.

Whole country on vacation

One week ago, I sent an email to my professor to ask him for a meeting for discussing the thesis and related stuff. He did not reply; Today, I thought maybe it's a good idea to ask his secretary if he's there or she knows when he comes back.

Fortunately the secretary has set an automatic out-of-office email: "I am out of the office from Friday, the 5th of August up until Friday the 26th of August. I will reply upon my return."

I think the whole country is on vacation now! What I'm doing here then? :(

Germanic Language Patterns

Today, I was talking to one my friends who studies at NTNU in Norway. I was curious to find out what NTNU stands for. It is the acronym for "Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet".  Though, it was the first Norwegian words I've ever seen, I could guess the meaning easilty. In fact, it's very similar to its German and Dutch variant. Look at the following table which shows the word Science in different Germanic languages.

German	Dutch	Norwegian	Swedish	Danish
Wissenschaft	wetenschap	vitenskap	vetenskap	videnskab

They are extremely similar. Even more interesting is the fact that certain patterns occur in all these languages.

Below is another example which shows the word community in the above-mentioned languages. As you can see the schaft suffix and its forms in other languages are repeated.

German	Dutch	Norwegian	Swedish	Danish
Gemeinschaft	gemeenschap	fellesskap	gemenskap	fællesskab

Unfortunately, pronunciation (and hence listening experience) is very different in these languages and that's what actually learning a language is all about...

GWT

I never liked GWT as a web framework. Simply working with it did not feel natural to me. Today, I came across the following assessment of GWT by ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, which I would like to share with you:
"GWT is a reasonable implementation of a poor architectural choice. GWT attempts to hide many of the details of the web as a platform by creating desktop metaphors in Java and generating JavaScript code to implement them. First, in many ways, JavaScript is more powerful and expressive than Java, so we suspect that the generation is going in the wrong direction. Secondly, it is impossible to hide a complex abstraction difference like that from event-driven desktop to stateless-web without leaky abstraction headaches eventually popping up. Third, it suffers from  the same shortcomings of many elaborate frameworks, where building simple, aligned applications is quick and easy, building more sophisticated but not supported functionality is possible but difficult, and building the level of sophistication required by any non-trivial application becomes either impossible or so difficult it isn’t reasonable."

What do you think about GWT and the arguments made by Technology Radar?