Minh’s Notes

What we watched before YouTube

2009-07-10T15:59:31Z

After I introduced the HeadSprout back in April, several people asked me how I came up with the idea of a bike- and head-mounted digital television system. The best answer I could give was that a TV antenna and a bike helmet found themselves both in my field of vision at the same time.

The other day, I read a BBC Magazine article asking a teenager to trade his iPod for a Walkman for a week. Feeling nostalgic as I always do, I went rummaging through a drawer at home and found my old Sony Watchman. Slightly before my time, portable TV gadgets were all the rage. At some point, my family purchased an FD-250 model, probably at Sears, and it became my favorite toy growing up.

The Watchman FD-250 has the size and weight of a small book, but the antenna extends well over a foot.

The Watchman was my poor-man’s introduction to DXing. Whenever my family took a summer road trip, I’d bring the device along with me and tune in to various stations along the way, collecting their call letters as we entered large metropolitan areas. On the way to New Orleans, I would pick up numerous Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Birmingham stations this way.

It still works, after you pop in a fresh battery or two. The first thing you notice is how much consumer electronics have changed within just twenty-odd years. Get it? Watchman, Walkman? You know, Walkman, predecessor to the CD player? Like large MP3 players? Um, before iPods?

The Watchman’s screen is angled downward and pincushioned inward. Shown here is some old movie on channel 38. Even if you watched it on a state-of-the-art digital TV, it’d still be in black-and-white, so no loss here.

This particular Watchman model had a black-and-white CRT display. Actually, to give the device a less awkward form factor, the screen is just a mirror, angled to reflect the image produced by the CRT tube (below the screen in the photos). The fact that the screen is black-and-white shouldn’t be that surprising: in the early 1990s, you could still find plenty of full-size, black-and-white TV sets at family-run electronics stores (another relic of that decade).

Since nearly all Cincinnati-area stations stopped broadcasting in analog sometime last month, the Watchman can only receive three stations: WLWT 5, the Cincinnati NBC affiliate; WKEF 22, the Dayton ABC affiliate; and WBQC 38, an independent station in Cincinnati that airs kung-fu movies and similar fare. As a low-power station, WBQC isn’t required to give up their analog signal yet, while the other two are airing nothing but DTV infomercials in a federally-mandated loop. The reception isn’t spectacular in any case – unidirectional VHF antennae never work well this far out from the city – but the Watchman was built for mobility, not kung-fu movies.

If I had the right cables, I could restore the Watchman to full working condition by hooking a converter box up to its A/V In jack. Then I could watch digital TV in glorious black-and-white, and it would be plenty more convenient than HeadSprout. But that’s a project for another day.

Introducing the HeadSprout

2009-04-02T04:30:00Z

For the past three months, I along with five partners have toiled in stealth mode to build a disruptive product that will revolutionize media consumption as we know it, by synergizing television watching with bicycle riding. Leveraging unparalleled loyalties to both recreational activities, it is our intent to forge a new market based on mobile multimedia and capitalize upon emerging opportunities.

In short: we have developed the HeadSprout, the world’s first fully-integrated bike- and head-mounted digital television system.

]]> Mobile television has been a tragically untapped market thus far in the United States. Because the vast majority of television viewers are accustomed to consuming broadcasting from the comfort of a living room, various companies have failed to make significant inroads in taking television out of the house.

Our approach is to start with perhaps the most mobile segment of the American population: college students. Typically without the resources to own a car, many college students are confined to their bicycles as their only means of transportation. Additionally, the college environment has historically seen less broadcast entertainment, since many students find themselves without the time to passively watch television or listen to the radio, and most do not have access to a living room. Paradoxically, individuals from this demographic tend to follow sporting events and other regularly scheduled programming more fanatically than younger or indeed older Americans.

In short: don’t you wish you could keep up with March Madness even while biking to class? Of course you do. Wouldn’t it be great to magically sprout antennae and continue watching the live coverage? Of course it would.

And that’s where HeadSprout shines. Using our patent-pending, non-invasive head mount technology, HeadSprout provides a quick and easy way to keep a bidirectional VHF receiver attached to the part of you that receives the best television reception: your head. This configuration transforms a previously frustrating process – adjusting the antenna for improved reception – into a very natural action: cocking ones head in various directions. The receiver is connected, via insulated wires or a coaxial cable, to a compact NTSC/ATSC tuning device clipped to the bicycle frame. A USB cord then runs forward to a mobile touchscreen device (sold separately), which is finally mounted to the handlebars via off-the-shelf components.

But what about controlling the television unit? Since our apparatus is designed to integrate with a mobile touchscreen device, the obvious solution would be to stop there and force cyclists to use the touchscreen while biking. However, we found key deficiencies in this model during preliminary testing. Specifically, I involved myself in a multi-bike pileup in the Intersection of Death while attempting to operate the touchscreen with one hand.

Instead, we focused on more deeply integrating the television interface with the bicycle itself. For example, we found that changing channels is analogous to the process of changing gears, familiar to all but the youngest of bikers. Therefore, channels and gears are now controlled using the same dial, typically built into one of the handlebars. We also discovered that bikers tend to shift attention away from the television screen when braking, such as at busy intersections. In our apparatus, live television is paused whenever the brakes are pressed with sufficient firmness.

It’s simple, conceptually, but the trick is getting it all to work together. We have pioneered a safe, durable apparatus that integrates all these parts into a package that can be easily installed onto an existing bicycle. With minor modifications, it will even be possible to support tricycles, tandems, and unicycles.

Our current design has undergone substantial testing, and we believe it is nearly ready for more widespread use. In fact, our team has used the system religiously for the past two weeks, with excellent results. (Namely, we know all about the latest soap operas and Power Rangers episodes. What an odd lot we are.)

Only two minor caveats remain: first, it is usually necessary to remain completely stationary (including holding one’s breath) in order to receive digital signals reliably. We believe this is an issue out of our control and a fault on the part of the ATSC. Fortunately, there is a simple workaround. Second, VHF antennae usually extend upwards by a few feet. We have noted a variety of responses to our unique design from passers-by, ranging from the playfully curious to the downright malicious, due to the antennae’s prominence. With the slight vertical footprint also comes a somewhat heightened risk of brushing into trees or having low clearances pull you right off your bike.

In the future, we hope to eliminate the HeadSprout’s physical footprint – already much less than that of 18-wheelers and earth-moving machinery – by engineering an UHF antenna into a specially-designed helmet. The effectiveness of such helmets has been proven in life-or-death situations. We also plan to contract with eyeglass HUD manufacturers. Soon, you won’t even need to glance away from the road to view television, thanks to an opaque image of the current channel superimposed onto your regular field of vision.

We concede that the world is not expecting an advance in blue sky technology from these quarters. But we are confident that it needs one. As such, we fully intend to take this concept to production by the beginning of April next year. If you or someone you know is a venture capitalist with hoards of cash and a love for sophomoric technologies, please get in touch. Also, if you are a licensed psychologist, we could probably use your help too.

If you would like to keep up with the latest news on our venture, please submit the short form below:

All the photos in this post are the work of HeadSprout photo wizard Agustin Ramirez. Happy April!

AVIM extension is now AVIM change-around

2009-04-01T09:08:33Z

This morning, Mozilla officially renamed “add-ons” to “change-arounds”. Apparently the move is intended to capitalize on Barack Obama’s campaign for President, which centered around the word “change”.

Add-ons never added to my hard drive’s available space, and the extensions I’ve authored never added to my bottom line. So, though I find the new name a bit awkward, I’m thrilled that Mozilla is finally listening to the more pedantic parts of their user base for once. I just Twittered a Mozilla official, who wished to either remain anonymous or place me under an NDA. He assured me – off the record – that the Internet Explorer team plans to make the same change to their browser interface, possibly as soon as the next Patch Tuesday come-arounds.

Mozilla had planned to rename the feature “Take-outs” – reflecting the subtractive nature of many extensions and themes – and had already commissioned a series of cute Chinese take-out box icons. However, the nearby Lucky Wok restaurant stepped in at the last minute, threatening legal action. “Developers need Chinese take-out for late-night coding sessions,” explained the official, again off the record. “You wouldn’t believe how many bugs we’ve traced back to the presence of pizza or TV dinners in the building. You just don’t get that with moo goo gai pan.”

I’ve just updated AVIM’s website and its listing at Firefox Change-arounds to reflect the change. The Mozilla official fully expects other change-around developers to follow suit. But you didn’t hear it from him.

[Update] After much outcry from such Facebook groups as “I miss OLD Firefox Add-ons!!!11!!”, Mozilla has changed the name back. The fact that it’s now April 2^nd must’ve factored into the decision, too.

High school humor

2009-03-15T09:38:10Z

I keep a folder of bookmarks filled with pages I intend to mention at some point on this blog, because they’re just so funny or otherwise worthwhile to read. But the last time I ever drew from the “Blog About…” folder was over a year ago; since then, its growth has closely paralleled that of the National Debt. The 182 bookmarks stand as a rustic testament to my penchant for procrastination, and that’s just the ones I didn’t lose when switching to the Mac. Though many of those links are now dead, no longer interesting, or covered copiously elsewhere, I’m still going to post the interesting ones.

Well, maybe later. Instead, I thought it’d be fun to share a few of my oldest “good read” bookmarks. Here are some of the webpages I added to the “Humor” folder back in high school, sorted by date bookmarked. Seriously: it’s not every year you find this kind of brilliance on Digg or Reddit:

Steve, Don't Eat It! – 1991 Urkel-Os (bookmarked June 23^rd, 2005)
Under Construction (June 22^nd, 2005) – guilty
The Onion 2056 (June 22^nd, 2005)
Big Fat Institute for Advanced Interactive Experiences (April 11^th, 2005) – based in Cincinnati
The Credit Card Prank (April 1^st, 2005)
PodBrix (February 27^th, 2005) – Legos, except not
Taste for the Web (February 8^th, 2005) – a parody of Paul Graham
Postal Experiments (January 21^st, 2005)
“Oh my god! There’s an axe in my head.” (September 22^nd, 2004) – in 112 languages
BlueScreen Screen Saver (August 28^th, 2004) – free from Microsoft
win98.c (February 14^th, 2004)
Case Western Reserve University, circa ~~2000~~ 1900 (September 2^nd, ~~2003~~ 1903) – background
Laws of Japanese Animation (September 27^th, 2002)

Wrong

2009-02-16T07:40:00Z

First things first: if you use version 20080728.280 of my AVIM extension, upgrade to version 20080728.306 now.

Last Friday, Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant refuted five typical excuses for calling the eval() function in JavaScript. I remembered that function well: take any string, pass it into eval(), and the string gets executed as though it were ordinary code. When I took Stanford’s hacking class last spring, we developed an exploit that targeted a fictitious website’s generous use of the function. eval() is the most easily abused function available to JavaScripters, because it’s such a tantalizing shortcut. Why bother learning DOM Level 3 when you can call one function and move on?

Were you to conduct a comprehensive survey of computer programmers, I’d suspect that nearly all of us would rate ourselves “above average” programmers who keep particularly good best practices in mind at all times. Like, to avoid eval() at all costs. But I called that function – once – and Wladimir caught me.

]]> The gory technical details go something like this: Mozilla-based applications like Firefox have user interfaces built in an XML-based language called XUL. Textboxes in XUL look kind of like textboxes in HTML: .

JavaScript makes the interface interactive, just as it does for webpages. If you want the textbox to do something special as soon as you change its contents, you use the oninput attribute:

This textbox changes its text to say “barbaz” every time you try to type or paste something in.

Since AVIM is an IME, it similarly changes the textbox’s contents when you type in it. But for various reasons, the oninput attribute has no effect when AVIM interferes with the text. That prevents the interface from responding properly to input in places like the Find Bar and the Library (formerly the Bookmarks Organizer).

So what’s my solution? After searching for low-level, implementation-detail functions to do what I want, I settle on calling – naturally – eval() with the contents of the oninput attribute. After some quick testing to verify that it works, I ship a new version of AVIM. To make myself feel better about knowingly using such a dangerous function, I added this comment above the call to eval():

// Truly awful kludge

Indeed. The problem is that, like all extensions, AVIM is given more privileges than an ordinary webpage script. It can access APIs for everything from opening dialog boxes to saving files. With enough effort, you might even be able to get files to execute. Such privileges aren’t usually a problem, since malicious and malware-laden extensions rarely go public on the official Firefox Add-ons website.

But the eval() function doesn’t know where the string you’re giving it came from. That string may come from a webpage that contains a textbox with the oninput attribute. eval() just assumes you wanted it to execute exactly what you, the extension, told it to. So the string gets executed within the extension’s scope, with all the extension’t privileges, and with access to plenty of Mozilla’s low-level interfaces.

As a concrete example, what do you think would happen if a webpage contained this HTML textbox:

Never mind that oninput isn’t a standard HTML attribute: my extension never checked, and eval() certainly couldn’t be bothered to. If you have AVIM enabled and start typing in this textbox, AVIM winds up disabling itself.

Cool, huh? One could imagine doing a bit more with that line of attack.

After Wladimir wrote about eval(), I spent several hours searching for more low-level functions that would execute the oninput code in a safer way, but nothing seemed clean or sane enough to actually use. As usual the solution turned out simpler than I ever imagined: generate a fake onInput event.

So, yeah: upgrade now, pretend I never made this mistake, and hope you never do either.

This post was embargoed for eight days to give AVIM’s users adequate time to upgrade.

Almost a snow day

2009-01-29T12:10:00Z

Sixth grade was not a good year for me on the school bus. Every year, Loveland City Schools shuffled its bus routes around, with the intent of keeping us students on our feet. That year, my stop wound up first on the route. The long ride each morning – usually half an hour to school – exacerbated my motion sickness, keeping me under the menacing eye of the bus driver.

One day, a classic winter storm passes through Cincinnati. You know: snow, sleet, slush, ice, slice. I can’t remember quite how much snow accumulated that day, but it can’t’ve been more than five inches. Regardless, the weather forecasters went hysterical about the sheer severity of the storm. Loveland, on the other hand, kept their cool. At the time, the district was hard core about staying open despite inclement weather. (I believe these days we call it “flinty Chicago toughness”.) Nothing like those Northern Kentucky schools that’d shut down whenever it felt chilly outside.

Still hoping for a chance snow day, I monitor all the TV stations’ scrolling tickers that morning. There’s an art to channel surfing on snow days: you switch to each channel as its ticker nears “L”. Little Miami, Live Oaks, Lockland – wait for it – Lynchburg. Fooey.

My bus meanders along its usual route, but at normal walking speed. Due to the thick layer of ice on the roads, the driver never makes stops; instead, she coasts a bit, swings open the doors, and waves us in. One by one, we jump aboard the oversized toboggan. While the driver carefully manages the slick hills, time is ticking on my motion sickness. We’re already plenty late for school. A few more minutes, or a couple more speed bumps, and I’ll have to pull out the Kroger bag the driver required me to carry, just in case.

Just as we slide past the final stop and start across town to school, the dispatcher comes across the radio, unusually loud and clear:

Base to all drivers, pull over. Repeat: pull over. We are determining whether to cancel school for today.

The freezing, exhausted passengers on the bus erupt in celebration, followed by arguments about who gets dropped off first once school is called off. Surely following the route in reverse would be unjust: some of us had been riding almost an hour already!

During the next ten minutes, we search for ways to stay warm as the district deliberates (in their cozy office, no doubt). Finally, a relieved-sounding dispatcher gives the all-clear over the radio. There will be school after all. Defeated silence. The eighth-graders at the back of the bus resume their daily routine of furiously scribbling down homework answers just before arriving at school. The kids across the aisle kick themselves for not flushing at 7:00 the night before. And I just want some fresh air.

Although St. Columban School is located within the Loveland school district boundaries, students come from several surrounding districts as well. That morning, the school appeared conspicuously empty. Of course, with Little Miami, Milford, and Goshen all closed, everyone but us Lovelanders had an excuse to stay home.

Readers from the West Coast will probably want to know what a Kroger bag is. They’re your ordinary plastic grocery bags, but tan-colored, so they make for good barf bags and great dresses (apparently).

Revisiting Atmosphere

2009-01-25T09:30:00Z

Longtime readers of this blog – again, all two of you – will recall that I’m still a fan of Adobe Atmosphere, that brilliant online virtual reality platform, even though Adobe killed it off shortly after version 1.0, more than five years ago. But even though Atmosphere has gone virtually unused in the years since, I’m on a quest to preserve its memory:

Shortly after Adobe pulled their support, I asked the user community for help in establishing an “abandonware” website specifically for Atmosphere, similar to websites that memorialize other long-gone software. That led to the article on Wikipedia. The article still lacks numerous details and contains scant citations, but it’s a start.
A few months ago, I updated MingerWorld – which I painstakingly developed during my freshman year in high school – for compatibility with Atmosphere 1.0. Finally.
My latest project is “Dialup”, an avatar that Atmosphere’s beta testers will instantly recognize. It imitates the placeholder avatar that other users would appear to wear as Atmosphere downloaded their real avatars.

The breakthrough came when I found Joe De Costa, who’s been running a working copy of Atmosphere’s chat server all these years. With his permission, I hooked MingerWorld up to his server, allowing you to explore the world as it was meant.

Atmosphere’s powerful chat functionality allowed users to see and converse with each other in-world, setting the software apart from countless other 3D offerings, including Adobe’s later ventures in 3D modeling.

In a fit of irony, Adobe released the chat server under an “Atmosphere Open Source License” but neglected to publicize the fact. In fact, the only way to obtain a copy of the source code was to contact Adobe directly. So even at the height of Atmosphere’s popularity, there were only a few chat servers in operation, apart from the official Adobe server. The vast majority of worlds were connected to the official server. After 2004, these worlds went silent: even in the worlds that saw dozens of visitors at a time, each user would appear to be alone. For the many thousands of meticulously-built worlds, the “killer app” was gone.

I want to fix that. I have a copy of the Adobe Community Server software, which I’m planning to run on my own computer in the future. I’d love to make the software publicly available, the way it should be, but first I have some legal questions about it. The key passage in the server’s license agreement reads:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Adobe grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty free license to use, reproduce, prepare derivative works, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, and sublicense the Software for any purpose provided that the copyright notice below appears in a conspicuous location within the source code of the distributed Software and this license is distributed in the supporting documentation of the version of the Software you distribute.

That’s all well and good, but contained in the source code are two references to patent applications held by Adobe. The first was granted as patent 6,842,786 and seems to describe a server-side dynamic language runtime. The second is still pending after all these years and covers the way worlds “cloned” when full. (An overflow copy of the world was created automatically, so that worlds wouldn’t fill up so severely and users wouldn’t have to load 150 avatars on their dialup connections. Most of us found the feature annoying but dreaded the alternative.)

So my question is: would I be legally permitted to distribute and even modify the server software, as provisioned in the license, even though Adobe holds a patent on certain parts of the server? Note that the license never mentions patents, but rather grants sweeping rights. If not for the patent question, the license would even let me relicense the server under something very much like the MIT license.

Any help appreciated.

AIM OpenID Login in Motion

2009-01-16T07:45:00Z

From the I-should-have-blogged-about-this-literally-a-month-ago department, AIM OpenID Login has been released as part of Six Apart’s Motion package. That was a mouthful, so allow me to unpack the sentence.

AIM OpenID Login is a small plugin I wrote in 2007 that lets anyone with an AOL account – including AIM users – easily log into your Movable Type blog to post a comment. Motion is a plugin for Movable Type that turns the blogging software into a social networking platform. It’s currently a public beta, so you can download it for free while Six Apart works to smooth out the edges. According to the FAQ, its features – including, presumably, AIM OpenID Login – will be folded into the standard Movable Type application by version 4.25.

Early last month, a product manager at Six Apart e-mailed to notify me that my plugin would be incorporated into a future Movable Type release. He did not ask my permission. As it happens, I’d already given explicit permission by licensing the plugin under the GNU General Public License, as I was required to. So this e-mail was simply a courteous heads-up. As you might imagine, I’m quite pleased that one late night of coding has led to such visibility for my code. If only I got such a high ROI with this week’s complement of problem sets.

Even if you have no inclination to turn your blog into a full-fledged social networking service, AIM OpenID Login lowers a barrier that keeps your readers from becoming commenters.

AVIM not just for Firefox

2008-12-10T01:30:00Z

In July, when I last wrote about AVIM, it was a Firefox extension that let you easily enter fully-accented Vietnamese into any webpage, as well as most of Firefox. It also supported a few well-known Firefox extensions.

Since then, AVIM has gained French and Chinese localizations and added support for all of Firefox. More importantly, the extension now supports a number of Mozilla-based applications, including Songbird and Flock. AVIM’s also been downloaded nearly 30,000 times and serves over 1,700 people as of last month.

Mozilla Messaging today released the first beta of Thunderbird 3. Since it runs on Mozilla 1.9, AVIM supports it too. It’s a boon for Vietnamese speakers who still use a desktop application for reading e-mail and news feeds.

You can download AVIM for free and drag the file into Thunderbird’s Add-ons window. Alternatively, you can use Thunderbird 3’s new Add-ons Manager to install an older version of AVIM hosted by Mozilla.

One thing you’ll notice about AVIM is that, even though the extension is intended for Vietnamese speakers, the extension’s menus aren’t necessarily in Vietnamese. If your copy of Thunderbird is in English, for example, AVIM is also in English. That’s because I designed the extension to blend in with the application as much as possible.

Unfortunately, efforts to translate Thunderbird into Vietnamese aren’t complete yet. In the meantime, you can force AVIM to display in Vietnamese anyways. Regardless of AVIM’s interface language, the extension will continue allowing you to type in Vietnamese.

You might’ve noticed that AVIM is essentially in maintenance mode. I’ve implemented all the big changes I have planned, and I really don’t have much time to work on the software in the near future. However, you’ll continue to see AVIM support more and more applications as they upgrade to Mozilla 1.9. Someday, I’ll get around to writing an operating system–level IME, so you’ll get AVIM’s well-known flexibility no matter which application you’re using. Someday.

As always, I welcome any contributions to the AVIM project, whether in the form of code or translations, or by spreading the word. Working on AVIM’s code require little more than a working knowledge of JavaScript and Vietnamese. For any code or translation contributions, you’ll receive due credit on a widely-used piece of software and the satisfaction that you’ve helped real people in a measurable way. If you’d like to help out, please contact me.

Community

2008-11-09T08:15:00Z

Friday night (San Francisco time), northern Vietnam’s wiki addicts got together to discuss – what else? – wikis at the inaugural Wiki Day in Hanoi.

Inside the inaugural Wiki Day. Courtesy: Trần Xuân Trường, Nguyễn Phan Kiên, NHHP.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it: at the last minute, my professor caught wind of my plans to take a plane to Vietnam instead of taking a midterm. :^P So instead of being able to finally meet my co-conspirators in the wiki revolution face to face, I settled for writing a talk for an attendee to read. In between studying for a midterm and completing a problem set, I managed to crank out what sounded (on paper) like a coherent essay on Wikipedia’s principles, how we foster a community, and what we do about vandals. Hopefully it wasn’t too awkward. Word has it that the meetup overall was a success.

I hadn’t realized how big a deal wikis have become in Vietnam, but apparently the event has received coverage in the country’s major newspapers, and a few national TV networks were on-scene as well. If I knew the mainstream press was coming, I would’ve probably switched into car salesman mode and pushed Wikipedia’s benefits more than discussing the challenges ahead of us as a community. But it’s not like we have anything to hide, what with an Edit button atop every page.

The Vietnamese Wikipedia community doesn’t have official recognition with a Wikimedia Foundation chapter of its own, and it has yet to really spread to other Wikimedia projects like Wiktionary and Wikibooks. We haven’t won any awards like the Italian community or put on a Wikimania conference like the Taiwanese. But still, it’s awesome how far things have progressed since late 2003, when we were just a ragtag group of geeks starting into computer screens, developing carpal tunnel by writing too much.

Along the way, I learned a new language – I only knew a few words of Vietnamese before joining Wikipedia – we’ve written on topics that’ve never been written about in our language; and we’ve changed the way people think about learning. You can, on your own time, enrich your understanding of the world around you. At least for those with Internet access, the excuse of not having the money or patience is gone. (Reaching those without Internet access is an open problem.)

What makes Wikipedia (and any other wiki) is that we’re not just a community. We’re a community making something useful: in our case, a website synonymous these days with “encyclopedia”. In making decisions at Wikipedia – such as determining how strict we enforce a rule on notability – the overriding challenge is balancing the needs of the community versus the needs of the encyclopedia.

I’m pretty sure what kept me contributing to Wikipedia all these years, even as the offline world called, was the knowledge that the project depends on each individual to keep it afloat. Especially when there weren’t many administrators and other dedicated contributors around, others would have to shoulder more work if I simply packed up and left. I wouldn’t’ve particularly cared, except that I’d already built up a good working relationship with so many in the community. Meetups, like the one on Friday, ensure that “the community” isn’t just a nebulous group of someone-or-others, but rather your friends.

In treating everyone as equals – with mostly the same editing rights, but more importantly with equal authority in arguments – we the wiki community think of everyone as trusted friends. That’s a really great statement about humanity.

In a word

2008-10-19T20:18:32Z

The following exchange was edited out of Saturday Night Live’s coverage of the final presidential debate, in order to allot adequate time for applause:

Moderator: “Since you two clearly do not endorse the negative words your campaigns have used against each other in the last few weeks, would both of you care to summarize your campaigns in a single, hopefully positive word? Sen. McCain, you first.”
“Joe-the-Plumber.”
“One word?”
“Hyphenated.”
(Headline: “Joe-the-Plumber’s Name Hyphenated”)
“All… right, and you, Sen. Obama?”
“Look—”
“That’s all the time we have for tonight, live from all of us at Saturday Night.”

That’s about all the politicking you’ll find on Minh’s Notes this election cycle. TV comedy – Fox News and MSNBC included – have done a wonderful job covering the campaigns this time. Though I wonder if I’d have more to say (read: more fodder) were I still in Ohio around now, deep in the heart of Pro-America.

Résumé

2008-10-08T06:20:00Z

Stanford’s Career Development Center provides your typical list of action verbs to add that fleeting pizzaz to your résumé. After all, who wants to be something good long-term, when you can do something good and be done with it already? So for those still padding their résumés and for everyone else’s reading pleasure, here are 25 completely reasonable suggestions for action-filled job descriptions, ranging from the inept to the utterly inept, and extrapolated from the CDC’s action verbs (in bold):

Acted childishly.
Conceptualized nebulous abstractions.
Imagined being CEO.
Planned to get work done.
Contracted and delegated it out instead.
Figured the job was for life.
Arranged deck chairs on the Titanic.
Cut and pasted. Copied too.
Discovered gravity.
Referred self to psychiatrist.
Drew the curtains.
Oversawed plywood for the deck out back.
Invented all kinds of excuses.
Fabricated lies unabashedly.
Maintained own innocence.
Bound and gagged.
Drove self home every night.
Merged onto I-75.
Installed spyware accidentally.
Operated a pencil sharpener.
Collated. (Yes, collated.)
Produced bugs.
Furnished own apartment.
Assembled IKEA furniture.
Interviewed self for the job already; thanks for the offer. (Problem solved.)

Amelia Bedelia would be proud.

Warning: Tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Mười lũy thừa một trăm

2008-09-30T06:55:00Z

Back in May, I remarked that VDict’s English↔Vietnamese machine translation service was too good at churning out sometimes incomprehensible Vietrish. I also pointed out that the major Web translation services, such as Babel Fish or Google Translate, hadn’t gotten around to supporting Vietnamese. Today, Google has – VDict now piggybacks on their service – and my first thought was to try and break it.

]]> Another welcome

Once again, the Vietnamese Wikipedia’s opening paragraph:

Hoan nghênh bạn đã đến với Wikipedia tiếng Việt! Đây là bách khoa toàn thư có nội dung mở và thuộc sở hữu cộng đồng. Dự án được bắt đầu từ tháng 10 năm 2003 do công sức đóng góp của nhiều người ở khắp mọi nơi, bạn cũng có thể tham gia. Hiện giờ chúng ta có 86.752 thành viên (có tài khoản), nhưng mới chỉ đóng góp được 58.022 bài thôi. Rất mong sự tham gia tích cực của bạn!

Which roughly translates to:

Welcome; you’ve arrived at the Vietnamese Wikipedia! This is an open-content encyclopedia belonging to the community. The project began in October 2003, thanks to the efforts of many contributors worldwide; you can join in too. Currently, we have 86,752 members (with accounts) who’ve contributed only 58,022 articles. We really look forward to your active participation!

Surprisingly, Google Translate gets it mostly right:

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia! This is the encyclopedia content open and owned communities. The project was started from tháng 10 [“October”], 2003 by the contribution of many people everywhere, you can also participate. Now we have 86,752 members (of accounts), but contribute only be 58,022 items only. We hope the active participation of you!

Sure, it’s pretty ungrammatical, but at least they didn’t start rambling on about medication, like VDict did. Still, Google passed my little test because they rely on sophisticated statistical analysis techniques to determine which English phrases typically go with each Vietnamese phrase. Rather than simply looking individual words up in a dictionary and pumping out the matching words, the smart folks at Google seem to take into account the kinds of phrases actually in use on the Internet and normalize them, so that no matter the source language, Google internally represents each sentence the same way.

Regained in re-translation

This statistical technique usually allows Google’s translation to at least sound remotely relevant. But it also makes spotting errors more difficult. Case in point, a definition of the Moon:

Mặt Trăng (tiếng Latinh: Luna, ký hiệu: ☾) là vệ tinh tự nhiên duy nhất của Trái Đất và là vệ tinh tự nhiên lớn thứ năm trong Hệ Mặt Trời.

Quite straightforwardly, it means:

The Moon (Latin: Luna, symbol: ☾) is the Earth’s only natural satellite and the fifth-largest natural satellite in the Solar System.

But here’s what Google thinks it means:

Moon (Latin: Luna, symbols: ☾) is a natural satellite of only Earth and the satellite is the natural largest in the Torah.

First of all, English has this tricky feature where moving an adverb like “only” around the sentence actually changes the sentence’s meaning. But quibbles aside, I wouldn’t think to look in the Torah (the first five boks of the Bible) for the Moon. I&dquo;d just look up. Coincidentally, the fact that the Moon is the fifth-largest moon was lost in translation.

Now, the experts used to always caution against using machine translation tools. They also advised that we reverse-translate anything we find using those tools, just to see how much gets lost in translation:

Moon (Latin: Luna, ký hiệu: ☾) là một vệ tinh tự nhiên của Trái đất và chỉ là các vệ tinh tự nhiên lớn nhất trong Hệ Mặt Trời.

Apparently, not much. This reverse-translation hides the various translation mistakes we saw before, because every word in the sentence above, when placed in exactly the same context as that sentence, will always have a 1:1 correspondence with a word in the target language. In other words, since “abc1def” can only ever translate to “vwx2y&z” and is the only bit of text that can, “vwx2y&z” can only ever translate to “abc1def”. So if you’re using Google to translate into a language you don’t know so well, you don’t really know how well or how poorly Google’s doing.

Counting oddly

So now, for kicks, a little stress test. Below we have a series of numbers spelled out, with all its idiosyncrasies:

0–30. Số không, một, hai, ba, bốn, năm, sáu, bảy, tám, chín, mười, mười một, mười hai, mười ba, mười bốn, mười lăm, mười sáu, mười bảy, mười tám, mười chín, hai mươi, hai mươi mốt, hai mươi hai, hai mươi ba, hai mươi tư, hai mươi lăm, hai mươi sáu, hai mươi bảy, hai mươi tám, hai mươi chín, ba mươi.

Một trăm (100), một trăm lẻ một (101), một trăm lẻ năm (105), một trăm hai mươi mốt (121), ba trăm (300).

Một ngàn (1.000), một ngàn lẻ một (1.001), hai ngàn rưởi (2.500).

Một vạn. Một vạn (10.000), một vạn lẻ một (10.001). Một triệu (1.000.000). Một tỷ (1.000.000.000).

Một nửa (½), một phần tư (¼), một phần trăm (1/100 hoặc 1%).

Translated, with annotations where incorrect:

0-30. Zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen different [where’d that “different” come from?], eighteen, nine of ten [woah, going fractional suddenly], twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, from twenty [mistaking tư (“four”) for từ (“from”)], twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.

One hundred (100), an odd one hundred (101), a hundred odd years (105), a two hundred and eleven (121), three hundred (300). [An odd quirk of the Vietnamese counting system is that lẻ (“odd”) precedes the ones digit if the number is above 100.]

One thousand (1,000), an odd one thousand (1,001), ruoi two thousand (2,500).

A van. A ten thousand (10,000) [một vạn gives different results when alone], an odd one thousand (10,001). One million (1,000,000). One billion (1,000,000,000).

One-half (½), a quarter (¼), one percent (1 / 100 or 1%).

Counting is just one of those things that Google will have to hard-code into their translation software to get completely right. Statistical techniques won’t really cut it, because – well, when’t the last time anyone spelled out “eighty-six thousand, seven hundred fifty-two”.

The post title, by the way, is how you’d spell out “ten to the hundredth power” – a googol – in Vietnamese.

AVIM for Firefox

2008-07-05T21:30:00Z

Vietnamese computing is a very fragmented experience. Not only are there several character encodings for Vietnamese, but Vietnamese computer users must also choose between several popular input methods. As you’ll recall from November, an input method is a procedure for typing in a complex, often non-alphabetic writing system. An input method editor (IME) is software that intercepts your keystrokes and translates them into more complex characters, such as Chinese characters, on the fly. Today’s major operating systems provide IME for most complex writing systems, notably Chinese and Japanese.

Vietnamese is alphabetic, unlike Chinese, but because of its large set of letter–diacritical mark combinations, it’s impractical to simply assign each key to a letter or accented letter, as with French or Spanish. Making matters worse, operating systems have historically provided poor support for Vietnamese input. Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X (until 10.5 Leopard) don’t include an IME for Vietnamese, so each Vietnamese-language website is expected to embed one using JavaScript. Webpages, ordinarily the least powerful of computing technologies, thus end up implementing one of the operating system’s core responsibilities: text input. Predictably, there are at least a dozen such IMEs, and each site uses a different one.

It’s a situation no one likes, but it’s not easy to convince operating system vendors to ship good support for Vietnamese, since the market for it is still relatively small. As a stop-gap solution, three of these IME’s authors have released Firefox extensions that provide Vietnamese typing support on any webpage within the browser. Since the Web browser is pretty much the application that users keep open all day, it’s not an entirely bad solution.

Back in November, I released a keyboard layout for Vietnamese, to improve the Vietnamese typing situation on the Mac. Although the keyboard layout provided support for every application on the system, it was far from ideal, because very few Vietnamese speakers use Mac OS X. Now I finally have a way to show non-Mac users some input method love too.

In 2006, I made a number of modifications to one of the IME extensions, Hiếu Đặng’s AVIM extension. However, because the original extension was a kludge and I didn’t yet consider my version to be of release quality, I hung onto the modifications for nearly two years. Recently, I briefly encountered a curious phenomenon known as free time and began shaping AVIM into a much more presentable extension.

AVIM for Firefox

Since it was introduced to the Vietnamese Wikipedia in 2005, AVIM has turned a very poor editing experience into a pleasant one. My productivity at the site increased dramatically, as I could begin to write and edit articles from directly within the site, rather than copy-pasting my composed text from another program. I hope that this extension will give you the same dramatic increase in productivity, no matter what site you frequent.

Vietnamese Dictionary 1.0 for Firefox

2008-06-05T14:30:00Z

Any serious computer user lives by Firefox extensions. My copy of Firefox has around 30 installed, and I wouldn’t part with more than five of them. It’s bad enough that I employ the Nightly Tester Tools extension to shove out-of-date extensions down Firefox’s figurative throat and Menu Editor to keep my sprawling Tools menu (the product of 30 extensions) tidy.

I know most of this blog’s readers don’t write in Vietnamese, but for the few who do, I spent a bit of last weekend writing an extension for Firefox and its companion e-mail program, Thunderbird, that checks your Vietnamese spelling as you type. Unlike the last piece of software I released, this one requires hardly any explanation. You know if you need it.

]]> Features

The Vietnamese Dictionary extension provides two spell checking dictionaries: one prefers the newer-style diacritical marks typically used in Vietnam (e.g., xoá), and the other prefers the traditional placement of accent marks (xóa). Both dictionaries can suggest accented words when an unaccented word is entered, as long as the entered word is not recognized by the spell checker.

Installation

So if you’re a Vietnamese speaker and don’t have absolutely perfect typing skills, you can add Vietnamese spell checking to your Web browser by downloading this extension:

vi_dictionary_1.0.0.24.xpi
(XPInstall archive, 51.4 kB)

Clicking the link above will trigger a banner (typically yellow) indicating that Firefox has blocked the installation:

In Firefox 2, click Edit Options, and in the dialog box that appears, click Allow and Close. Click on the link again, and click Install Now in the dialog box that appears. Finally, restart Firefox. (By clicking Allow, you added notes.1ec5.org to your whitelist. To remove this site from the whitelist, go to the Security tag of the Options or Preferences window, and click the first Exceptions button. In the dialog box that appears, select notes.1ec5.org and click Remove Site.)
In Firefox 3, click Allow, then click Install Now in the dialog box that appears. Restart Firefox.

To install this extension in Thunderbird, right-click on the link above and select Save Link As. After saving the file to your computer, open Thunderbird, go to the Tools menu, and select Add-ons. Now find the file you downloaded and drag it into the Add-ons window. Finally, click Install Now and restart Thunderbird.

The extension installer is also available at the official Firefox Add-ons website (registration required for now) and Google Code (download only).

System requirements

The extension works in Firefox versions 2.0–3.0 and Thunderbird versions 2.0–3.0a1. Please note that the extension doesn’t provide great suggestions in Firefox 2, especially when the word is capitalized, but you can currently download a release candidate of Firefox 3 to see the spell checker in its full glory. (The final release of Firefox 3 is coming later this month.)

Your computer also needs a font capable of displaying the various Vietnamese characters. Most modern operating systems now come with Vietnamese font support.

Usage

After installing this extension in Firefox, right-click on any webpage textbox, make sure the “Check Spelling” option is enabled, and select either Vietnamese (New) or Vietnamese (Old) from the Languages submenu.

In Thunderbird, open the Options or Preferences window (Tools ▸ Options… in Windows, or Thunderbird ▸ Preferences… on the Mac). Go to the Composition panel and the Spelling tab beneath it. From here, you can change the spell-checking language to vi-x-New or vi-x-Old. Changing the spell-checking language is considerably easier if you instead install the Dictionary Switcher extension for Thunderbird.

Known issues

In Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2, the wordlist is case-sensitive, so any capitalized word is marked as a misspelling, and some words with misplaced diacritical marks are ignored.

License

This extension was based on a list of entries in the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project by Hồ Ngọc Đức and a set of rules for generating suggestions in the Vietnamese spell checker for OpenOffice.org by Iván García. Both are licensed under the GNU General Public License. Because the GPL requires any derivative works to be released under the same license, the GPL applies to this extension as well.

In short, that means you’re allowed – actually, encouraged – to download, install, use, tinker with, and share this extension, as long as you don’t forbid others from doing the same.

Building it yourself

If you’d like to keep up with the latest development code, you can use the following command (which requires Subversion) in a command line window, to checkout the extension’s current source code:

svn co http://version.1ec5.org/vi_dictionary/trunk/ svn co http://hunspell-spellcheck-vi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ hunspell-spellcheck-vi

Iván and I have merged our projects, so I’ve updated the instructions to checkout from Google Code’s Subversion respository.

To package the code as an extension yourself, you can use the included build script, which requires Linux or Mac OS X. In a command line window, navigate to the hunspell-spellcheck-vi/firefox_thunderbird/ directory and execute the following commands:

chmod 755 build.sh ./build.sh

Two installable archives, vi_dictionary.xpi and vi_dictionary_version.xpi should now reside in that directory.

A humble request

I need feedback: you might’ve noticed that the extension is marked as “experimental” at the Firefox Add-ons site. Because Firefox has become so popular lately, Mozilla has implemented a stringent vetting process for new extensions such as mine. In order for the extension to appear “publicly” – that is, for it to be included in the extensions listing and installable without having to log in – I need to demonstrate to Mozilla that the extension is trustworthy.

That’s where you come in. After installing the Vietnamese Dictionary extension, please take a moment to publicly share your thoughts at its Firefox Add-ons entry. Once enough people install and comment on the extension at that page, I’ll be able to nominate it for review.

Finally, if you encounter any correctly spelled words that the extension wrongly marks as incorrect, please leave a comment at the Errata page.

I hope this extension makes your day-to-day Web browsing a tad easier. Maybe it’ll even be one of your 25 can’t-live-without extensions.