Tag Archives: Switzerland

Transport

A Bill But No Detail

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Yesterday I had a decidedly interesting bill from Hertz, the people who we rented a car from on our trip to France in the summer. The bill is for an administration charge, for supplying my details to “the relevant authorityâ€? in Switzerland for a penalty charge. All well and good, but it doesn’t actually say what the penalty is for, aside from “Trafficâ€?, nor where it actually occurred – for that part the bill just quotes the reference number for the penalty notice.

Whilst it’s entirely possible that I may have broken some rule or other, what is slightly suspicious is that we weren’t actually in Switzerland for all that long. We picked the car up at about 3:30pm, and headed straight for the border – we were driving in France literally within minutes of leaving the airport.

Anyway, after exchange the bill is only about half what the rental companies charge over here – at about £20. I’ve sent an e-mail off to Hertz customer service, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have much more detail. I’d only really be bothered (and I suspect will only actually find out what I did when it does) if an actual ticket turns up, and that really depends whether the Swiss signed up to the EU process whereby they can get the DVLA to issue tickets, or whether the Swiss chase up the ticket.

Now I guess it’s just a question of waiting.

Computers/Technology, Programming

Language Problems

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The obvious frustration in this post from a frustrated Swiss Blogger gave me a definite feeling of relief that the five companies she has issue with (MySpace, PayPal, eBay, Amazon and Google) are all in America, so all speak a language that is similar enough to British English that I can use their default site without relying on localisation.

The issue she is contending with is that she is one of the 20.4% of the population of Switzerland who speak French. All of the companies are apparently producing Swiss versions of their sites that either default to German, or are only available in German, excluding more than a third of the population that speak one of the other three official languages.

It’s not an uncommon problem though – a couple of years ago I was reinstalling Windows on a PC at Beth’s parents place, and foolishly told the Windows installer that I was in Canada, at which point it set the machine up in French, because of course all Canadians speak French don’t they…

Anyway, for anyone involved in writing software for an international market, it is a salutatory lesson in how a poor attempt at localisation can actually result in more frustration – note particularly her comment that many of the non-German speaking people in Switzerland are better at English as a second language rather than German. To be honest what I tend to do with regards to localising an application is to make sure that there is a simple way to override the settings – a command line switch for example. Apart from anything else it gives our installation engineers a fighting chance to work the application if they are testing a Chinese install of an application!

Computers/Technology

CERN Tour – Big Science with some Internet History

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As usual I’m a little behind with watching some of the videos I’m subscribed to. However, this afternoon I got round to watching the ScobleShow video tour of CERN near Geneva.

CERN is very much science on a big scale, with the new accelerator the Large Hadron Collider running for 27km under the mountains. Not surprisingly, to support all of this research, they’ve needed a similar level of computing resources. The two people doing most of the talking on the video are Ben Segal and Jean-François Groff, who were both involved in key parts of the story of the birth of the World Wide Web along with Tim Berners-Lee. Ben Segal was key in introducing TCP/IP into the organisation, and at one point in the video talks about the significant internal arguments that took place over using the North American protocol over European alternatives. Jean-François Groff worked with Tim Berners-Lee on the first browser and the underlying protocol.

Alongside the history, you also get a bit of background as to the main work at CERN looking around the on site museum. The video then finishes with a look at the data centre, with a discussion of quite how much the contents of the data centre have changed. Definitely an interesting video.

Computers/Technology

Swiss Mapping Better Than Google Maps?

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A few days ago the Scobleizer highlighted a Swiss equivalent to Google Maps.

Having had a play around with it, I’m definitely impressed. It combines both the overhead photography with the maps, by highlighting ground features with icons and symbols where required. More than that, it links to a wealth of information related to the icons. On top of all that it scrolls around and zooms in and out smoothly.

However, it is only really useful if you’re planning on visiting Switzerland…