Archive for 24 September 2007

Love your enemies

Posted: 24 September 2007 in Uncategorized
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My wife Donna found another great bumper sticker the other day and snapped the pic below:

Love your enemies - bumper sticker

“When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies’, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”

That seems pretty clear to me.

Maybe you’ll listen if you’re under water

Posted: 24 September 2007 in Uncategorized
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Affect on certain landmarks with a one meter rise in sea level

If sea levels rise one meter, we could see a lot of stuff disappear beneath the waves, including Wall Street. Maybe then corporations and certain politicians would listen to reason. A bunch of historical landmarks would be affected as well, including Jamestown.

Richard Hogg dies

Posted: 24 September 2007 in Uncategorized
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This past spring I worked on a morphological analyzer for Old English verbs. To my knowledge, this has never been done using finite state transducers. As part of my search to find the current state of the art for this language, I emailed Professor Richard Hogg at the University of Manchester. He wrote the section of the Cambridge History of the English Language on Old English morphology. A lot of times, you’ll email a professor and it could take days for them to get back to you, especially if they are at a different university. Sometimes they don’t respond at all. But, Dr. Hogg was a very polite and helpful guy, saying my work sounded interesting and pointing me to the Stella group at the University of Glasgow. His section on morphology in the Cambridge History was also very helpful, so I felt quite grateful to the guy. I wish I could have known him better.

Read his extensive obituary in the Guardian.

Gmail 2.0

Posted: 24 September 2007 in Uncategorized
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Rumors are running around about a possible upgrade to gmail. Garett Rogers at ZDNet started the rumor mill a few days ago when it was noticed that the gmail translation page wanted translations for the phrase “Newer Version.” Not exactly conclusive, but it’s long overdue so these rumors could actually pan out. Google Operating System (an unofficial google-watching blog) continued the rumors today, speculating about some of the possible new features.

Particularly scary to me is the potential of moving more towards an “outlook-style” interface. That is exactly the wrong thing for gmail to do. My favorite part of gmail is how it isn’t Outlook-like. Folders are so 2003. Labels let you classify email into multiple logical “folders” without having to duplicate the message and work pretty much the same. They also fit better into the current paradigm of classification using tags. Tags are something that gmail needs. Suggested tags for emails and a quick tag adding cloud would be very nice. A lot of times, searching text just isn’t enough. If I remember what the email was about, but can’t remember any verbatim phrases from it, I’m in for a difficult search. If I had tagged it, though…

Another thing I’d really like to see gmail get are more sophisticated filters. Maybe I’m missing some how-to somewhere or something, but when I want to add multiple contacts into a single filter, I can’t get it to work. I’d like filters that I can just add a group of contacts (or ones I hand-select) to.

When Yahoo! released their new mail client, I gave it a try. Certainly it was well done and quite sophisticated for a web-based client. It was also slower than a wounded three-toed sloth. It’s Outlook-clone-like interface also turned me off immediately. Plus I get so much freakin spam in my inbox with Yahoo! mail anyway, I just can’t use it. I know no one’s spam filter is perfect (I read my gmail spam for false-positives, which I do find). But anyhow, Google, I beg you, do not go the way of the Outlook-dodo interface.