Mention “Russia” at any cocktail party, and someone will quickly inform you of Churchill’s epic description that Russia “is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But they always forget Churchill added the remark that there is a key
to that enigma-contained, mystery-wrapped riddle ride. Churchill
was speaking about the difficulty of predicting Russia’s actions in
response to the outbreak of World War II (which happened for the British
in 1939 - two years earlier than the American history books have it).
The key that Churchill had in mind was “the self-interest of the
Russian people”, but there are other keys to understanding the behavior
of people who live in Russia.
We’ll
get back to Russia in a minute. For now, consider a recent bug
report against the Chrome browser. The Chrome browser is
important to mobile developers for several reasons, foremost among them
that Chrome recently surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to become
the world’s most popular browser. In addition, Google has clarified its long-term plan: Chrome will become the standard browser on Android 4.0 and above.
The
current status is that Chrome for Android Beta can be installed from
Android Market. It does not yet replace your Android browser, and you
can have both on your Android Ice Cream Sandwich or later device.
Google’s focus is on getting feedback on Chrome for Android Beta, and
improving the software until it is able to replace the current browser.
Bug reports are the way to do both those things. You can
search or file bug reports against Chrome at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list and against Android at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list .
Most
smartphones are single user devices, but the desktop version of Chrome
has a setting (reached by entering the url chrome://chrome/settings/)
that lets you keep track of multiple users. That way, everyone can have
their own bookmarks and other configuration data. Users can choose
their avatar icon. One of the standard icons is a
cheeseburger, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: the cheeseburger icon in the Chrome browser
The Chrome bug report that I’m describing here is http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id
Figure 2: blown up burger icon, plus annotated image from the bug report
Why
would anyone submit such a bug? Whimsy has a long tradition in software
development. The default contact picture in Microsoft Outlook 2010 is a
silhouette of Bill Gates's mugshot
picture from his 1977 traffic arrest, for example. The Chrome
engineers played along with the fun, adding comments to the bug report
like “Keep
in mind that it would be harder to see both the cheese and the meat
clearly if the cheese were between the meat and the lettuce, where it
belongs. Sometimes we have to make these difficult sacrifices to improve
usability.” Someone
dug up a picture from McDonalds of a burger with similar low altitude
cheese positioning. Many subsequent comments in the report are
hilarious. People started submitting designs for a new burger
icon, and a guy in Australia claims that they put beetroot on their
burgers (horrifying, if true).
I
wanted to get a comment from the burger bug submitter himself for this
blog post, so I emailed him. The burger bug submitter is a student
and a web designer whom I’ll call “Eugene” (because that’s his name).
He lives in a small town in Russia, about 600 miles east of
Moscow. It’s wonderful how the internet brings practical jokers
together from across the world. Eugene emailed back to say he did
not want to be interviewed, probably in the mistaken belief that I
deprecated his work rather than admiring it. The last line of his email
(perhaps) holds the key to Eugene’s motivation in filing the burger bug
report. It read simply, in Russian,
Отправлено с iPhone
which translates as
sent from my iPhone
And there you have it. A riddle inside a mystery, wrapped in a cheeseburger, solved.
Peter van der Linden
Android Technology Evangelist
Randy Ksar (DJ_Ksar)
on:
SQLCipher for Android, and You!
