Minh’s Notes

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 It’s bad enough that I employ the Nightly Tester Tools extension to shove out-of-date extensions down Firefox’s figurative throat and Menu Editor to keep my sprawling Tools menu (the product of 30 extensions) tidy.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

Continue reading "Vietnamese Dictionary 1.0 for Firefox" »

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.

Continue reading "A smile and nod" »

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.

Continue reading "Pills with bank accounts" »

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.

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.