2007 Jul 12, 8:40ONN news story on the crash of the Internet. I blame that Mac the guy was using.
humor news onion video internet 2007 Jul 11, 9:54Stats on who uses social networks.
research reference statistics social web 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 27, 11:27RFC defining a registry of string sorts that other future RFCs may reference.
rfc reference ietf internet protocol registry collation sort string locale 2007 Jun 25, 3:13I keep seeing 'Ozzie' on emails and such now due mainly to
Ray Ozzie who is now the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft and his brother
Jack Ozzie. Whenever I see his name I think of
Ozzie from Chrono
Trigger. He was one third of a trio of villains, the other two being Flea and Slash. I feel like I should be thinking of the
Ozzy for
which this Ozzie was named but I really don't.
My next thought on Ozzie is
the Scottish guy who went to my high school. He'd shout
'Ozzie! Ozzie! Ozzie!' to which listeners were compelled to respond 'Oi! Oi! Oi!'. The wikipedia article on the chant has some thoughts on the
origins but I suppose at Microsoft it could take on entirely new meaning. I really hope I'm someday in a meeting with Ray or Jack Ozzie and have the opportunity...
ozzy personal ozzie random nontechnical 2007 Jun 21, 4:12Info on obtaining a .museum domain name.
internet reference museum tld domain 2007 Jun 21, 2:38Unspun is a social list creation website from Amazon. For instance, you could create a list named '
Most Desired Features for Next Version of Internet Explorer' and users of Unspun fill in and
rank the answers. There's a mix of serious answers that are excellent suggestions, fan-boy answers that are lame, uninformed answers that are already implemented, and hilarious answers that are
awesome. The following is the very short unsorted list of the awesome suggestions.
-
Innovative Anti-Phreaking Technology
-
Given the work done in IE7 on anti-phishing, subsequent work on anti-phreaking just makes sense.
-
AXELROD 2.8 Acceleration with XML Bindings
-
I'm not sure what AXELROD 2.8 is but accelerating it sounds good. Also I enjoy binding things to XML so...
-
Larger Buttons for My Mighty Fingers
-
For maximum humor this should be read by Richard Horvitz as Zim of Invader Zim. This
one makes me laugh every time I read it.
amazon personal ie humor nontechnical 2007 Jun 20, 1:05A tool that lets you edit HTML & CSS in realtime with views rendered in IE and Firefox side by side.
browser ie ie7 firefox mozilla css debug html free software download tool tools web 2007 Jun 17, 11:59I expected more from Safari -- more like Opera. There weren't many exciting features to convert me.
apple article safari internet browser arstechnica review 2007 Jun 17, 10:40FTA: "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these
intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could de
ai article human intelligence internet philosophy evolution essay scifi technology science future singularity 2007 Jun 15, 3:44Info on the format of the MIME type that contains data from an HTML form submission of enctype multipart/form-data.
form html mime multipart encoding rfc reference internet ietf 2007 Jun 14, 9:55Recently released Request For Comments documents from the IETF
ietf reference internet rfc rss feed 2007 Jun 14, 9:52RSS feed from the IETF of the recently submitted drafts.
ietf rss feed draft rfc internet reference 2007 Jun 11, 2:41A blog post on the topic of cookie limits in wininet and IE.
http ie ie7 wininet cookie cookies network blog microsoft article 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 6, 4:59A list of free web based language translation services including language guessing which I think is neat.
dictionary translation tool language reference free internet 2007 Jun 5, 5:50Firefox's notes on their implementation of the OpenSearch description.
api browser firefox internet search opensearch programming reference mozilla mycroft specification 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 May 31, 11:11An article from newscientist about videogame avatars. There's a slideshow with side by sides of people and their avatars.
internet videogames avatar culture article photos 2007 May 22, 3:22I've created an
update to the IE7 feed display.
After working on my
update to the XML source view I tried running my resourcelist program on other IE DLLs including ieframe. I found that
one of the resources in ieframe is the XSLT used to turn an
RSS feed into the IE7 feed display.
My first thought for this was that I could embed enclosures into the feed display. For instance, have controls for youtube.com videos or podcast audio files directly in the feed display. However, I
found that I can't use object or embed tags that rely on ActiveX controls in the page or in frames in the feed display.
With that through I decided I could at least add support for some RSS extensions. Thanks to
IE7's RSS platform which provides a
normalized view of RSS feeds it was really easy to do this. I went to several popular RSS feeds and RSS feeds that I like and took a look at the source to see what extensions I might want to add
support for.
For
digg.com I added support for
their RSS extension which includes digg count, and submitter name and icon. I
added the digg count in a box on the right and tried to make it fit in stylistically. For the
iTunes RSS extension
I add the feed icon, feed author, and descriptions. I was surprised by how much of the podcasts content was missing from the feed view. I also added support for a few other misc things: the
slash RSS extension's section and department, the feed description to the top of the feed display, and the atom author icon.
I wonder what other goodies lurk in IE's resources...
feed res slashdot digg resource itunes technical browser ie rss extension
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