2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog
hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his
Second
Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this
blog post I became aware of the
llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests.
I decided that I too could do something cool with this.
Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner
modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator
hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to
Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.
Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults
to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through
experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en
. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I
found that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to
interpret it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my
PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non
US-ASCII character input worked.
In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation.
Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.
personal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest 2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my
N-dimensional
Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the
issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the
user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.
Anyway, I did a little
research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and
Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a
Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my
computers had one already. I used
GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer.
GlovePIE is actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.
Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a
Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long
forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on
Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose
in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I
can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a
comparison list of implementations and tried the ones
that support javax.bluetooth.
None of them worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried
bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use
that address.
And I thought that after I found the Wii remote Java library it would be easy... Oh well...
java bluetooth wii technical remote jsr82 tetris polytopetetris wiimote 2007 Jun 4, 4:39David Weinberger (of Everything is Miscellaneous) gives talk about how the Internet has or will change storage and structure of information in a Google Tech Talk.
google video taxonomy david-weinberger 2007 Jun 4, 2:44Presentation on incorporating humans into solving problems computers aren't good at.
ai captcha google video spam human human-computation robot 2007 Jun 4, 1:11A map of the various real world locations depicted in the Ghostbusters movie using Google Maps.
blog map movie ghostbusters nyc google mashup 2007 May 15, 9:16Definition of the elusive hit_parade element in the slash RSS extension.
hit_parade rss slashdot slash slashcode 2007 May 13, 6:59Presentation on graph visualization.
data information design google video visualization graph 2007 May 13, 5:11An presentation on 'spimes' objects that are Internet addressable and produce information about themselves and their surroundings
spime google video presentation cyberpunk uri information web technology future 2007 May 13, 12:16My parents and grandmother came to visit the weekend before this current weekend, starting Friday May 4th. They arrived via their new motor-home which is quite the machine. Of course its my parents
motor-home so its very well decorated inside including drapes and mini-chandelier. I didn't have a memory card for my camera at the time but I'm sure my parents will put up photos on their
new blog dedicated to their motor-home at some point in the future.
At any rate, they parked the motor-home in an
RV park in Issaquah so that Friday night I drove over to them and we ate at the conveniently
closely located
Pogachas. The next day they came over and I showed them the various cool looking things my computer connected to my flat
screen TV can do. This includes
Vista Media Center showing my photos from recent trips and
Google Earth mapping out our respective homes and my recent trips (and Paris). Additionally, we played Wii which, unsurprisingly based on anecdotal evidence
from varied sources across the Internet, was a seeming hit. Mom broke records playing bowling with my dad and I, Dad did an excellent job fishing, and Grandma's slow but steady win's the race
approach to cow racing worked very well.
The next day I drove them to Seattle and we walked around Pike's Place. My parents made dinner that night at my place which was very good and made my apartment actually smell like cooked food. Also,
we exchanged Christmas gifts. For the past two years I've flown back to my parents' house for Christmas and ended up with gifts I couldn't take with me in both directions. Those I left at their house
they drove up and I was able to give them the ones I left at my place. They started the drive back the next day. I really enjoyed seeing them here.
motorhome family personal nontechnical 2007 Apr 11, 9:22Short tiny travel guide for Santa Cruz, CA. Found via Turn Here in Google Earth. All places mentioned in the video are great and I totally vouche for them.
geo video santa-cruz coffee food saturn-cafe 2007 Apr 11, 9:12Show Flickr photos on Google Earth. Its pretty neat. Light on features though like no user selection.
googel map flickr photos geo 2007 Apr 11, 5:23Historical maps available for Google Earth
map mashup google history visualization reference research via:swannman 2007 Apr 9, 11:18Video of a 500kV switch opening. Shocking!
video electricity google 2007 Apr 8, 9:05Geotagging used in your delicious tags so you can plot your delicious links on Google Earth.
make article blog delicious google geo tag tagging hack mashup map 2007 Apr 8, 3:05Shortcut Tag?
I just saw this on
another user's delicious links:
a link to ESV search that's
tagged with, among other things, "shortcut:esv". When viewed on del.icio.us there's a text box that lets you search using that link. I hadn't seen this before, but it seems pretty cool and I'm
surprised I hadn't seen it previously. A delicious post with such a tag ends up looking like the following:
I tried searching for information on this and I've found
other delicious users doing the same thing,
but nothing about the tag itself. If you know any information especially official information from del.icio.us itself please post links in reply to this post. So without further preface here's what
I've learned about the del.icio.us shortcut tag.
How-to
To get a search box in your del.icio.us links make a post that satisfies the following requirements:
- One of the tags must begin with the text 'shortcut:'. You can have more text following that in the tag if you like but it must at least start with 'shortcut:'.
- The 'url' you post must be a shortcut url rather than an actual URL. It must contain a '%s' with a lowercase 's'. When you enter text into the textbox on the del.icio.us page the text will
replace the '%s' after being percent-encoded. For example 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s' is the shortcut url for Google and if you type 'foo bar' into the textbox the URI you will
navigate to would be 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foo%20bar'.
Complaints
This is neat but I do have a few complaints:
- The text from the textbox is percent-encoded before replacing the '%s'. Most sites use application/x-www-form-urlencoded
which encodes spaces as '+' rather than '%20'.
- The shortcut url format seems to be taken from Mozilla's Firefox Custom Keywords. Its a shame it wasn't based on something more
adaptable like the OpenSearch URL template syntax.
- A '%s' in the url means technically what you're submitting to del.icio.us isn't a URI as defined by the standard.
- Allowing text after 'shortcut:' means you can't look at all of a user's shortcut using this tag.
The next step is to create a tool to sync my
IE7 search providers with my shortcuts saved to delicious...
technical howto tagging tool tag delicious 2007 Apr 2, 11:50Google Base lets you add items to Google in a database like fashion. You add items of a particular type where the type is defined by you as consisting of various properties.
google base metadata database 2007 Mar 13, 1:29Google will help you out sharing scientific information by shipping harddrives with terabytes of your info to some destination. In return they get a copy of your data. Interesting to note it costs
less to ship harddrives then transfer the data over the
article p2p offline data transfer google 2007 Feb 8, 3:22Don't you hate it when someone implements your idea before you?
yahoo rss pipes feed review article 2006 Nov 13, 11:50This is awesome because its built as a constant into the Google Calculator. So try something like: http://www.google.com/search?q=answer+to+life+the+universe+and+everything+%2F+2
google search humor answer life-the-universe-and-everything hhgttg