Stingy Scholar has collected a list of links to language study websites for less-popular languages (think Greek, Korean and Icelandic).
Recommended for comparison and (if you language is on the list) for the study.
Yakov Fain writes (from experience) about good and bad aspects of Russian programmers for outsourcing.
I left Russia well before American companies thought of trusting russian (or indian) programmers. But I remember the software and ingenious hacks written back then by my friends to work with limited computing resources available. I participated in programming competitions and summer camps, where school kids learned and applied concepts that are only taught on advanced level of university education in other countries.
If you speak more than one language and have a blog, join the Carnival of Blog Translation.
I am not a translator, but I do speak (and write) English and Russian. I will be participating. The next step is to figure out whether I should do it from Russian into English or from English into Russian. Maybe I can even do both. Certainly a translation practice could not go astray.
I used to rave to everybody about how good ProcessExplorer from Sysinternals was for technical troubleshooting. Oops, I guess I was too loud.
The new license terms state:
A commercial license is required to use the software in any way not covered above, including for example:
Use of the software for technical support on customer computers This license does appear in ProcessExplorer 10.05. The license is not yet in my other favourite tool (FileMon), but I assume it will get rolled out with the next release.
Russ Olsen (via Michael Baum) writes about tools to use in production, when ones does not have access to tools. Specifically, when one does not have access to tools like Eclipse IDE.
He mentions a good list of tools, though he has a bit too much praise about Strace. To quote:
Ever wonder why your program can’t open that one file? Use strace to find out precisely which file it is trying to open and the exact identity of the error.