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 and rewritten parts of it to teach grammar as part of the story. The resulting self-published book Tarzan and Jane’s Guide to Grammar (or Amazon link) has been selling quite well in schools for a year or so.

… 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 the flat without turning the main computer on. One of the other benefits of the built-in WiFi was synchronization over IP, which for me was specifically over the WiFi.

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 contribute to the open source one, VoxForge always needs more transcribed audio recordings to improve their Command and Control acoustic models.

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 for: Java source code contributor. BlogicBlogger Over and Out

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 be as immersive as what a child gets - 24 hours a day minus sleep.