Spanish language and SMS messages

At the end of the last decade everybody in Spain decided to buy a cell phone. As all foreigners know, Spaniards party and dance flamenco on the streets all day long so cells were very useful to call your friends and locate the next place to dance flamenco. However the voice service was very expensive so the people started using the SMS messaging system. As we don’t have a lot of time to write messages between one glass of sangria and the next one, we created our Spanish SMS language.

The Spanish SMS language makes use of compressed words taking off vowels and shortening expressions. In consequence it is faster to write a message in SMS language and you can pack more information in each SMS.

This SMS language is seen as an aberration for Academics, which are seriously concerned about those simplifications finding their way onto regular Spanish. One of the most widespread problems is that nobody writes SMS messages with accents.

What not everybody knows is that if you want to write proper Spanish on your SMS messages, you will need to pay more for each message.

The technical reason

All the cells in Spain are configured to send messages of 160 characters. However, the real payload limit for an SMS message is 140 bytes. We can encode 160 characters on only 140 bytes using a 7 bit character set.

A bit after the dinosaurs ruled the world, the computers spoke to each other on complete 8 bit words. American people were not entirely happy with this solution. You have plenty of space to encode all English characters on 7 bits so using 8 bits per word was seen as a waste of space. One bit does not seem a lot, but it was actually a big deal when computers could just manage a few kilobytes of memory.

So they took off the first bit and the 7 bit characters sets were born. The most widespread is named ASCII. On 7 bit you can refer to 127 characters but instead of including foreign symbols, American people decided to use the free space for drawing symbols and to control printers. This was a decision what made easier to develop software but it also made sharing information encoded in different character sets a big headache.

On the other hand GSM was an European effort, a lot more concerned about interoperability on the entire region. Instead of using standard ASCII they decided to create a new 7 bit character set removing the useless symbols and control characters and including the special symbols of the European languages. They included German, French, Danish and Finish symbols, but they just included the Spanish symbol “ñ“, essential to write wonderful words as coño,maricastaña,ñoño, guiñapo or moño.

The GSM character set is spoken by all the GSM cellphones on earth. This is how it looks:

On the GSM character set there are all the lowercased French accents but only the lowercased Spanish é. Why they included only one Spanish accent is a mystery to me. It’s useless.

You have probably noticed that this character set has 255 spaces but I said that GSM is a 7-bit character set. It actually was at the beginning, but eventually they decided to extend the character set with a beautiful hack on the system. They allow referring the upper 127 symbols using 14 bits (one control symbol plus the upper symbol). That’s why when you write a ‘[',']‘ or € symbol on your cell it counts as 2 characters instead of one. As you see there is still lot of empty space. Why they didn’t seize the opportunity to include more symbols? No idea.

GSM is also used out of Europe. Can Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Arabic people send messages in their languages? Yes, but they don’t use standard GSM character set. They use UTF-16/UCS2 (Unicode) to encode their symbols. Unicode solve all the problems because it includes on one character set all the symbols of all the present and future real languages  you can think of. Unicode is the character set equivalent to a nuclear power plant.

Unicode requires 2 bytes per character. As we have a maximum payload of 140 bytes, all those countries using Unicode have a limitation of 70 characters per message. This is not a big deal for Korean, Chinese and Japanese people because they can transmit very dense information with their symbols. I guess Russian people have the same problem as we have with Spanish.

What is the problem? Spanish is not a dense language. Using Unicode to write Spanish means we can only use 70 character messages. 70 characters is simply too short. Remember that we already have a very compressed SMS language to deal with the 160 character limitation.

You can set up your phone to send messages in proper Spanish in Unicode. It’s very easy. Why the Spanish cells are not configured by default in Unicode? I guess it would be a nightmare for PR Operator’s department because thousands of people would start complaining about extra cost. Spanish operators charge concatenated messages as independent messages.

There was a nice alternative which was also the ethically correct solution. The operators could have changed their billing processes to allow sending sequences of two or three Unicode-written concatenated messages at the cost of one message. That would have meant that sending 160 character messages of proper Spanish in Unicode would have cost the same as one message. That nice solution would have forced the Operators to assume extra transmission  costs. Let’s say they could lose 0,00001% less. I got that number out of thin air but I don’t think it’s far from reality.

The operators chose between giving the possibility of write proper Spanish in concatenated short messages or ignore the problem and force the people to write bad Spanish.

Everybody knew what happened. In fact using SMS language was used by the operators on their marketing campaigns to attract young people. It was just cool and modern to use it. The operators forced the people to write bad cool Spanish.

So if Spaniards start using SMS-based language while singing flamenco,  remember that part of the problem was that one executive working on a Spanish operator thought that it was a good idea to sacrifice our language in exchange of a bit of extra revenue.

Small laptops

In my recent trip to Taiwan I bought an Asus eee 701. This is the famous cheap, simple, and low powered laptop that is turning the industry upside down.

In my case its improving the way I work. Before having it, I used to carry my thinkpad everywhere with me. I really love this rock solid, super stable laptop, but has two problems. First, even being an ultraportable, it weights 1,4 kg which is too heavy if you are going to carry it always with you. The other problem is that I was using the x40 as my main laptop and I didn’t want to have the risk of losing it or (even worse) losing the data.

With the inexpensive laptop everything changes. It’s almost always with me in my bag because it’s a lot lighter and I use it wherever I have free time. Subways? No problem. As I don’t trust the laptop, I don’t carry sensible information there anymore (all my data is stored online anyway) so I’m less worried.

What kind of use does these small underpowered laptop have? I use mine mainly as a typewriter. I like to go to public areas like parks or crowded streets. Lots of ideas come to my mind while looking the people walking and running around me. These ideas are captured by my fingers and stored in the laptop.

It’s not perfect though. This laptop is cheap and unfortunately the keyboard is one of the places they Asus save money. The keyboard is bad if compared with Thinkpad’s family keyboards which personaly are the best laptop keyboards ever. It’s necessary to hit with energy each one of the keys to be sure that the keyboard is going to detect the letters correctly. Furthermore the keys are tiny, even for my small fingers. I frecuently hit keys I dont want.

That’s the price of convenience. Cheap underpowered laptop for online use and typewriting. Light. Almost disposable and without critical data stored.

Online use? Yes, another feature of the mini laptops is the webcam. These laptops are the perfect videoconferencing tool. The webcam and internal microphone allows you to have a pretty good video quality and decent audio quality without need of external microphones or headphones. And it’s light meaning you can easily move it around.

Three months ago was impossible to find small laptops in Korea but last week I went to Yongsan (Seoul electronic market, the biggest in Asia) and they had small laptops everywhere. Furthermore there have several options, including the new MSI wind which is by far a better deal than the Asus family, not only because the hardware (I don’t care about that anymore) but because the screen and the keyboard look a lot better.

Seoul Firefox 3 release party

Last week I attended the Firefox 3 release party in Seoul, in Daum Headquarters. Daum is the main search engine in Korea, way ahead in market penetration than Google and there were a lot of interesting people related to the Korean Internet world.

The host gave us stickers, food and drinks. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation was here and we spoke about the important role Firefox has from now on, providing a safe and clean browser for the masses.

In the Q&A, I asked a question about the huge problem Firefox faces in Korea. Here the Firefox penetration is very low and there is a good reason: Lots of Korean websites make heavy use of proprietary extensions in the form of Active X controls that can’t be used on Firefox.

I asked Mitchell if the Mozilla foundation has any plans to address this issue and Michelle told us that Firefox will never execute Active X controls because of the huge security hole they create. What they are doing to fix the problem is going through the political way, educating the people who take decisions .  I think is the correct way.

For example, Michelle was in Seoul this week because the next day she was going to attend a meeting with Korean ministers to request them to eliminate the need of the Active X controls in the government websites.

It was a fantastic technological party and hope to soon enjoy firefox 3.1 release party too!

UPDATE: I’ve just added a group picture I founded on flickr