Hello (again) Virgin Mobile. Good bye Virgin Mobile?

After nearly a week of wasting my time with Virgin Mobile Canada,I am giving it my best last try using hard-learned customer support skills:

….Follow up to the phone call on Thursday and lack of returned call.

I am unable to activate my new HTC Wildfire S phone on a pre-paid plan. I enter . . . →Read More:Hello (again) Virgin Mobile. Good bye Virgin Mobile?

Apple’s Catch-22 of moving countries

I moved from USA to Canada with my iPad (among other things). I have a bunch of iPad apps and I keep buying new ones. Not any more. Since I updated my banking details,my iTunes account stopped working.

I cannot pay for apps with my USA iTunes account,since the address for the Credit . . . →Read More:Apple’s Catch-22 of moving countries

Talk me through the menu –recipe app idea

Recipe and cooking apps are aplenty,but it is hard to use an app while cooking and having wet or dirty hands. This may not be a big deal to experienced cooks,but for the beginners it is a catch 22. They want to follow the recipe,but get lost between steps,timing and multiple . . . →Read More:Talk me through the menu –recipe app idea

Say your name –idea for podcasters

I listen to a lot of podcasts on many different topics. Most of them have nothing in common –except for one thing:they butcher the names of people (cough JavaPosse cough) Those mispronounced names could be of people sending comments,of known people in the community or just some other strangers.

Seems like . . . →Read More:Say your name –idea for podcasters

Prince2 embedding –by stealth

I am studying for Prince2 foundation exam and it is very obvious that Prince2 is expected to be introduced from the top down. The embedding –which means introducing Prince2 into an organization –talks about securing executive commitment,building high level strategies and other nonsense high-commitment steps. And the corresponding templates are all overwrought, . . . →Read More:Prince2 embedding –by stealth

Gamification:new term,old idea,still useful

Gamification can be roughly explained as applying game mechanics to the real-world scenarios in order to entice people towards particular goals. This subject (new field?) has been getting a lot of attention lately. It has not hit popular press quite yet,but seems to be gathering steam fast. Companies such as Foursquare use the concepts . . . →Read More:Gamification:new term,old idea,still useful

My guest post about uncorpora project at TAUS blog

I was asked to guest blog for TAUS about my research/work project UNCORPORA. The article has now gone live. It might be interesting for people interested in UN languages,natural language processing or (by following links) XML geeks.

. . . →Read More:My guest post about uncorpora project at TAUS blog

Bulk processing Lotus Notes database

This article is for a niche audience even smaller than my usual readers. There are not that many Lotus Notes developers;even smaller is a number of Lotus Notes coders who have bulk integration/migration needs. But some use cases do exist.

I have started (and probably finished) a small GitHub project that demonstrates how to . . . →Read More:Bulk processing Lotus Notes database

Injecting BidiChecker to test Arabic web pages

Google has just announced the release of BidiChecker –an open source tool to automatically test Arabic web pages for issues related to bidirectional support. This is a great news,as bidirectional support is always a huge problem and requires both deep Arabic language understanding and deep technical HTML/CSS understanding,preferably at the same time. . . . →Read More:Injecting BidiChecker to test Arabic web pages

Arabic numerals’non-WYSIWYG

Image via Wikipedia

For my other project,I needed to process some Arabic text that was in HTML file derived from MSWord document.

Everything was going reasonably well,except my regular expressions were not picking section name/numbers sequences in all of the cases,which was causing a problem with the 6-language alignment algorithm.

Normally, . . . →Read More:Arabic numerals’non-WYSIWYG