http://blog.outerthoughts.com > From inner thoughts to the outer limits of Alexandre Rafalovitch Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:37:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I have written about converting Microsoft Word files into text or html using OpenOffice before. However, the wizards I described in that article were crashing when the number of files crossed into several hundreds. I have written some macros to do the conversion, but they were scary looking and fragile. Fortunately, ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2008/04/bulk-converting-doc-files-into-txt-or-html/ No, I am not complaining about food. I love food. And I love it different and - sometimes even - adventurous. Which is where Sour Grapes come in. We have been walking around the neighborhood and have discovered Middle Eastern shop with some unusual but recognizable foods and some ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2008/04/cooking-sour-grapes/ They say at BarCamp that if you don't like the session you are in, feel free to go to a better one. No hard feelings. But what do you do, if you show up for the announced moderated discussion session yet the moderator does not. That's what happened to us with ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2008/03/artificial-intelligence-discussion-at-barcampnyc3/ I have gone (and will go back tomorrow) to the BarCampNYC3. The requirement for every person to speak was not enforced, but I figured I have something to contribute anyway. I brought and talked about the Chumby. I entitled my talk "Chumby - Open, Cool, Cute". My session must have only ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2008/03/chumby-presentation-at-barcampnyc3/ Atlassian has just released Crowd 1.3 that now has the Delegated Authentication option - two-faced directory with an external LDAP facing part for authentication and an internal Crowd part for authorisation. This double-faced functionality causes some non-obvious interface issues. The most important issue to understand is that external part is accessed ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2008/03/5-unobvious-things-about-atlassian-crowds-delegated-authentication-directory/ Watching the 21 Accents video (via Neatorama)  made me think that different languages/accents seemed to require different mouth positions. Is it possible that some phonemes are only achievable with the mouth wide-stretched in a smile? Then loading a language with such phonemes would be one way to ensure people appear ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2008/03/languages-that-make-you-smile/ While reading weka Data Mining book, I have come across this impressive example of using machine learning to confirm person's authorship (p. 358). In 19th century, there lived a famous rabbinic scholar Ben Ish Chai, who among other writings had two collections of letters. Ben Ish Chai claimed that only one ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2008/01/on-uselessness-of-pretending-to-be-somebody-else/ DOJO has hit 1.0 and changed a lot of things. So the documentation is still all over the place with examples using old syntax. I am migrating to DOJO from jQuery, so just wanted to get basic dojo.query functionality to work. Specifically, I wanted to highlight alternative table rows. Not easy! At ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2007/12/dojo-10-highlighting-alternative-table-rows/ What could be common between Computational Linguistics and Aerobics? Quite a lot, as it turns out to be. Dance descriptions, while not really in English do have a regular structure and can be thought of as a sub-language with full set of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels. There are basic words of ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2007/12/parsing-jumping-jacks/ Since Dave Winer declared Chumby the next breakthrough device, there has been a small flood of people talking about how cool it is and how much they want one. The usual TechMeme effect, I guess. I admit, it is a cute device. I have a black one, which I am hoping ... http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2007/11/interesting-chumby-articles-and-videos-around-the-web/