arafalov on November 29th, 2006

I frequently say that public domain books are a great source of further innovation and small business ideas. Today I found another example that brings together several of the themes I track: Language acquisition, Publishing and Public Domain books.
Mark Phillips has taken Tarzan of the Apes book that is now available in public domain [...]

Continue reading about Language learning and public content - ‘I am Tarzan’

arafalov on November 21st, 2006

… is dropping the feature.
I have an iPAQ rx3115 with a built-in WiFi. I had it for a while and it is a nice unit, if one forgives Windows Mobile 2003 (this is possible on a good day). I also have a wireless router, so can download books and generally browse internet from anywhere in [...]

Continue reading about Microsoft’s way of fixing a security issue with a feature

arafalov on November 16th, 2006

Lots of new sightings of CL/NLP technologies since the last update:

On the commercial speech recognition front, Nexidia is currently in beta with phonemes-mapping audio search. But don’t go to the company’s site. Instead, read the explanation and collection of links is in the ResourceShelf’s article.
If, instead of waiting for commercial offerings, you would like to [...]

Continue reading about Computational Linguistics - News update for Nov 15, 2006

arafalov on November 13th, 2006

A great news all around.
I hope Sun will also host a public cross-referencing source code navigator for the code, rather than just a subversion directory. Something like Sorcerer might be a good start. We know the idea is good, because Linux had one for ages.
Oh, and a new line in a resume to strive [...]

Continue reading about Java has gone open source with GPL2

arafalov on November 13th, 2006

I keep hearing the claims that one should try learning a foreign language like children do. Roseta Stone is a famous example of software that convinces people that they can do just that.
I have a couple of problems with that approach.
First one is that even if the immersion method was sufficient, it would have to [...]

Continue reading about Learning language like children do - as if!

arafalov on November 10th, 2006

Amie St is a very interesting business idea with a good execution. They are music discovery and store with a twist - songs start free and the price goes up based on how popular they get. To encourage ratings and downloads, they even pay to the users who discovered good songs early and recommended them [...]

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arafalov on November 7th, 2006

The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society has updated their website. It now looks prettier, runs on more modern technological base and promises better up-to-date information.
This is the next step after the redesign of the society magazine to move forward in times, while preserving the original goals of the Society.
It is good to see the society [...]

Continue reading about RSCDS website refresh

There is a fight brewing between David Rothman of TeleRead and Bill Janssen of Plucker fame. The point of contention (as I understand the issue) is what would be good format to produce e-books in.
Bill’s position is that any format that is not already accepted (specifically not html) is a lock-in and a [...]

Continue reading about On open e-book standards and whether translating to Esperanto will bring more readers?

arafalov on November 3rd, 2006

In my last update on applied computational linguistics, I have written about PodZinger that uses speech recognition to figure out which advertisement to match to the podcast you are searching with their service.
Another company is claiming to do that with songs - Lirix. Their upcoming AdLirix platform is supposed to be so effective that Lirix [...]

Continue reading about Lirix - computational linguistics aspects

arafalov on November 1st, 2006

O’Reilly labs have created a quick, but addictive code quiz that tests programmer’s knowledge based on him being able to look at code example and figure out which book it might have come from.
I run through it in one breath and did not do too badly (280 points). I mostly had troubles with VB/ASP (no [...]

Continue reading about Example based code quiz from O’Reilly Labs