So Delta has a cute “We’re Experiencing Some Turbulence” error message when they have an internal error on their website. I’ve seen this error many times before, I think the first time I chuckled a bit.

The other day I was enjoying the new Wi-Fi Delta offers in some of their flights. I checked my email, my facebook account, everything worked great. Then it occured to me to check my delta account. I was wondering if they credit your miles after take off or later when you land (yeah I was bored). Suddenly, I get the familiar error message; “We’re Experiencing Some Turbulence“. I go, “oh crap” what’s going on? For a couple of seconds I forgot I was getting an error message for a website, and thought I was reading a message about my flight, a problem serious enough that they bothered to notify me via the new Wi-Fi connection.

Now I did say it was a couple of seconds, of course I quickly realized this had nothing to do with my flight. But for a couple of seconds I did get a bit freaked out by the message, specially seeing it on my browser. It got me thinking; how did my brain go into alert mode that quick when I know better?

It was all about context.

The context in this situation is this; traveling on Delta flight, on the official Delta website, checking my account and current flight information and then getting a message mentioning a very specific phrase about air travel. Obviously, if I get this message at my home, the train or the airport there’s no problem. Everything changes once I’m on a situation that is directly related to the term used in the error message.

So it’s probably not a good idea to keep these cute error messages, when you think that there’s a new context for use of this site. Before it wasn’t possible to read this from a plane but now it is. It just highlights how sometimes when you consider usability, you have to think about all the possible scenarios that your users will be in while interacting your application.

BTW, I’d love to hear from other people on potential error messages that might be scary in other contexts.

I have to say, the most difficult part of preparing this presentation was trying to figure out the Spanish version of common programming words and concepts. Part of the problem is that when I was learning how to program in Panama (when I was around 10-12 years old) all of my resources; magazines, books, etc where all in English. So I never knew that array is “arreglo”, that a developer is called a “desarrollador”, or what the corresponding word for loop is. It would be really nice if there was some type of resource out there with a table with all these terms, and maybe other languages. One challenge is that it seems not all of these words are “settled”. I noticed some people were still pretty comfortable with the English versions, while others used the Spanish ones exclusively. Also, there are a lot of emerging technologies and concepts in Computer Science which I think still don’t have Spanish translations. Pretty much a more difficult challenge than I expected.

One more thing, JavaFX has changed a lot in the last year. When I did this presentation, I didn’t cover how much effort has gone into optimizing this technology or the new changes to the animation API (like the deprecated dur keyword). There is a preview JFX SDK coming out next month, and you can sign up for it at javafx.com. I didn’t attend JavaOne this year, so I don’t know all the details, but I’m hoping the SDK comes with some of the tooling that Sun has promised. Designer level tools are key to this technology’s success. I hope to make a blog post with a quick review of the SDK once it comes out.

We all went to Disney’s Magic Kingdom last weekend, and I like this picture we took of the castle at night. Makes it look a bit spooky.

I was on the way back from a trip, and at the JFK airport I decided to buy a couple of things for my girls. I picked an origami book and a plush “emperor” penguin doll. The lady at the counter just rings up the penguin and it comes up as totaling a billion dollars (including taxes)!

The poor lady at the counter couldn’t cancel the order for some reason, so she called another lady to help her, who called their manager, who called the main finance person, who then called some guy. I think they had like 5 people trying to figure out what happened to this register.

They took me to another store to pay for the item, which cost about 6$. It’s kind of funny, but I would have thought these cash registers wouldn’t even charge over a million dollars, specially at a store like this.

I’ve been in India this week, and haven’t had much time to update the blog. I was in Mumbai until yesterday, and today I’m in Hyderabad. A gallery of the current pictures I’ve collected so far is here.

It’s been a great trip. Everybody is very friendly here, and we had a chance to visit a lot of Mumbai on Sunday. Mumbai is a very interesting place, the density of the population is unbelievable. We saw a lot of extreme poverty, but we also saw a lot of happy people. The picture in the blog post is one of my favorites. Just a kid with his dad having fun in their motorcycle. BTW, this is a very dangerous but common practice in India. I saw up to 4 people in a small motorcycle, wearing no helmets!

Hyderabad is pretty different. Still a lot of people, but not to the scale on Mumbai. It also seems somewhat more modern, with very lavish stores and malls all over the place. Hopefully I can capture some of the city before we head back home this Saturday. I’m really looking forward going back home because I deeply miss my family. Can’t wait to see Roxana and the girls soon!!!!

Uploaded some of my pictures from my recent trip to Calgary. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to look around the city, so the selection is pretty limited. I was able to go skiing at the Olympic Park on the last night I was there, but aside from that, most of my time was spent in our Calgary building.