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  • 1 min read

Machine translation: Funny!

The highly anticipated Mac OS X "Tiger" arrived in my hot little hands, and I've spent most of the day installing it (2 hours) and getting everything to work again (6 hours and counting.) One of the highly touted new features is "Dashboard" which is a "not quite as good as" knock-off of Konfabulator. One of the widgets is a 'translation widget" to translate from one language to another. I've no idea whether the translation is on board or being outsourced to a web site. It works pretty well, but you can have fun with it, by translating the same phrase back and forth.

"Why are you looking at me?" "¿por que usted me esta mirando?" "why you are watching to me?" "¿por que usted esta el mirar a mi?" "why you are to watch at me?" "¿por que usted esta el reloj en mi?" "why you are the clock in me?" "¿por que usted esta el reloj en mi?"

At which point it stabilized asking me about the clock in me. Ok, so some of those hours were spent playing around! Technorati Tags: mac, osx, funny

  • 1 min read

LinkedIn: Highly connected?

Picture 1-1 Interesting: I can reach 1.1 Million people through my 125 connections on LinkedIn, and there are a total of 2.1 million people registered. So I can reach one out of two. My statistics are not good enough to analyze the significance of that, but it is a bit surprising. Technorati Tags: interesting, linkedin

  • 1 min read

Great new OS X Software Releases

Two of my all time favorite Mac OS X applications just came out with new releases: Adium X is a beautiful multi-IM- service client. It's based on GAIM but with a true OS X user interface. For PC users, it's kind of like Trillian but nicer! They just came out with a new version. The one thing everyone hasn't done yet is to add Skype IM support. They are coming on strong as a competitive IM network. Picture 1-4 Ecto is a beautiful multi-blog-service authoring tool, in other words, it gives you a nice and rich edior for your posts. They also have just come out with a new release. For me the key new feature is Technorati Tags support. Picture 2-1 Recommended! Technorati Tags: blog, cool, mac, osx

  • 1 min read

Too much good stuff: makes me feel inadequate :-)

I saw this in the Wall Street Journal:

"Marcos Weskamp, a 27-year-old Web designer in Tokyo, created a graphical interface1 for Google News as a way to see how much attention is given to individual stories. A headline that has appeared in several publications is represented by a large box, while a story that is less widely covered shows up as a smaller square. The boxes are grouped by color into categories like business and entertainment." - Wall Street Journal, subscription needed.

What a totally cool idea, and beautifully implemented! Technorati Tags: cool, UI

  • 2 min read

[GEEK] The BIG LIE of certificate checking

Maybe you've read or heard my rants about what has become known as the "Scary Dialog Box" that users see when the run a Java application without a valid certificate. And if you have used BlogBridge, you will have seen it and many of you have asked what the heck it means, and I am sure many more have chosen not to run BlogBridge because of it. Sun has heard this complaint from many many people and is now trying to fix the problem, by introducing this new alternative dialog box to report the same thing. There's a post and a thread about this here. Here's what you see if your application is signed with a verified certificate: Is this an improvement? Yes. Is it good enough? No! IMHO the whole idea of using certificates to sign applications is fatally flawed. It provides illusory security. As a small developer, all I have to do to make it go away is to spend some number of hundreds of dollars to get a certificate from Verisign or one of the many other CAs. When I do this, the message then becomes this: How is the user any more secure? Any malware developer could do the same thing. Of course they are smart enough so their company name wouldn't show up as " Malware Developer" and the application wouldn't be called "Big Bad Virus." How is the user to know? So my problem with this whole signed application certificate thing is that it gives the user a very false sense of security. Technorati Tags: java, security, webstart

  • 1 min read

Happy Birthday Dave!

Picture 1-3 Long time readers of this blog (yes, I can say that now, it's been 2 years or so 🙂 know that I am a Dave Winer fan and a daily reader of Scripting News. In yesterday's posts, Dave talks about life and death, honest, open, sincere, like no one else can: "What's it like to die? Some people believe they know, but that's just a belief. You won't know for sure until it happens to you. And that, my friends, is both the curse and the blessing of humanity. It's the curse because it haunts each of us from the age of seven or eight when it first hits us that we 're going to die too." (from Morning Coffee Notes, Scripting News.) I remember, but for me it happened around age 11 or 12, but it was the same experience. Anyway , it's Dave's birthday today, so this post is in his honor. As it happens Dave and I are almost the same age. For me the big five-oh is coming in about 6 months. So Dave, Mazel Tov on your birthday, and I hope to still be reading you when we both are eighty!

  • 1 min read

Gmail spam filtering degraded?

In the last few weeks or so, I've noticed a marked increase in the number of spam emails that are making it into my Gmail inbox. It would be very interesting to know how the spammers vs. Google arms race is going. I've got to believe that Google is working hard on the problem, but given that this was one of the main benefits, at least for me, of going to Gmail, it is a bit of a worry. Anyone else notice this? p.s. This blog posting is a classic "cc: World" message. I want to ask everyone who I might know who is using Gmail, but boy would it be annoying to actually send an email to all of them! Technorati Tags: gmail, security

  • 1 min read

Hacking the papal election

I have to admit to being fascinated with the Vatican, and the ancient , elaborate traditions and rules that surround the papacy. Bruce Schneier, in his (excellent) monthly newsletter had a really interesting discussion about the rules and procedures that have been set down (and fairly recently updated) for the papal election:

"As the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, people like me wonder about the election process. How does it work, and just how hard is it to hack the vote?" (from Crypto-Gram)

Did you realize that the Vatican publishes the complete election rules online? It is quite interesting, if nothing else, to see how detailed they are, and that they are in (the Pope's) first person:

"After careful reflection I have therefore decided that the only form by which the electors can manifest their vote in the election of the Roman Pontiff is by secret ballot, in accordance with the rules set forth below. This form offers the greatest guarantee of clarity, straightforwardness, simplicity, openness and, above all, an effective and fruitful participation on the part of the Cardinals who, individually and as a group, are called to make up the assembly which elects the Successor of Peter." (from UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS)

  • 1 min read

Who thought of it first? Who cares?

Microsoft and Apple are arguing about who came up first with the idea of having a pervasive search capability built into the OS Apple is shipping it imminently in Tiger, and Microsoft, eventually , in Longhorn. Well let's see: Windows had a broken Find command in the start menu forever. Apple has had find in the finder forever. Microsoft was talking about this kind of pervasive Find capability since Cairo.

"As described by Nash, the Cairo directory will maintain separate stores for files and the directory, but the file system will be extensible so users can add attributes, such as who created it, to a file identifier. The directory will be able to search for objects using those attributes, according to Nash." (from a Network World article of 4/8/96 - 9 Years ago!)****

I say, who cares? It is mind boggling that it's taken them this long to actually make it into the OS. Both Apple and Microsoft are way late. I also say, the only thing that matters is shipping the functionality to customers, and looking at it that way, clearly Apple gets props over Microsoft.