Windward Wrocks

I am not worthy (to post on reddit)

I like reddit – I hit it three to five times a week to see what's at the top. Mostly I read a couple of items in the hot list. I try to read a couple in new at times – and vote for the ones I have a strong opinion on. I rarely comment because I usually don't have anything substantive to add (mostly do to existing comments that state what I was going to say).

And in the past I have almost never submitted links to reddit. I appreciate those who do but I don't have the time (nor to be honest the inclination) to go find good posts of wide interest to submit. The good posts I come across tend to have very narrow interest. I don't want to degrade reddit by posting links of little to no interest to the vast majority.

In short, for a long time I've benefitted from reddit but I haven't contributed. And then it hit me… I can write pretty well and in 35 years in the industry I've learned some things that are of general interest and that readers might find interesting. So I wrote a post on time zones. And in two days it got 10,000 hits – a large chunk via reddit. So I figured great – I've found a way to give back.

My goal was to write a post like this every couple of weeks. Some were popular, some were not. But about 50% of them got a lot of interest – strong votes on sites like dzone, reddit (pre blocking), etc., nice comments, and lots of traffic. And I'd found a way to give back – each of these posts takes about 2 hours to write (I put a lot of time into finding just the right way to say something), but people are reading it.

But then on r/programming posts by me were set to auto-hide by a moderator, because I only submit my own content. I've never understood this viewpoint - some of us are good at writing (I think I'm one), some of us are good at finding quality posts (I'm not), some of us are good at commenting (I generally have nothing to add).

Why is it some think you must be good at all to participate? Those of us that only create content are, I think, worthy too. And if a post is good, if it will generate hundreds of votes and comments and tens of thousands of readers, is that not a good thing? I could understand this if I had submitted 10 posts and they were all drek – but the votes & comments (pre blocking) show that what I submitted was, if not Shakespeare, decent content.

This is my plea to the moderators on r/programming – let my posts be read. And let others who only write also be read.

The Best Programming Interview Question – ever!

First off, I have no idea why this question works so well. I don't even have a good theory. All I have is an incredible correlation between answering this question correctly and being a really strong programmer.

The question was suggested to me by someone I respect a lot. I replied that it seemed too easy but he suggested I try it. He's a smart & imaginative guy so I started asking it of people I interview.

The interview process at virtually every company I have worked at has been 3 – 4 hours long. We ask basic programming, we ask brain teasers, we have them bring in some code they are proud of and spend 45 minutes having them take us through what they did and why. And 99% of the time, getting this question right or wrong predicts if they will pass the 3 – 4 hour process.

Question: For the integers between 0 and 100 (i.e. 1, 2, 3, …, 100) – how many have the digit 7 in them?

Answer: In the first comment below – answer it before reading below.

Keep in mind programming skill is just one of the skills you need to interview for (albeit, a critical one). So this is not the single question that answers if you should hire someone. You still need to determine if they work well with others, can make the right compromises and trade-offs to deliver a quality product – on time, etc. But to measure their technical ability, if I only got to ask one question, this would be it.

As to why it is such a good predictor – I have no idea. But before you dismiss it, try it.

Previous post on interviews

• The Best C++ Interview Question – Ever!

Everything you need to know about Locales

A long time ago when I was a senior developer in the Windows group at Microsoft, I was sent to the Far East to help get the F.E. version of Windows 3.1 shipped. That was my introduction to localizing software – basically being pushed in to the deep end of the pool and told to learn how to swim. This is where I learned that localization is a lot more than translation.

Note: One interesting thing we hit – the infamous Blue Screen of Death switched the screen into text mode. You can't display Asian languages in text mode. So we (and by we I mean me) came up with a system where we put the screen in VGA mode, stored the 12 pt. courier bitmap at the resolution for just the characters used in BSoD messages, and rendered it that way. You kids today have it so easy J.

So keep in mind that taking locale into account can lead to some very unexpected work.

The Locale

Ok, so forward to today. What is a locale and what do you need to know? A locale is fundamentally the language and country a program is running under. (There can also be a variant added to the country but use of this is extremely rare.) The locale is this combination but you can have any combination of these two parts. For example a Spanish national in Germany would set es_DE so that their user interface is in Spanish (es) but their country settings are in German(DE). Do not assume location based on language or vice-versa.

The language part of the locale is very simple – that's what language you want to display the text in your app in. If the user is a Spanish speaker, you want to display all text in Spanish. But what dialect of Spanish – it is quite different between Spain and Mexico (just as in America we spell color while in England it's colour). So the country can impact the language used, depending on the combination.

All languages that support locale specific resources (which is pretty much all of them today) use a fall-back system. They will first look for a resource for the language_country combination. While es_DE has probably never been done, there often is an es_MX and es_ES. So for a locale set to es_MX it will first look for the es_MX resource. If that is not found, it then looks for the es resource. This is the resource for that language, but not specific to any country. Generally this is copied from the largest country (economically) for that language. If that is not found, it then goes to the "general" resource which is almost always the native language the program was written in.

The theory behind this fallback is you only have to define different resources for the more specific resources – and that is very useful. But even more importantly, when new parts of the UI are made and you want to ship beta copies or you release before you can get everything translated, well then the translated parts are in localized but the untranslated parts still display – but in English. This annoys the snot out of users in other countries, but it does get them the program sooner. (Note: We use Sisulizer for translating our resources – good product.)

The second half is the country. This is used primarily for number and date/time settings. This spans the gamut from what the decimal and thousand separator symbols are (12,345.67 in the U.S. is 12 345,67 in Russia) to what calendar is in use. The way to handle this is by using the run-time classes available for all operations on these elements when interacting with a user. Classes exist for both parsing user entered values as well as displaying them.

Keep a clear distinction between values the user enters or are displayed to the user and values stored internally as data. A number is a string in an XML file but in the XML file it will be "12345.67" (unless someone did something very stupid). Keep your data strongly typed and only do the locale specific conversions when displaying or parsing text to/from the user. Storing data in a locale specific format will bite you in the ass sooner or later.

Chinese

Chinese does not have an alphabet but instead has a set of glyphs. The People's Republic of China several decades ago significantly revised how to draw the glyphs and this is called simplified. The Chinese glyphs used elsewhere continued with the original and that is called traditional. It is the exact same set of characters, but they are drawn differently. It is akin to our having both a text A and a script A – they both mean the same thing but are drawn quite differently.

This is more of a font issue than a translation issue, except that wording and usage has diverged a bit, in part due to the differences in approach between traditional and simplified Chinese. The end result is that you generally do want to have two Chinese language resources, one zh_CN (PRC) and one zh_TW (Taiwan). As to which should be the zh resource – that is a major geopolitical question and you're on your own (but keep in mind PRC has nukes – and you don't).

Strings with substituted values

So you need to display the message Display ("The operation had the error: " + msg); No, no, no! Because in another language the proper usage could be Display("The error: " + msg + " was caused by the operation"); Every modern run-time library has a construct where you can have a string resource "The operation had the error: {0}" and will then substitute in your msg at {0}. (Some use a syntax other than {0}, {1}, …)

You store these strings in a resource file that can be localized. Then when you need to display the message, you load it from the resources, substitute in the variables, and display it. The combination of this, plus the number & date/time formatters make it easy to build up these strings. And once you get used to them, you'll find it easier than the old approach. (If you are using Visual Studio – download and install ResourceRefactoringTool to make this trivial.)

Arabic, Hebrew, and complex scripts.

Arabic & Hebrew are called b-directional because parts of it are right to left while other parts are left to right. The text in Arabic/Hebrew are written and read right to left. But when you get to Latin text or numbers, you then jump to the left-most part and read that left to right, then jump back to where that started and read right to left again. And then there is punctuation and other non-letter characters where the rules depend on where they are used.

Here's the bottom line – it is incredibly complex and there is no way you are going to learn how it works unless you take this on as a full-time job. But not to worry, again the run-time libraries for most languages have classes to handle this. The key to this is the text for a line is stored in the order you read the characters. So in the computer memory it is in left to right order for the order you would read (not display) the characters. In this way everything works normally except when you display the text and determine moving the caret.

Complex scripts like Indic scripts have a different problem. While they are read left to right, you can have cases where some combinations of letters are placed one above the other, so the string is no wider on the screen when the second letter is added. This tends to require a bit of care with caret movement but nothing more.

We even have cases like this in English where ae is sometimes rendered as a single æ character. (When the human race invented languages, they were not thinking computer friendly.)

Don't Over-Stress it

It seems like a lot but it's actually quite simple. In most cases you need to display text based on the closest resource you have. And you use the number & date/time classes for all locales, including your native one. No matter where you live, most computer users are in another country speaking another language – so localizing well significantly increases your potential market.

And if you're a small company, consider offering a free copy for people who translate your product. When I created Page 2 Stage I offered a free copy (list price $79.95) for translating it – and got 28 translations. I also met some very nice people online in the process. For an enterprise level product, many times a VAR in another country will translate it for you at a reduced rate or even free if they see a good market potential. But in these cases, do the first translation in-house to get the kinks worked out.

One resource I find very useful is the Microsoft Language Portal where you can put in text in English and if that text is in any of the Microsoft products, it will give you the translation Microsoft used for a given language. This can give you a fast high-quality translation for up to 80% of your program in many cases.

Удачи! (Good Luck)

What every developer should know series:

What every developer should know series

What I would like to see added to the Office API

In priority order. I know some are N.F.W. as we are so close to shipping, but maybe in Office 2014 (it won't be 2013 because of the team's superstition about '13').

1. A way to provide a DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX object (flat package format or stream of the file image) for a drag/drop.
2. Excel & PPT equivalents for Range.WordOpenXML and Range.InsertXML().
3. Content Controls for Excel & PPT (even if just the plain text one).
4. ContentControl.Tag removes the 64 character limit (why did they do this???).
5. Document, Workbook, & Presentation all have a Guid property that is constant for the lifespan of the object while it is open. The object itself cannot be used as an identifier or hashtable key because it will change on subsequent events.
6. Drag/drop events where Office passes the location(Range) and we return the drop icon on moves and if we handled the drop on a drop.
7. Ribbon items:
   1. Have section headings in galleries like Word does for Insert, Shapes.
   2. Have a way to line up the right side of editBoxes, lists, combos, etc (extending the shorter ones to match the longest one). Setting the sizeString doesn't work well when you localize by returning values on getLabel.
   3. Get the location of the button pressed. We need this to then pop up our own sub-menu for the button where what we need is functionality the ribbon controls don't provide. Like Insert, Table in Word.
   4. getEnabled call on gallery items.
   5. Have a way to make a tab rightmost with a section header. What we are doing is like the table design tabs - when a user is on our tag we make our design tab visible. When they are off our tag, we hide it. To match Office I think that design tab should be rightmost.
   6. Place my own controls in the ribbon – like Word's color picker.
8. Custom Content bitmap:
   1. Can be a Shape (presently only an inline shape).
   2. Can set & change the bitmap from memory.
9. Allow creating a regular bitmap with the bitmap in memory, and can change the bitmap.
10. Provide the clipboard formats used by Office when pasting/dropping between Office apps.
11. Get the main office app window IWin32Window handle. We need this to place a topmost message box and determining it gets really difficult for some weird cases like Word first starting in Outlook 2003.
12. Provide why an AddIn doesn't load (similar to showing errors in the ribbon).
13. Remove the requirement for a shim.
14. Event on a caret move (selection change does not fire when typing text). Also fire selection change when changing a bitmap to/from inline.
15. Custom panes not require ActiveX.