End-of-Year Review: Economic Flashbacks

At the end of each year we tend look back and analyze what has happened. In this post I will rent about economics and the financial crisis again.

It has been another year when all over the news, and in society in general, the financial crisis was a constant topic. We were, again, told that even though things seems to be going a little better we are still in a crisis and we, as a society, have to endure and support each other and accept low salary, extra hours, no Christmas bonuses, and so on.

Fortunately for me, I work for an open minded and realistic company. The rules are simple, if the company does well, the employees do well. If the company doesn't do well, we, the employees will do our best to make it better. However this is not the case for most of the companies in my country, that is Romania.

In my personal opinion there was never a crisis in Romania. At least not directly. We felt the effects of the crisis as exports dropped and banks decided to not loan people and divert all the incomes to their mother countries. But that's it. There were no huge surprises or bankruptcies. There were no big companies closed and unemployment is kept in check at one of the lowest levels in Europe.

However, the curtain of the phrase "We don't have money, it's a crisis!" allowed a lot of companies and politicians to hide behind those words and affect a huge part of the country's population. We knew politicians were stealing huge amount of money, but simple citizens and the media could do little. The president itself may very well be the heart of groups making money end up in the pockets of well placed, influential people. Of course, there are little or no proof, but that's how things work. Take for example the 10 billion dollars payed by the state for a highway that was never built and the money never recovered. Money doesn't evaporate.

So, in the early years of the crisis the government, back then controlled by the democrats, decided to reduce all the salaries and even pensions (though illegally). There was less money coming in to the state's treasury since less exports and external investments reduced the growth we were used to. We, the citizens, thought it will make the politicians steal less. It did not. They stolen probably even more, thinking about the dark times to come, and took away from the people. Well, they payed the price at last year's election, finally they were gone.

2013 was the first full year with a social-liberal-democratic government. An unlikely alliance with one goal, get rid of the democrats and the actual president. They managed the former, unfortunately not the later. I am sure they are also money hungry, and making their part in all of the state's businesses, but at least we stopped hearing about briberies like 40% of a 1 billion dollars highway must go to certain people otherwise the project is assigned to another company willing to pay. We also could observe some legal changes toward a better direction. We've seen that most of the salaries and pensions were reintegrated to the values they had back in 2010 when they were reduced. Some of the illegal cuts were also payed back retroactively.

We also registered a 3-4% economic growth. A very nice figure in my opinion. And an absorption of about 30% of the European funds, compared to about 5% in 2012. A lot of money.

Even though I still do not agree with at least half of the government's actions, at least I can see some of them are good and they are starting to produce positive results.

The private sector is a totally different story. Private companies can do whatever they want and believe me, they are doing huge profits, hidden under the curtain of the crisis slogan. About 40-45% of all the employees in the private sector are working the minimum salary imposed by the law. That is about $250 per month. And from that you have to subtract about 20-30% of different taxes. At the other end of the scale, there are only 2.5% that are earning more than twice the average monthly salary, which is somewhere at 500-600 dollars.

Most employees are kept in the dark, and if they dare to ask for a rise they are simply told "It's a crisis.". Meanwhile many companies are reporting record profits. The people, a huge part of the country's working force, thinks there is no other way, they have to work for the minimum wage. They gave up ... unfortunately.

And the banks are part of all this. They are in no trouble, at least not here in Romania. They probably never were. They are doing just fine. In fact I think they feel very well. All those house loans given before the house crisis are paying off. People continue to pay them. And while in many countries the interest rates were reduced to almost zero, they stayed more or less the same here, except the effects of the mandatory EURIBOR or ROBOR interest rates, which were reduced. But the banks are actually taking more than before. For example, when I bought my  house I payed about 5% EURIBOR + 3% the banks interest rate. Now, EURIBOR 0.3% and the bank's rate is about 4-6%. Yes, I pay less than in 2008, but the bank is getting more.

So, the banks are getting richer and more wealthy while telling us that we should be happy we pay less then before ... sure.

And the proof? Simple. Basically you can not get loans now. The banks are giving only very few loans or only those that are guaranteed by the state. For example if you want to by a car and you have a salary in the top 2.5% of the incomes, you have little chance to buy anything but the cheapest cars out there (I refer to new cars). It doesn't matter you could easily pay the car in less then 2 years, they will not risk it. Why should they? They can sit back, do nothing for the next 20-30 years while all those huge house loans will be payed. Good business. They are still supporting small credits, 200-300 dollars if you want refrigerator or a new TV or a new phone, but basically that's it. And they are doing that because the risk basically is zero. If you don't pay, the law permits them to take 30% or so of your salary and they will, in a couple of years, get the money back. And if they wont, they've lost almost nothing anyway.

So, it is so sad when you can see through the curtain of the crisis and see how so many people are exploited unjustly and kept working for minimum wage just because there is a fictional crisis out there...

Programmer's Diary: The Bluetooth Hell Continues on Linux

In my previous post I described an elaborate way to configure your bluetooth device on the badly behaving Bluez and newer kernels. Well, things seems to be changing again.

My distribution, Sabayon, pushed yesterday a newer pre-release of Bluez 5.... something. Now pairing actually works from KDE, however the bluetooth service segfaults when I connect my keyboard. Mouse connects though without a problem.

What is even funnier is that even though the service goes bye-bye, and I can not remove or add devices, once connected both mouse and keyboard works, with the service crashed!


csaba ~ # systemctl status bluetooth
bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib64/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: signal) since Fri 2013-12-20 19:08:15 EET; 14s ago
     Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)
  Process: 20461 ExecStart=/usr/libexec/bluetooth/bluetoothd (code=killed, signal=SEGV)
   Status: "Running"

Dec 20 19:08:01 csaba bluetoothd[20461]: Bluetooth daemon 5.12
Dec 20 19:08:01 csaba bluetoothd[20461]: Starting SDP server
Dec 20 19:08:01 csaba systemd[1]: Started Bluetooth service.
Dec 20 19:08:01 csaba bluetoothd[20461]: Bluetooth management interface 1.3 initialized
Dec 20 19:08:15 csaba systemd[1]: bluetooth.service: main process exited, code=killed, status=11/SEGV
Dec 20 19:08:15 csaba systemd[1]: Unit bluetooth.service entered failed state.

So it seems to be no problem, right? If the service crashes after my devices manage to connect, all I have to be careful about is to first connect my mouse, and only then my keyboard. Wrong! Bluetooth devices have this habit of entering in a sleep mode after a few minutes, so they reconnect automatically after an idle period of time when moved or touched. I must have my service up and running at that point.

In lack of a better idea ... I mean in lack of a lot of free time, because ideas I have plenty, here is a one liner crontab entry that will issue a start to your bluetooth daemon. Just put it in /etc/crontab


* * * * *       root    systemctl start bluetooth

If the service is already running, start will do nothing, if it does not, it will start it. Still, I have to remember to enable my mouse first, but in the worst case scenario I will need to wait one minute to connect the keyboard... or grab my other, non-bluetooth, keyboard and restart the service.

Linux Tip: How to Pair your Bluetooth Device when Using Bluez 5.x and Kernel 3.11-12

It seems like there are problems with Bluez 5.x and newer kernels, especially post 3.10 ones. Since 3.13 is not yet out, these tips apply to kernel 3.11 and 3.12.

I specifically tested and applied the solution below to pair my Microsoft keyboard and mouse. My specifications are as follows:

[bluetooth]# version
Version 5.10
csaba ~ # uname -a
Linux csaba 3.12.0-sabayon #1 SMP Tue Dec 3 15:10:14 UTC 2013 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

So if you were looking for things like:
I can't pair my bluetooth keyboard on Linux
My bluetooth mouse won't work on newer kernel
My bluetooth headset pairs but doesn't connect
My phone can be discovered but not connected or paired over bluetooth
... then here is how to do it with bluetoothctl.

csaba ~ # bluetoothctl 
[NEW] Controller 00:15:83:3D:0A:57 csaba-0 [default]
[NEW] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000

Start bluetoothctl. Mine found the keyboard automatically with it set in discoverable mode. However, it is possible you will need to enable scanning. Just write:

[bluetooth]# scan on

If it is not showing up at this point, you may have problems with your bluetooth receiver or the device is not set in discoverable mode (with that "connect" button pressed).

After my device was found I wen on immediately and tried to pair it. However, it asked for no PIN or anything, it just timed out with an error that I failed to provide correct PIN code. This made me think, maybe I missed something. And I did.

[bluetooth]# default-agent
No agent is registered

There was no default-agent. Now, I do not exactly know what these agents are, so if you know, feel free to comment below with details. However we can easily start one.

[bluetooth]# agent on
Agent registered

And we try to pair now...

[bluetooth]# pair 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74
Attempting to pair with 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Connected: yes
[agent] PIN code: 241178
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Modalias: usb:v045Ep0762d0013
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Modalias: usb:v045Ep0762d0013
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 UUIDs has unsupported type
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Paired: yes
Pairing successful
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Connected: no

So we are halfway there. Paired, but not yet connected. I also noted at this point, that the "connecting" LEDs on my devices were still blinking. So the keyboard and mouse did not yet know about the computer. But I could see them...

[bluetooth]# info 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74
Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74
        Name: Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000
        Alias: Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000
        Class: 0x002540
        Icon: input-keyboard
        Paired: yes
        Trusted: no
        Blocked: no
        Connected: no
        LegacyPairing: yes
        UUID: Service Discovery Serve.. (00001000-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
        UUID: Human Interface Device... (00001124-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
        UUID: PnP Information           (00001200-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
        Modalias: usb:v045Ep0762d0013

So I went on and trusted the device.

[bluetooth]# trust 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Trusted: yes
Changing 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 trust succeeded

Then connecting worked. The blinking LEDs turned off. Great. And the connection remained ON.

[bluetooth]# connect 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74
Attempting to connect to 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Connected: yes
Connection successful
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Modalias: usb:v045Ep0762d0013
[CHG] Device 7C:1E:52:A8:47:74 Modalias: usb:v045Ep0762d0013

I did reboot my computer and the settings are persistent. I know these devices are working correctly on my computer, I had them paired and working for the past year or so. In fact, if you had them paired before you upgraded to 3.11-12 kernels, you will have them working. Only pairing fails.

I could not find out a way to make pairing work from KDE or other desktop environments.

I hope I could help some of you, and save you some precious time.

Have a nice day.

Programmer's Diary: Global Day of Code Retreat Retrospective

This year, 2013, I was the one organizing the Global Day of Code Retreat event in Timisoara, Romania. It was an amazing day and this is a small article to show everyone how I perceived the event.

First the Bad Things

1. I felt quite under pressure, especially at the beginning, so many things to think about...
2. We almost remained without food ... I forgot to order it in time. Crazy!
3. There were less then expected people :(

Now the Good Things:

1. I learned a great deal about facilitating and organizing events.
2. The event went well, we managed to ditch all obstacles.
3. I was amazed how well some participants perceived the event.

And now let's talk about what actually happened throughout the day. I planned for 6 sessions, we managed to do 5. I thought there will be quite a few people familiar with TDD, there were probably 1-2. But that is not important, we felt good, programmed and learned a lot.

Below are some of the most memorable quotes from attendees, told at the closing circle. I am proud of each of them, and I am proud I could help them open their minds to new concepts and ideas.

What did you learn today?

"There are different, successful ways to write software."
"It was the first time I actually did TDD so I learned quite lot about the process itself."
"Maybe we should think about more designing tests and less about designing code."

What surprised you the most today?

"I could write working code without the debugger."
"In the last session I felt my mind blowing. I managed to finally think about tests without thinking about all the production code's design. It was amazing."

What will you do differently next time?

"I will start reading some books."
"I will start learning other programming languages to understand the philosophy behind their culture."
"I will try to write more often tests before code and not after."
"I will try out some coding katas."
"I will try to take baby steps and let my tests guide my design."
"I will research a good testing framework for .NET."

*quotes are approximate

I am proud I could today facilitate an event where programmers had the opportunity to learn and they took it and learned great things. I was surprised and pleased by their dedication and openness and they also started quite interesting discussions which led to short brainstorming mini-sessions.

Total headcount:
~7 people from Serbia
~7 people from Timisoara

~7 kids from Coder Dojo (thank you for joining us, it was great)

   2 people from Macedonia
   1 person from Germany
+ 3 organizers and facilitators

I am happy I've met you. See you next year!

Programmer's Diary: Interface Naming

This is a repost from my old blog. Original post date March 15, 2013


There was a twitter thread recently about interface naming. How should you name your interfaces? "IProduct" or "ProductInterface" or in another way? To my surprise the majority of the people who replied to that thread suggested "ProductInterface" and than "IProduct".

I suggested simply "Product".

In my view an interface should be named to reflect an abstraction. When you decided to make an interface you had a good reason to do so. If you didn't, your interface has no reason to exist.

In most cases interfaces abstract a higher, more general concept and they have several implementations. Of course, you can't write two implementationa at once, so at the beginning you will have only one implementation, then when you need another you will have another one.

Let me give you an example from our code at work. One of my colleagues, +Vadim Comanescu , wrote some logic in our application to handle sockets. At the moment of writing it, he defined an interface for the socket. He called it "Socket", no "I"s or "Interface" in it's name. Back then there was only one implementation to it "HttpSocket". It was great, it worked well. Today we needed to use our networking logic and communication modules over a UNIX socket. The solution was simple and done in just a few minutes. We created another implementation for "Socket" called "UnixSocket" and everything worked perfectly.

When we name interfaces we think about the clients, the other classes that are using our interfaces. In our networking module at some point we have something like "function writeToSocket(Socket $socket)". This is obvious. It looks great, it sounds logic and it is easy to understand. And one great thing there is that the client does not know that "Socket" is an interface.

Interfaces belong to the clients and not to their implementations; said Robert C. Martin and I totally agree. In the same way interfaces are like any other classes for the clients. What if you decide to change your interface into an abstract class. Very possible. After a few implementations you observe common code throught the implementations and extract it toward a Template Method design patter. Then... you have to change the name of your - now abstract class - interface into something else. An abstract class called "SocketInterface" has little sense.

And finally, a last thought, "Product" is a great name for an interface and it can be implemented by many many classes representing real-life products, for example "Keyboard" or "Mouse". However, there are some rare cases when you need an interface and you will have only one implementation. In those rare cases, I prefer to name well the interface and add "Impl" or "Implementation" to the the implementing class' name. This has more logic since the programmer writing the interface is most probably the one writing the implementation. However the programmer using the interface may be someone else from a totally different team or company or country. Why should that programmer of the client code know that "Product" is an interface or not. What if at the beginning it was a real object and the original programmer decided later that it should be an interface to better accommodate different implementations inside the "products" module? Why should the clients care? Why should they know?

If you are using a dynamically typed language, like PHP, there is almost no real reason for creating an interface that has only one implementation. Period. You have only one implementation and you are sure you need no other ones? Drop the interface.

Programmer's Diary: Just Good Enough

This is a repost from my old blog. Original post date June 8, 2013.

Some people are sloppy and they are doing too little. Others are perfectionists and they are doing too much. I think the best is to be somewhere in-between, to be just good enough and to create what is just enough. At least this is what I am trying to do each day.

But, doesn't "just good enough" means you are doing only the minimum necessary? Not at all. As any coach would say "it depends".

In most cases it takes the same energy to build something 80% perfect as it takes to build the remaining 20%. Closer you get to perfection harder it becomes to achieve advancement. I did no studies, it's just how I feel about what I do. Now, the question comes: "Is 80% good enough?" sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. If 80% satisfies 95% of the users of the product you are building, you did it. You may want to stop there and start a new product or a new feature. Let time and user feedbac guide you on the remaining 20%.

Other times 80% is not enough. If you build a car and you are unable to provide wheels, you are doomed. Nobody will buy your car. In that case you need some extra percents to achieve a minimum viable product.

The hardest thing is to find the 20% that is both difficult to create and also has little or no interest for the user. I have no recipe to solve the problem but frequent retrospectives on my own activity, feedback from others and some objective analyses can do miracles.

I am always trying to figure out where this good enough margin would be. Based on user feedback, or feedback from my colleagues, boss, wife, friends, etc I try to set for myself a little higher than expected targets both in my job and in my daily life. I always try to provide a little more and keep doing it in a consistent manner.

While this is mostly a good strategy I found that with higher quality comes higher expectations which in turn leads to even higher targets for my "good enough". And that's perfectly natural. What I find the hardest though is realizing when you are doing too much and have to take a step backward. Doing more and more each day will at some point hit your physical limits. When that happens you have to take a step back, take things easier for a while and adjust both your and your users expectations.

Only then, you can get back on track.

Programmer's Diary: Usability Failure

This is a repost from my old blog. Original post date June 9, 2013.

My wife suggested to try and buy eggs from an egg dispenser (vending machine). Not exactly the model on the right, but something similar.

Even though we finally managed to buy the eggs, it was quite an interesting experience. First of all you start by pressing a button to rotate the internal shelfs so that what you want lines up with a sliding door. Each shelf has it's own door.

Than you have to put in the money. We first tried with a 10RON bill for a 3.5RON package. It just refused to take the bill. I can only presume that it had no way to give me the change and this was the reason for the refuse. However there was no indication of such a logic. And yes, I tried a couple different 10RON bills.

Then we went on and found 4 pieces of 1RON bills. After some trial and error it accepted all 4 of them. However I was required to try at least 10 times to insert them. Again, there was no feedback from the machine about the reason why it refused my bills.

Another problem was that there was no way to cancel the operation. So if I inserted 2 bills with success and then if it refused the other 2, I would have no way to get my money back.

Finally I had all my money inserted, a total of 4RON for a 3.5RON package. Now, there were about 10 shelfs with 10 doors. Only 1 or 2 doors actually had any products on them. The trick was that the machine had no idea about which shelfs are full and which one are empty. You had to open the proper door and only that. If you, by mistake, opened a door to an empty shelf, bye-bye money... At least there was a red text with an attention sign telling me this. But I totally think that the decision should be the machine's and not mine. If there is no product on a shelf, just don't let me open the door by mistake and loose my money.

I am wondering how many people can actually use this vending machine without falling in any of the above described usability traps? If you are a software developer or some kind of user interface designer, being it physical UI like a vending machine or a purely virtual one like an interactive web-page, keep in mind that we, the users, just want things to be done quickly and as painlessly as possible. Don't put traps and tricks in our way because we will not use your product the second time.

Programmer's Diary: Extract Variable NetBeans Macro

This is a repost from my old blog. Original post date June 14, 2013

I've got tired of manually extracting local variables so I wrote a little macro to do the job for me. Just copy-paste it into a new NetBeans macro, and add a shortcut to it.

Then, select the code you want to put into a variable, hit your shortcut and watch the magic happen.

---

cut-to-clipboard
split-line
caret-up caret-end-line insert-break
"$newVariable = " paste-from-clipboard ";"
caret-down caret-end-line "$newVariable"
caret-down caret-begin-line
selection-begin-line rem

---

I Just Visited the Most Unique Waterfall in the World

This is a repost from my old blog. Original post date August 26, 2013.

Last week I was watching the news on TV just to discover that according to THE WORLD GEOGRAPHY the most unique waterfall in the world is just about 150 km away from where I live. Being so close it would be a sin not to go and see it. So last Sunday my wife and I went on a drive to visit Bigar Cascade Waterfalls.

The largest city in it's vicinity is Timisoara, where I live. The waterfall itself is located near a small village called Bosovici, exactly on 45 Paralel. There are several ways to get from Timisoara to the Bigar Cascade Waterfalls.

1. The shortest road - Timisoara - Moravita - Oravita - Bigar. It is the shortest road but unfortunately about 1/3 of it is in pretty bad shape. The road is all paved with asphalt, but about 50 km between Moravita and Oravita was repaired so many times that you will not be able to recognize the original layer. It will shake you quite hard. Even though you can go quite fast (80-100 km/h) it will not allow you to push as hard as you would like. The portion Timisoara - Moravita is in very good shape, but being a road that leads to the border with Serbia, it is quite heavily used and again you will find yourself blocked behind some slow car and you will not be able to go fast.
2. The longest road - Timisoara - Recas - Lugoj - Resita - Anina - Bigar. It si about 30-35 km longer than the first option. It has very good road and asphalt quality. The only drawback with it is that Timisoara - Recas - Lugoj is one of the most heavily used roads in the country. So that 60 kms will be pretty uncomfortable to drive.
3. The one I recommend - Timisoara - Buzias - Lugoj - Resita - Anina - Bigar. This is the one I recommend. Road and asphalt quality is very good. It is not heavily used so you will be able to drive at your own pace all the way to Bigar. It is about 20-25 kms longer than the first option but it is arguably the fastest way to get from Timisoara to the Bigar Cascade Waterfalls. It is also the most spectacular road. You start your trip on plain. Then you go through forests, then hills, then mountains and canyons. The most spectacular part is Anina - Bigar where you will be able savor abrupt serpentines on high altitudes in canyons and mountain forests.

But this should be a story about Bigar. Near the road, following some hand-painted road signs you will find a small waterfall hidden in a valley. The easiest way to recognize the entrance is the big 45 Parallel sign "Paralela 45", a big white road sign with blue letters. You will have to pay a visit tax of about 1 Eur for 2 persons (5 RON). A small bridge over the valley will lead you just above the waterfall to a tiny, beautiful miracle of nature.

On one side of this valley is the Bigar Cascade Waterfall in all of it's glory.

After you are tired of hiking on the rocks around the waterfall and taking pictures and admiring this wonder of nature you can get on a short trip (100m) in the forest to find the waterfall's water source.

 

Just follow the water and the path laid to you.

 

After a few minutes you will find the cleanest water you've ever seen. Just perfect for drinking as it surfaces between the rocks.

That's it folks. The Bigar Cascade Waterfalls and it's source.

If you have time and mood after visiting the Bigar Cascade Waterfall you can go and see some of the oldest water mills of these mountains located in and just after the village called Eftimie Murgu, 15 km distance from Bigar. There are 22 small mills, you can visit about 10 of them. It will take about 1-2 hours to walk near the river and find the mills, so be prepared for a long walk in a quite spectacular mountain landscape.

The mills are small, made of wood, and located in the valley created by the water.

They are all similar but slightly different. The most known characteristic of these mills are the horizontal wheels turned by the water.

 

So, if you happen to be in this part of Romania, the Bigar Cascade Waterfall and the water mills are certainly a great place to visit and spend a day in the mountains with spectacular panoramas.

And finally a little warning. Unfortunately we could not find a single decent place to eat. Nor near Bigar or in Bosovici or on the road. So be prepared with some food for the day when you live from Timisoara.

Programmer's Diary: Zombies and Phantoms

This morning when I checked our continuos integration system I spotted that our integration tests are running since a long time. This is unusual because they should finish in 3-4 minutes at most. After some investigation made together with a colleague of mine, we discovered there were about 2000 zombie processes on our build machine...

An hour before the end of this Friday working day I realised that after the changes we made lately to our software, the notification mails telling that a disk pool has been imported missed a key information: the pool's name! It seems like it turned into a phantom and vanished...

... after all, it's 1st of November.

Let's Talk About Animals or Why Genders in Languages are Bad

My native language is Hungarian. It is one of those languages which are hard to pronounce but have an easy grammar. One of the particularities of the Hungarian language is the lack of genders.

However, I live in Romania. Romanian is one of the Latin languages like Italian, Spanish, French, etc. All these languages have something particular in common, the excessive use of genders.

Now, I am writing in English here, a language that found a quite unique and logical balance for use of genders. When you talk about a female person you use the female gender, when you talk about a man you use the male gender, for everything else (objects, animals, etc) there is a "neutral" gender.

English uses genders quite restrictively. There are no different versions of adjectives, substantives or verbs based on gender. So when you say "My dog is tired." it doesn't matter if it's a female dog or a male. If you say "My husband is tired."  you will use the word "tired" in the same way, regardless of the gender of the subject.

In Romanian, and most Latin languages, the problems are much worse ... so let's see how one has to reason when thinking about "My dog is tired.".

1. First, one has to think if the gender of the dog can be determined or if it matters. If it does, the appropriate word for female/male dog will be used. The adjective "tired" will be also used in the appropriate form: "obosita" for female or "obosit" for male. 
2. If the gender of the dog can not be determined, or it is not important in the context of the sentence, the "default gender for the animal dog" has to be used. The default gender for dog is male. But there is no rule for this like in English. It is just random and you have to remember it. Dogs are by default males, cats females, horses males again, chickens female, eagles male ... there is no rule. And some are actually neutral, yes there is a neutral gender also.
3. However, determining the default gender and using the subject in the default gender also depends on the context. If you want to refer to a female dog attending it's puppies, you have to use the female substantive for dog "catea" instead of the male one "caine" and adjust you adjectives accordingly.
4. To complicate things even further, if the number of substantives rises, for example we have "Two dogs are tired" we have to change our adjective for "tired" again, so that the plural and gender adjusted versions are used. Yes, each adjective has four versions just to accommodate this complexity.

I think my colleagues can understand why I sometimes can not make the proper connections in everyday speech. In Hungarian you have no genders. End of rent.

PS: In Romanian even objects have genders ... randomly assigned.

The New Place for My Ideas

Hello everyone. Unfortunately My Opera will be soon closed. Posts, articles and everything else will be moved over here in time.

Welcome.