Technology

Happy Programmer’s Day

My brother reminded me that today is Programmer’s Day, an official holiday and appreciation day for those hundreds of thousands of people who spend their days teaching computers new tricks. I know that not many people think about it, but I do and I find it totally fascinating, that everything, every tiny little thing that we see on a computer screen is thanks to someone who programmed it in. Just think about it.

What are you staring at now? Probably a web browser. That’s a large and mighty complicated program that was written over a few years by hundreds, if not thousands of programmers. Your browser runs on top of an operating system, which again was written by many programmers over lengthy periods of time. The browser, through operating system, communicates with the server that runs my blog. All those communications go through a number of networking devices (routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, etc), which run software written by more people. My server runs Apache web server software. Which runs PHP software. Which runs WordPress software. Which connects to MySQL database. These are just a few major pieces of software involved in the process. There are probably thousands of smaller applications that nobody ever thinks of, that still do their job to deliver this content from me to you. Like TinyMCE editor that I am using inside of WordPress to write this post. Or like Google search engine that you probably misused to get to this post.

Do you like any video games? Those are software applications. How about YouTube videos? For you to be able to waste time at work this inefficiently, a lot of software had to be written by a lot of people. Oh, are you working then? Doing some calculations in Excel or drafting up Word document? Maybe you are working through some customer data in the CRM application. All those are software applications too. They didn’t just grow on trees. Someone somewhere had to think them up, design them, implement them, and maintain them.

Oh, and do you know what’s even crazier? Programmers are using software applications created by other programmers. Operating systems, text editors, compilers, linkers, debuggers, and more!

Software industry is very young. I’m not sure when was the first program ever written, but, according to Wikipedia, the first theory was proposed by Alan Turing in 1935. That’s not even 80 years ago. And if you look around you now, the amount and the complexity of software applications created to date is immense – from operating systems, through games and business applications, to all the things online and mobile.

But that’s just the job, right? All those people were paid for it, right? Wrong! Very wrong! While many did indeed get paid, there is plenty of contribution from amateurs and enthusiasts. Those are the people who push the technology, ask hard questions, and try to make the world a better place not necessarily for their own greater income, but out of pure curiosity and for the love of science.

Anyways, I’m getting carried away. All I wanted to say is that it’s important to pause once in a while, look around, and appreciate what we have and people who brought us all that. Computer software is not the single most important thing around us, but it is one of those things that we rarely notice, until it breaks. So, have a thought about what software you use, what role does it play in your life, and how did it get there. And then, find a programmer and buy him a beer. Because there is someone somewhere not just using his software, but enjoying and/or depending on it, and not thinking about it.

One last thing I wanted to mention. Of course, I knew about Programmer’s Day for a while now. And, of course, I knew that it is an officially recognized holiday in Russia. But what I didn’t know is that I actually know one of those people who worked to make it an officially recognized holiday.

This particular day was proposed by Valentin Balt, an employee of Parallel Technologies web design company. As early as 2002, he tried to gather signatures for a petition to the government of Russia to recognize the day as the official programmers’ day.

Valentine Balt currently works in FxPro, here in Cyprus. And we had a few drinks together. Well done, Valentine!

To all you programmers out there – happy Programmer’s Day. I wish you faster computers, shorter compile times, fewer bugs, better APIs, clearer specifications, more pull requests and patch submissions, and more appreciative users. Enjoy!

WordPress Plugins: Liveblog

WordPress.com VIP blog announced the availability of the Liveblog WordPress plugin. This is pretty cool for anyone doing live coverage of events and such. One of the coolest things about this plugin is that you don’t have to setup a separate blog for live blogging. You can turn any post – new or existing – into a live blog and post updates straight from the front page. People who have the blog post open in their browser, will see a notification of an update available, like the one the screenshot below.

Pretty cool.

I’ve been using CloudFlare for my domain for over …

I’ve been using CloudFlare for my domain for over a year. Two weeks after I move back to GoDaddy, GoDaddy gets DDOSed. Coincidence? I think not.

GoDaddy goes down, the cycle is complete

Back when I just started doing web things, there weren’t Web 2.0, cloud computing, or much of web services. People used to do their own thing, and that’s exactly what I was doing too. I had a home server that was my web, email, ftp, dns, file, and print server. And maybe something else server as well. I just don’t remember anymore. But gradually, companies started popping up left right and center, that made it easier to have your stuff somewhere else, somewhere other than your own server. And one of the first things that I “gave away” were the domain names. I tried a few companies back then and chose to go with GoDaddy, because it was by far the cheapest I could find. Then my web server was moved to a VPS hosting, which was cheaper and faster than my home server machine. Then email went to Gmail. Then I got rid of printers at home. Then I moved my pictures to Flickr. And then the rest of the files ended up on either Dropbox or Evernote. The home server was long gone.

In the last three or four years, I’ve been feeling the need to reverse that migration. First, when my web hosting company got hacked and lost all the data (yeah, apparently they weren’t keeping backups either). Then with some migrations issues I had over Gmail, which just didn’t have all the tools I needed. And now with GoDaddy going offline for a few hours yesterday, because of a DDOS attack against their servers.

When considering such a move, one of the first thoughts is usually – do I really think that my own servers cannot be hacked or DDOSed? Of course not. They can, and probably will. But there are two small things to remember here. Firstly, I am a much smaller target than GoDaddy. And secondly, having control in your own hands is important. Need backups? Do them yourself. Being hacked and need to move to another host urgently – you have everything you need to do so. Something went down, it’s up to you to fix it.

I’m not saying that I am moving everything back onto my home server yet. But I am seriously considering getting some of that control back, and hosting it on my own server. After the GoDaddy incident yesterday, I am most definitely setting up my own “DNS friends circle”. And with disk space getting so much cheaper, I am seriously considering moving the emails and files back to my own server again. Especially after I discovered that Flickr lost or corrupted some of the files that I’m storing over there.

This whole thing of moving back and forward is nothing new though. Progress often happens in spirals. Think, for example, about the desktops. Things started off as dumb terminals connected to a central mainframe computer. Then then moved into standalone desktop computers. Then terminal servers got popular again, with slightly less dumber terminal clients. Then desktops and laptop again. And now once again things move to the cloud, somewhere far away from the end user. Who, in tern, moves to a smartphone or table, which is, arguably, the next reincarnation of the desktop computer.

Things go back and forward all the time. So I’m thinking it’s time for me to get some of my things back. Even if just for a while.

Managing gettext translations on the command line

I am working on a rather multilingual project in the office currently. And, as always, we tried a few alternatives before ending up with gettext again. For those of you who don’t know, gettext is the de facto standard for managing language translations in software, especially when it comes to messages and user interface elements. It’s a nice, powerful system but it’s a bit awkward when things come to web development.

Anyways, we started using it in a bit of a rush, without doing all the necessary planning, and quite soon ended up in a bit of a mess. Different people used different editors to update translations. And each person’s environment was setup in a different way. All that made its way into the PO files that hold translations. More so, we didn’t really define the procedure for the updates of translations. That became a bigger problem when we realized that Arabic has only 50 translated strings, while English has 220, and Chinese 350. All languages were supposed to have exactly the same amount of strings, even if the actual translations were missing.

So today I had to rethink and redefine how we do it. First of all, I had to figure out and try the process outside of the project. It took me a good couple of hours to brush up my gettext knowledge and find some useful documentation online. Here is a very helpful article that got me started.

After reading the article, a few manuals and playing with the actual commands, I decided on the following:

The source of all translations will be a single POT file. This file will be completely dropped and regenerated every time any strings are updated in the source code.
Each language will have a PO file of its own. However, the strings for the language won’t be extracted from the source code, but from the common POT file.
All editors will use current project folder as the primary path. In other words, “.” instead of full path to “/var/www/foobar”. This will make all file references in PO/POT files point to a relative location to the project folder, ignoring the specifics of each contributor’s setup.
Updating language template files (PO) and building of MO files will be a part of the project build/deploy script, to make sure everything stays as up to date as possible.

Now for the actual code. Here is the shell script that does the job. (Here is a link to the Gist, just in case I’ll update it in the future.)

#!/bin/bash

DOMAIN="project_tag"
POT="$DOMAIN.pot"
LANGS="en_US ru_RU"
SOURCES="*.php"

# Create template
echo "Creating POT"
rm -f $POT
xgettext \
 --copyright-holder="2012 My Company Ltd" \
 --package-name="Project Name" \
 --package-version="1.0" \
 --msgid-bugs-address="[email protected]" \
 --language=PHP \
 --sort-output \
 --keyword=__ \
 --keyword=_e \
 --from-code=UTF-8 \
 --output=$POT \
 --default-domain=$DOMAIN \
 $SOURCES

# Create languages
for LANG in $LANGS
do
 if [ ! -e "$LANG.po" ]
 then
 echo "Creating language file for $LANG"
 msginit --no-translator --locale=$LANG.UTF-8 --output-file=$LANG.po --input=$POT
 fi

echo "Updating language file for $LANG from $POT"
 msgmerge --sort-output --update --backup=off $LANG.po $POT

echo "Converting $LANG.po to $LANG.mo"
 msgfmt --check --verbose --output-file=$LANG.mo $LANG.po
done

Now, all you need to do is run the script once to get the default POT file and a PO file for every language. You can edit PO files with translations for as much as you want. Then simply run the script again and it will update generated MO files. No parameters, no manuals, no nothing. If you need to add another language, just put the appropriate locale in the $LANGS variable and run the script again. You are good to go.

Enjoy!