Minh’s Notes

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 It’s bad enough that I employ the Nightly Tester Tools extension to shove out-of-date extensions down Firefox’s figurative throat and Menu Editor to keep my sprawling Tools menu (the product of 30 extensions) tidy.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.

A smile and nod

2008-05-23T04:05:00Z

The old joke goes: if you know three languages, you’re trilingual; if you know two languages, you’re bilingual; and if you know only one language, you’re an American. Ohio has struggled with immigration from Hispanic countries more than the small number of immigrants would indicate. Late last year, four illegal immigrants from a poor village in central Mexico were found stabbed to death inside their home, vividly symbolizing the hostility that immigrants face in that part of the country.]]> ESL classes. Although Ohio’s state and local governments have never conducted an appreciable amount of business in Spanish, the state legislature is attempting to ensure it will never happen in the future:

The Ohio House passed a bill Thursday requiring that government business, such as meetings and public records, be in English.

The measure, sponsored by Rep. Bob Mecklenborg, R-Green Twp., passed by a vote of 54–42 over the objections of lawmakers who argued that the bill contradicted the country’s heritage as a land of immigrants. It still needs Senate approval.

“This bill is forward looking and will ultimately promote the similarities that unite us,” Mecklenborg said. “It will further promote economic success and result in more productive and involved citizens.”

The Hispanic community has generally been vocal in encouraging immigrants to learn English – it is, after all, a must for working in the area. The only Spanish-language newspaper and radio station in Cincinnati set aside generous space for English instruction. Nevertheless, the fact that Hispanics speak Spanish is often brought up as a reason that they don’t belong in Ohio, straw-man argument or not. So Spanish-language government publications would be prohibited, if the Ohio House gets its way. Next will surely be a measure to stem the rush of schools adding Spanish language courses. (One wonders if Rep. Mecklenborg realizes how many students from his alma mater learn and use a second language. Hint: all of them.) It happened before. During World War I, Ohio passed the Ake Law, banning German-language instruction in elementary schools. Other evidence of the predominant German-American population was similarly suppressed: families changed their names to more Anglo-sounding ones, sauerkraut became “victory cabbage”, the few remaining German-language newspapers folded, and Cincinnati’s many German street names were quickly replaced. All because foreign cultures were equated with foreign loyalties. Today, foreign languages are too often viewed a telltale sign of unpatriotism and a mark of disdain for the “native” culture – unpatriotism even on the part of legal citizens. That’s sad. If it is so American to be diverse, why are we suddenly shifting to the idea of one country, one language, while pretty much the rest of the world allows for multilingualism? And yet, it isn’t just about language. Growing up in Cincinnati, English was my language, but that didn’t always make a difference. In school, I was initially placed in something of a remedial language program, until the teacher realized I knew what a “cow” was and my pronunciation of “tree” was just fine. There will always be people certain I’m a foreigner due to my name and my face. It’s somewhat entertaining to see the look on others’s faces when I answer the question, “Where are you from?“ with “Here.” (The response was always, “Oh. No, really. Where’re you from?” The correct answer must’ve been China, but I always answered wrong.) As a child, getting this question every day – and having to identify the cow on a flashcard – didn’t bother me too much. But looking back, it’s these little things, which come from even well-meaning people, that bother me the most. They show how insidious the concept of “not one of us” can become. For what is ostensibly a multicultural society, the characteristics of a monoculture shine through clearly. And what I experienced was really just the surface, because as a child, you never really see the discrimination and double standards that take place around you. Of course, I really can’t fault well-meaning people for getting my country of birth wrong. But it’s a bit frustrating that – after mentioning my Vietnamese heritage and explaining that Vietnam is the country just to the south of China – all I could do was smile and nod. There was no convincing them that I am one of them. I don’t know what the intent of the English-only legislation is. The issue in Ohio isn’t really about illegal immigration: the state sees far fewer undocumented workers than other states, and factory jobs are being lost to overseas workers, not immigrants. So if every Hispanic immigrant were to quickly learn English, would everyone be satisfied? Or would the Americans still not be American enough?

Pills with bank accounts

2008-05-16T20:15:00Z

In high school, the Spanish teachers would always warn about the perils of using AltaVista’s Babel Fish service to quickly translate to and from English and Spanish. The canonical example was always, “I can pass the test,” which supposedly used to translate to, “Yo lata fallecer el probar,” or something to that effect. For the non-hispanophones out there, that ungrammatical sentence roughly translates back to English as, “I tin can pass away the to challenge” [major sic]. So much for Douglas Adams’ “proof” of the non-existence of God. It gets better (read: more entertaining) with non-cognate languages, like those from the Near- and Far East. None of the major online translation services, like Babel Fish or Google Translate, offer automatic translation to or from Vietnamese, and it’s a good thing they didn’t. As I mentioned a couple years ago, even linguists can get the translation humorously wrong.]]> VDict.com, a website specializing in regurgitating open-source Vietnamese translation dictionaries, as well as automatic translations by Google Translate. One of their few original services is English↔Vietnamese automatic translation, powered by the EVTran software package. As an example, the Vietnamese Wikipedia’s opening paragraph, written in reasonably accessible diction, reads:

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 73.172 thành viên (có tài khoản), nhưng mới chỉ đóng góp được 40.343 bài thôi. Rất mong sự tham gia tích cực của bạn!

This paragraph roughly translates as:

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 73,172 members (with accounts) who’ve contributed only 40,343 articles. We really look forward to your active participation!

VDict translates it as:

Your éclat [French, “luster”] came wherewith Wikipedia Vietnamese! this is informative encyclopedia open and belong directly to community property. Project is initiated as of October in the year 2003 owing to contributing effort of many peoples here, there and everywhere, you is also participative. At the present time we has 73.172 become pill (have bank account), but newly only contribute 40.343 elution article. Wait your take an active part event very much!

In the absence of decent AI technology, automatic translation is only supposed to give you the gist of the message. Fine. But what in the world is this passage talking about, then? Apparently:

“Your luster” – splendid euphemism
Seventy-three and 43/250 people who have somehow metamorphosized into bank account–wielding medications – poor Horatio!
Just over 40 materials used in chromatography

For more fun, let’s take a paragraph from a random entry at this blog, from 2005:

It’s no different in San Francisco. Although Stanford prides itself on being diverse, they might’ve overlooked the task of diversifying campus opinions. Professors here assume you’d vote the straight Democratic ticket. You can never have a diverse, intellectually thriving campus without people willing to think the other way, without people encouraging thinking the other way.

Auto-translated:

Nó không có (thì) khác nhau ở San Francisco. Mặc dù chính Stanford lòng tự hào trên việc đa dạng, họ có thể đã trông ra nhiệm vụ của việc đa dạng hóa những quan điểm khu trường. Những giáo sư ở đây giả thiết bạn bỏ phiếu vé Dân chủ thẳng. Bạn có thể chưa bao giờ Có Một Đa dạng, hiểu biết thịnh vượng khu trường không có những người sẵn sàng để nghĩ cách khác, không có những người động viên nghĩ cách khác

At least the translation from English to Vietnamese gives you something of the gist of the message, sort of. Maybe it’s just that Vietnamese grammar is so much looser than that of English:

It doesn’t have different from each other in San Francisco. Although Stanford itself pride [the concept] atop diversity, they could’ve already considered out the responsibility of diversifying campus perspectives. Professors here assume you directly vote the Democratic ticket [a piece of paper]. You could’ve never Had One Diversity, understand campus stability, without having people get ready to think a different way, without having people ready to think a different way

Ah, Vietrish.

Ngựa thành Troy

2008-05-08T07:05:00Z

With extensions for programs like Firefox at the convergence of desktop applications and the Web, they can at times become attack vectors:

Starting in mid-Feburary, Vietnamese users of Mozilla’s open source Firefox browser were at risk of infection from malicious Trojan Horse code seemingly accidentally embedded in a language pack available on its Add-ons site.

…

The add-on’s author is not suspected of intentionally booby-trapping the file, but instead had his own system infected. That Trojan inserted a banner-ad displaying script into any html [sic] file on his system, which included the help files for the language pack.

Ironically, the HTML files have been removed altogether from the forthcoming Firefox 3, because Mozilla has decided to use an online, wiki-based help system, rather than the static help files that come packaged with Firefox 2. Application security is still important these days, but as software vendors race to embrace add-ons and RIAs, Web technologies can no longer be considered confined within a tight security “sandbox”. It’s not even just a security issue, either: with phishing- and other fraud-based attacks so prevalent, software developers need to be especially vigilant about any user interface details that could be used to deceive. As the author of a similar extension for Thunderbird, Firefox’s companion e-mail client, I should note that the Vietnamese localization pack I wrote for Thunderbird is not affected by the trojan. The current version was released in 2005, long before the Firefox localization package. By the way, an updated version of that localization pack is in the works, based on the Firefox extension. Although I did consult some parts of the Firefox extension’s source code to resolve some tough-to-translate terms, there was no code sharing of any kind. (Not even copy-pasting.) You can track my progress by pointing your Subversion client (such as TortoiseSVN) to http://version.1ec5.org/vi/. And if you happen to be thạo tiếng Việt, please contact me; I’d be more than happy to accept your help.

To clarify, only advertising banners were inserted, not actual worm or trojan code. See Asa Dotzler’s explanation.

Portfolio

2008-05-06T09:55:00Z

Spurred by my dorm’s photography contest on Flickr, I finally made a place for my photos online (a place other than Facebook): say hello to Minh’s Portfolio. I’ve been meaning to add a “portfolio” of sorts to my website for around four years now, but for both a lack of time and a lack of resources, most of my work has stayed hidden on my computer. Occasionally you’ve seen some of my work illustrate blog posts here, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Eventually, I hope to add my actual art and website portfolios to the gallery, but for now it’s just photography. Since the gallery doesn’t show full-resolution images, you wouldn’t notice that the equipment I’ve been using is, well, lacking. Until last year, all the photos were taken with a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P72, a now-antiquated digital camera that takes photos at a resolution of 640×480 pixels. A resolution that low would’ve been acceptable several years ago, when we bought the camera. In contrast, the newfangled gigapixel cameras these days can probably discern strange quarks from top quarks. Because the Cyber-shot was the family camera, I only had access to it during family vacations. But last spring, I was forced to replace my trusty, non-flip, cameraless Nokia phone with a battery-draining Samsung Sync, weighted down with no end in pay-to-unlock gimmicks. (I also had to swap my reliable Cincinnati Bell service for Cingular, but that’s a sad story for another day.) At least the new phone comes with a decent camera, which means I can snap photos on a whim. For a phone camera, it’s not half-bad: the resolution is 21^st-century, and the quality isn’t much worse than the film cameras we used to operate. (Remind me to tell you about my family’s hardy Canon film camera some day.) I know my “photography” doesn’t hold a candle to that of some of my dormmates, but I’ve at least established that I can operate a camera. Maybe some day, I’ll prove myself worthy of moving up to a disposable digital camera. They didn’t have those around when I was growing up, y’know.

Snow?

2008-04-01T20:42:49Z

The lucky folks back home in Cincinnati appear to be having a snow day in April, according to my self-aware program that automatically updates Planet Xavier to reflect the latest school closings. (pX is a blog aggregator for my high school.) Normally, I’d be quite skeptical, but it snowed a ton there last month, and plus, this program is seriously smart. It even deduced (from the school’s event calendar) that some events would have to be postponed or canceled, so it added a helpful link to the school website for details on schedule changes. (By the way, you should see what my alma mater’s doing for the 1^st of April!)

So pX is back to normal now, though I’ve archived the prank in case you feel like getting a catchy song stuck in your head today. As for me, this little experiment in inane Internet memes is definitely over. Ah, sanity.

Yesterday’s Web: Netscape and friends

2008-03-31T23:50:00Z

In honor of the inaugural Run Some Old Web Browsers Day, jwz’s valiant efforts at keeping the memory of the original, mid-90s Mozilla alive past Netscape’s demise, and the tenth anniversary of the Mozilla Project, I’ve gotten some ancient versions of Mosaic, Netscape, and the like running on my Mac via Darwine. Although Mac versions of these browsers were generally made available, I had to emulate the Windows versions instead, since most of these browser versions were released before Apple released Mac OS X and made the switch to Intel-based processors. Although things mostly work, there are some kinks preventing you from seeing these browsers as they were intended to appear. For instance, the emulated programs don’t recognize my computer’s copy of Times New Roman, so they instead default to Marlett, the font that contains Windows’s “close” and “maximize” symbols. This problem is most apparent in NCSA Mosaic (below the fold), since it offers no way to change the default font from Times New Roman to, say, Tahoma. (Your teacher may forgive you for handing in your homework typeset entirely in Wingdings, but you just try that with Marlett, and said teacher may choose to apply the clue-by-four procedure.)]]> NCSA Mosaic 3.0, precursor to the commercial browser that would eventually become Netscape Navigator:

Here’s Mosaic 0.4, from before Mosaic Communications was renamed Netscape Communcations:

The first usable versions of Netscape Navigator came from the 1.x series:

I started using Navigator at school at around version 2.0:

When my family finally got home Internet access, Fuse provided us with Netscape 3.0 Gold. (The “Gold” meant Netscape Editor was bundled.)

Jumping ahead, since I can’t get Netscape Communicator working on this machine, Firefox began its eventful life codenamed mozilla/browser and quickly renamed Phoenix:

Phoenix was renamed Firebird, due to trademark conflicts, and swapped the catchy orange look for a drab, metallic theme called Qute:

About the same time Firebird was chipping away at the Mozilla Application Suite’s usage in the Mozilla community, a few developers began writing a Mozilla-based browser specifically for the Mac. Originally codenamed Chimera, it too had to be renamed, this time to Camino:

Hope you enjoyed the trip down Memory Lane. Now it’s time for me to clear some room on my hard disk.

Thanks to Simon Willison for the scoop about Run Some Old Web Browsers Day.

True/false question

2008-03-10T18:35:00Z

A water treatment plant supervisor in Emporia, Kansas, declining to state whether the water had been tested for pharmaceuticals:

Well, it’s because of 9/11. We want everybody to guess. … We’re not putting out more information than we have to put out.

That just gives the bad guys a 50/50 chance of getting it right. Thanks a lot. (See also: security through obscurity.)

Tabs

2008-03-06T02:30:00Z

I often hear from people who didn’t realize that each Wikipedia article maintains a comprehensive list of everyone who’s ever edited it, along with every version of the article. The button to display this list is displayed as the History “tab”, sitting prominently above the page contents. It’s so obvious, yet even experienced computer users miss it and cite its absence as their main beef with the site. A similar situation exists for the ever-important Edit tab, which many experienced users never notice. But in this case, the problem doesn’t lie between the keyboard and the chair. Rather than fault the user, I find issue with MonoBook, the default skin for sites that run on MediaWiki, notably Wikipedia. MonoBook relegates the important history and edit links to a tiny, non-descript row of tabs at top, whose labels are all lowercase. At the time, it seemed like a neat way to deal with the sea of links that had been crammed into the Standard skin’s left sidebar, but MonoBook ended up being so minimalistic that everything but the current article text and the unnecessarily prominent list of translations got marginalized. Speaking of minimalism, I tolerate Facebook for two reasons: it provides me with an audience and it has a really clean, efficient interface compared to comparable sites. (And it’s blue. I like blue.) Now the second reason is about to go away, as Facebook looks to reorganize its profile pages. They’re going the way of Wikipedia and adding tabs to separate the profiles into three sections: Wall, About, and Photos. Near as I can tell, these tabs will be utterly easy for newcomers to ignore, and the rest of us will notice them only because we’ve grown accustomed to our friends’s half-hearted attempts at being photogenic and writing witty “About Me”s. Don’t get me wrong: I love tabs. Tabs make Web browsing bearable these days, and it makes using Internet Explorer 6 nothing less than torturous. But other than the occasional 300-pixel tabbed box, tabs belong in full-fledged desktop applications, like Web browsers, not in websites. It’s far too easy for visitors to ignore tabs in websites, because they’re not really discoverable unless they’re accompanied by ’90s-style rainbow-swirling effects as you hover over them, and by then you’ve been scared away. Though I usually find his brand of usability unnecessarily strict and bland, usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s guidelines for tabs are worth taking a look at. If the tabs are right above the small content box that is affected by them, they’re quite discoverable. But place them at the top of a webpage, and the visitor’s eyes will immediately drift down to the heart of the page, the content. Not all of Facebook’s redesign is so problematic: I like the idea of combining the wall with the poorly-named “Mini-Feed”, because you’ll often get wall posts in response to changing your profile picture or status, actions that are currently displayed out of context. But I still don’t know about continuing to call it the “Wall”. It was a Wall when you could devowel every Wall post that your friend had ever received. (The old version was kept around in the “History” section, of course.) It was a neat concession to Facebook’s otherwise orderly site. Now it’s just a corkboard: all your changes have to be fully contained within, basically, a boring little sticky-note. As for replacing Wikipedia’s tabs, I don’t have a solid answer. I would however suggest adding an “Action box” to – of all places – the bottom of each page. Given a generous amount of space there, the action box would list in large font a few key ways for users to interact with the article: edit the article, discuss it, view its authors and history, and cite it. Any other actions, like renaming the article, can be listed below that in smaller text. As it is right now, a visitor is likely to see the article’s title up top, think that’ the beginning, and read down from there. A list of what to do next makes sense at the end of an article. After all, do you tell your friends to comment on your latest adventure before you even tell them the story? Yes, I’m making a big deal out of a trifle, but it bugs me when websites are more tedious to use than they have to be.

Keyboarding for pianists

2008-02-12T03:35:00Z

Today’s update to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) features a new menu that lets you know when your hard drive is being backed up to Time Machine. The menu naturally comes with a command to back up your pirated movie collection, lest the MPAA comes by and runs a big magnet over your computer. (See, backing up is cool!) The command is accessible via a convenient keyboard “shortcut”: ⌃⌥⇧⌘B. (Hover over each symbol to see which key it stands for.) That’s a whopping four keys to hold down and one to press! Sure, you don’t want to accidentally start backing up your computer while Norton’s running in the background and you’re playing a scintillating game of… Chess. But you need the skills of a virtuoso to trigger a backup that way – you might as well just use a mouse. At least you can take as long as you want to master that key combination: in Windows 95, there was an Easter egg that would display Bill Gates’s horse, Nugget, on your desktop. Unfortunately, you had to press Ctrl+F6+RtShift+Del and the right mouse button, simultaneously, before your wallpaper loaded. Sounds like a job for Mavis Beacon.

Thanks to John Gruber for linking to the Macworld review.

Fifteen minutes

2008-02-06T19:50:00Z

All this year, students on campus have been frantic, anticipating the big new role California was to play in the presidential primaries yesterday. After all, when was the last time California was at the starting gate, Super Tuesday, deciding who gets the nomination and who gets written off? This was a big deal for the state, and students on campus – who are allowed to vote in California, regardless of their state of residence – were strongly encouraged to vote here rather than their home state. I didn’t vote yesterday. I received a few snickers from peers who found out I’m planning to vote in a month, in the Ohio primaries, because by then the nomination would’ve already been settled. As it turns out, although California will award more of its delegates to Clinton, the “settled” race is far from over, so look to the Other Super Tuesday on March 4^th, when Ohio, Texas, and a few other states actually decide who makes the cut. Wouldn’t be ironic if – in an election cycle where the states tripped over each other to be the first to hold primaries – the states that, undeterred, kept their late contests mattered more? I predict Iowa will feel mighty irrelevant come the party conventions. As for California, enjoy the 15 minutes of fame.

October through January

2008-02-01T02:15:00Z

Time to slim down my “need to blog about but can’t find the time for” folder. Since there’s currently a whopping 171 bookmarks in it, I’ll start with some of the stuff since October:

Finally, there’s a solution to the troubling trend of small logos: Make My Logo Bigger Cream.
Wired Magazine details the pains Apple went through to make the iPhone happen, and the lasting effect it had on the phone industry.
For the last three years, one man, Alexander Clauss, has pretty much single-handedly competed against Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple. Although his Web browser, iCab, looked horrendous for the longest time and never gained even the market share that Opera had, it until this month supported decade-old Macs and modern Web standards at the same time. In case you’re wondering: yes, my computer has a copy installed.
Those fortune cookies you get from any of the hundreds of Chinese buffets in Cincinnati? They’re Japanese.
My first quarter out here at Stanford, I joined a few hundred freshmen descending on downtown San Francisco for the school’s annual Scavenger Hunt, essentially a denial of service attack on the city’s mass transit infrastructure. Caltrain, the regional commuter railroad, was resilient enough to stuff everyone onboard successfully (albeit unconfortably), but once we got downtown, the Muni bus system was a different story altogether. Apparently Muni’s semi-subway system isn’t any better.
Today’s big corporations would be ashamed of what their Web presence amounted to back in 1996. My favorite is Nickelodeon’s site, where a pre–Web 2.0 vlogger is stuck in the back seat of the family car “with only her goldfish, Rover.” Yeah.

Thanks to John Gruber and Steve Baldwin.

Homophone

2008-01-30T23:36:21Z

A little old, but still interesting: a Microsoft employee demos a not-for-sale, stripped-down version of Windows called MinWin. (Not to be confused with the author of this blog, whose name is pronounced slightly differently.) Among other things, it features an ASCII art boot screen. In all seriousness, it’s more or less intended to be a tiny core within Windows 7, as well as the operating system for embedded devices like phones, which simply don’t have the 15 GB recommended for Windows Vista Home Basic. Also of note are a brief look at Microsoft Bob – which I happen to run on my computer occasionally – and the angry fruit salad known as Windows 1.0. Incidentally: Windows 2.0 – with Reversi! I love Reversi.

Via Ina Fried of C|Net.

Soapbox, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Facebook

2008-01-11T01:40:00Z

Maybe I’m increasing the signal-to-noise ratio at Facebook?

Those of you who’ve known me for awhile probably know of my contempt for so-called “social networking” sites. If they were merely about getting in touch with long-lost friends and looking up someone’s e-mail address, and maybe even bragging about how many favorite colors you have, I’d have no problem with MySpace, Facebook, and the like. But they’re run by for-profit companies, of course, and that means they need a way to monetize our eyeballs. My eyeballs don’t want to be monetized. I once described social networking sites as “one giant, conflated popularity contest”. I still think that’s the case with MySpace, but Facebook has since been more cunning about its whole business. You can easily find fault with a service where you’re encouraged to maintain a tell-all profile, add as many “friends” as possible, and chitchat with them, but do nothing much else. Facebook, however, caters not only to the super-vain among us, but also to those who have something better to do there. Applications. Facebook is a bazaar, and there’s something for everyone at a bazaar.

This blog has been my soapbox for nearly six years, but after high school, its readership declined considerably, not helped by the fact that Google relegated it to the second page of results for my name. That’s where Facebook came in. Although I was initially wary of its terms of service, Facebook was an irresistible distribution channel for my blog. I relented, and now it’s where the majority of my readers come from. People are quitting Facebook cold turkey. But as much as I’d like to follow suit one of these days – having already backed up everything I’ve ever done on the site with the glory that is ScrapBook – I can’t quite leave yet, because along with Facebook would go my audience: you. My profile stays, for now. As much as I dislike their tactics, I know how the record labels must feel, so beholden to Apple for sales. Soapboxes exist to tell everyone what they didn’t know they wanted to hear. If you stand on one, you scream at the top of your lungs, at every chance you get. It’s too bad Facebook just happens to be holding the donation hat.

State of the art

2007-12-30T22:10:00Z

About ten years ago, I first logged onto the Internet. It was a Netscape internet. Everything was “Optimized for Netscape Navigator 3.01”, because Internet Explorer was still in its infancy. On Friday, Netscape was put to rest for the third time. (Goodbye, Francisco Franco.) Though the state of the art long ago left their Mountain View campus, I’ll always miss the spectacular views of comets and huma-huma triggerfish that Netscape gave to the world.