Multi-lingual Email Address

Multi-lingual email addresses, or Email Address Internationalization (EAI) as it is more commonly known, has been around for a while. Netaka, a Canadian firm, has been providing an email service for the Chinese community that supports the use of Chinese characters in the email address.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has also assigned a committee to oversee the internationalized email effort and the result has been the RFC4952, which in combination with RFC3490 for Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) defines a standard for supporting email addresses with international character sets.

The effort for internationalizing email addresses has been fairly recent, so it will be a while before email servers start supporting other charactersets.

Yahoo! Geocities Pulling Down Shutters

Yahoo! will stop providing the Geocities free web hosting service later this year. What started off in 1994, providing free web hosting communities, was started off by Beverly Hills Internet. In it's original form, Geocities consisted of several virtual 'cities' that represented a category (Eg. Cape Canaveral was for Science & Silicon Valley was for Technology (?) ).

It was acquired by Yahoo in 1999. After a change in the Terms of Service, indicating that all content would be owned by Yahoo!, Geocities grew fairly unpopular and this caused Yahoo! to reverse it's decision on content ownership. Geocities also sold information about it's users to marketing firms which led to a litigation.

Judge of The Pirate Bay case

A recent blog article reveals that the judge who presided over The Pirate Bay hearing was, in fact, a part of two intellectual property protection organizations. As if that wasn't bad enough, he was also a part of the organization acting as the plaintiff i.e. the guys suing The Pirate Bay. If that isn't a mis-trial, I don't know what is. Get more of the juicy details here.

Torrent Sites Shut down After Pirate Bay Verdict

Following the court verdict against The Pirate Bay, several other torrent search and tracking sites have shut down to avoid becoming the target of legal lawsuits. Among them are: Nordicbits, Powerbits, Piratebits, MP3nerds, and Wolfbits. Nordicbits has a page here indicating the shutdown, while the others simply disappeared into thin air.

Why Are Software Development Estimates In-accurate?

I came across an article on CodeOfDoom.com about why estimations are inaccurate. The article starts with the question - Who made the estimate? If it's the new guy, he hadn't a clue of the team's efficiency, the skeletons in the closet (flaws in the existing system), and the requirements. If it's the upper management, the estimates made are either based on a dissimilar project or to please a higher-up guy. If it's marketing, they are in the business of selling the client an estimate and that's what makes it worse - you can't change your estimate, based on what you learn the further down the path you go, because what was sold to the client was the original estimate!

Often, we spend time doing things we didn't originally estimate for, such as lack of documentation, inadequate hardware and things we normally tend to overlook. Then, there's something that can be described as an act of God - illnesses, family emergencies and stuff of the sort.

Having put all of the above aside, dealing with the problem involves padding estimates, keeping management informed about resource and information requirements, and limiting changes to the scope or time frame and avoiding unrealistic time frames.

Finally, what you can do to keep work moving at the intended pace is to follow a couple of simple scrum practices (daily sprints, daily standup meets) and dealing with difficult people.