Tao of Paul: June, 2007

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June 26

YouTube, Flickr gone international

In case anyone blinked and missed it, Google and Yahoo have recently expanded some of their acquisitions internationally. I thought it would be worth mentioning since the two properties in question are hugely popular and are market-leaders in their respective market segments.

YouTube, now owned by Google, now has sites available in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. Each country "channel" features unique content for that market. It makes sense that they would take a market or country-specific approach here rather than simply translating the UI since the content is highly cultural and also copyright would be a big concern here, where many pieces may have licensing prohibiting their broadcast outside a certain jurisdiction.
Flickr, which has been part of Yahoo's portfolio for a while now, has expanded from English only to add seven additional languages: French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese. I find their language choices curious - traditional Chinese but no simplified? No Japanese? maybe these things are coming soon...

Flickr, of course has also been having international troubles with censorship of adult content in Germany in accordance with German law. German users are understandably incensed.

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June 22

Binary marble computer

Very cool (if you are a geek) - a binary adding machine as a woodworking project, using marbles as the counters.

(From woodgears.ca via Make via BoingBoing.)

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June 09

PaewPaul.com

You might have noticed that I haven't been posting here with the same frequency recently... I've been distracted setting up a new website for me and the "mrs. to be". It's online now, at paewpaul.com.

Feel free to check it out - I've been deliberately not talking much about my personal life on this blog, but this new site is the place to go for all that personal stuff (including pix of Paew, and I'm sure a few of you might be curious). There isn't a huge amount of content there and only one photo gallery so far, but hopefully I'll get around to adding more soon.

I didn't want the hassle of running my own server, and it took a while to find a hosting company and I was faced with having to choose either Microsoft or Unix/Open-source technologies to create the site. You might be a bit surprised to know that I went with the non-Microsoft environment. Yes, Linux/Apache/PHP, Wordpress, JAlbum, etc. Before my MS colleagues castrate me for going "over the wall", I have to say my motivations were purely selfish. A) in general I found the non-MS hosting companies were cheaper, and B) I was conscious that after 10 years at MS, I was really out of touch with what the rest of the industry was doing. Choosing a Unix/Open Source environment allows me the opportunity to learn about those technologies while working on my site.

And by the way, I've learned that PHP5 does a pretty poor job at being international. It's not Unicode-enabled. I hear that is being fixed in PHP6, but I was surprised indeed to find that it was poorly internationalized! Compared to the support built into something like ASP, ASP.NET, it seems MS can still teach the rest of the industry a few tricks!

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