Archive for November, 2009
Filed under: Fugly Friday
It probably says an awful lot that after spending ten (10) minutes on Carnage UK’s website… I still don’t know what they do exactly. I think they arrange wet t-shirt contests or something — binge-drinking, wet t-shirt events for students in the UK.
Either way, their brutal, eye-gouging monstrosity is quite possibly the most garish and ugly site I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if it’s meant to scare prospective clients off — or lure a very specific subset of the human species into their lurid, sweaty, drunken grip.
Further research shows that one of their clients/binge-drinking brain-dead student punters recently got into trouble for urinating on a war memorial. Why would I research such a debauched and drunken leper of a domain, I hear you ask? Because really, such a creation must be a front for something truly nefarious — no one designs such vomit-inducing promotional material with benevolent intentions. No one.
So, if you’re looking to get rip-roaringly drunk in the UK and wear ‘fancy dress t-shirts’, or if you’re looking for a good excuse to piss all over our respected and revered military veterans, look no further than Carnage UK.
[Thanks to Irregular Shed (?) for the tip!]
Fugly Friday: Carnage UK, best viewed when drunk — blind drunk originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Download Squad – Costumes – Carnage UK – T-shirt – Website
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We’re keeping things friendly with this latest roundup of fun, new mashups. Do something creative and different with your Facebook friends, like put their mugs on a mug or find a job near them. And there’s always some fun to be had with a website scoring tool. Here’s the details each of these:
- Friendcup: Create a unique Mug featuring all your friends profile-images. It is an easy and fun way to show the world who your best friends are. Besides coffee-cups they also have glasses and beer-mugs. APIs: Facebook, Zazzle. More at our Friendcup profile.
- Relocator: Indeed job search integrated with Facebook and LinkedIn – find jobs close to friends, and see who you know (or contacts know) at those offering the job. APIs: Facebook, Google Maps, indeed, LinkedIn. More at our Relocator profile.
- ScoreInTheBox: Type in your domain name and find out how your site scores. Uses a unique formula consisting of variables, such as backlinks and popularity, to calculate a score for each website entered. APIs: Alexa Web Information Service, Google Ajax Search, Yahoo Site Explorer. More at our ScoreInTheBox profile.
The Apertium Project works on open-source machine translation and language technology. We try to focus our efforts on lesser-resourced and marginalized languages, but also work with larger languages. To date, we have released translators for 21 language pairs, covering languages spoken by 1.1 billion people, ranging from English (est. 500m speakers) to Aranese (est. 4,000 speakers). A similar number of additional language pairs are in development. The Apertium software is licensed under the GPL, but in addition (a rarer situation in the machine translation field) so is the data for all these language pairs. This means that the data can be re-used by other language projects (e.g. in developing spelling or grammar checkers, thesauri, etc).
This was our first year in Google Summer of Code and we were very fortunate to receive nine student slots. We filled them with some great students and are pleased to report that out of the nine projects, eight were successful.
The completed project were:
A translator for Norwegian Bokmål (nb) and Norwegian Nynorsk (nn)
This project was accepted as part of our “adopt a language pair” idea from our ideas page. Some work had already been done on the translator but it was a long way from finished. Kevin Unhammer from the University of Bergen was mentored by Trond Trosterud from the University of Tromsø. The final result, after an epic effort, is a working translator (and the first free software translator for nb-nn) that makes a mistake in only 11 words out of every 100 translated, making using the system for post-edition feasible.
One of the key aspects of Kevin’s work was the re-use and adaptation of existing open source resources. Much of the bilingual dictionary was statistically inferred from the existing translations in KDE, using ReTraTos and GIZA++ (created by Franz Och). In addition to this, Kevin used the Oslo-Bergen Constraint Grammer, contributing fixes not only to that, but to the VISL CG3 software itself. After the GSoC deadline, Kevin has continued his work, including incorporating some changes from feedback from the Nynorsk Wikipedia.
A translator for Swedish (sv) to Danish (da)
Another language pair adoption, Michael Kristensen, who had previously done some work on this translator, was mentored by Jacob Nordfalk, the author of our English to Esperanto translator. As there are very few free linguistic resources for Swedish and Danish the work was pretty much started from scratch, although we took great advantage of the Swedish Wiktionary. The translator is only unidirectional, from Swedish to Danish, and it has an error rate of around 20%.
The completion of this translator is something of a triumph for Apertium. Begun back in 2005, the project had been neglected for many years. This was the first translator for the Apertium platform that focused on non-Romance languages.
Multi-engine machine translation (MEMT)
Gabriel Synnaeve was mentored by Francis Tyers to work on a module to improve the quality of machine translation by taking translations from different systems and merging their strengths and discarding their weaknesses. The two systems focused on in the initial prototype are Apertium (rule-based MT) and Moses (statistical MT) but it can easily be extended to more. The idea behind the system is that for some languages there is often not one MT system which is better than all others, but some are better at some phrases and some are better at others. Thus, if we can combine the output of two or more systems with different strengths/weaknesses, we can make better translations.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the MEMT project is its potential for use as a research platform for future work on hybrid machine translation, by allowing the researcher to focus only on the algorithms they wish to implement. During the project, Gabriel was joined by Francis in person for a ‘mini-hackathon’, which, despite something of a farcical start involving requests made on IRC for phone calls across Europe on behalf of two people who were in the same city, lead to a greater degree of functionality and modularization in the code.
Highly scalable web service architecture for Apertium
Víctor Manuel Sánchez Cartagena worked with mentor Juan Antonio Perez-Ortiz on a highly-scalable web service architecture, or, Apertium for Cloud computing. Initially targeting Amazon’s EC2, as well as standalone servers, the scalable web service allows the use of multiple translation services on multiple physical or virtual servers, scaling to meet the translation demands of users, from a single user-facing service, which implements the Google Language API.
The core of the system is the translation router, which controls the flow between user and translation server, based on a variety of factors, including the availability of the language pair, the current load on the server, as well as providing a framework to allow these factors to have different priorities on a per-user basis. It also takes into account the cost of each translation request. The project is a complete package; as well as the router, it includes a translation daemon, and convenience scripts to ease the rollout of server instances.
In addition to his work on his project, Víctor is also serving as an organiser for the FreeRBMT workshop.
Conversion of Anubadok
Abu Zaher was mentored by Kevin Donnelly and Francis Tyers to convert Anubadok, an open-source MT system for English to Bengali to work with the Apertium engine. This was an ambitious project and not all of the goals were realised, but we were able to make the first wide-coverage morphological analyser / generator for Bengali and a substantial amount of lexical transfer, so the project was a great success.
Zaher is also looking at improving the Ankur spell checker with information from his analyser / generator, so the work done is already being reused; there is also interest in using the data to create a Bengali stemmer, for more efficient searching/indexing of Bengali texts, and a number of tools which were created to model the various aspects of Bengali inflection will certainly prove useful in other areas of NLP for Bengali.
Apertium going SOA
Pasquale Minervini’s work was motivated by the needs of Informatici senza Frontiere to have a translation engine that would fit into a Service-Oriented architecture. To this end, Pasquale, mentored by Jimmy O’Regan, designed an XML-RPC-based server that efficiently contains the Apertium pipeline, and layered it with JSON (still under development), SOAP, and CORBA services, which, as well as making Apertium more buzzword compliant, gives a greater range of options to programmers wishing to integrate Apertiums translation services into a wider range of architectures. This is undoubtedly a popular project idea: Alexa’s keywords for Apertium show ‘apertium going soa’ and ‘deadbeef apertium’ (deadbeef is Pasquale’s IRC nick) in 2nd and 4th place for search keywords leading to Apertium.
Because of the potential overlap between their projects, in the first weeks of their GSoC work, Pasquale and Víctor agreed on the Google Language API as a standard for their projects to communicate; Pasquale took this agreement one step further by implementing the ‘language detection’ feature of the API – something previously unavailable in Apertium. In addition to that, Pasquale also contributed memory leak checks against the Apertium platform, as well as other fixes, and has helped another (non-GSoC) student in the goal of porting Apertium to Windows.
Trigram part-of-speech tagging
Zaid Md. Abdul Wahab Sheikh was mentored by Felipe Sánchez Martínez to improve our part-of-speech tagging module to use trigrams instead of bigrams, as well as implementing changes to the training tools to create data for it.
Apertium was originally designed for closely related languages, but is growing to meet the challenges of translating between more distant languages. One of the unique aspects of Dr. Sanchez’s work on Part-of-Speech tagging is the use of target language information which allows an accurate tagger to be trained using much less data than usual. Zaid’s work builds on Dr. Sanchez’s work with first-order Hidden Markov Models, extending it to second-order HMMs, similarly to TnT. This enables more accurate translation between more distant languages, using the same methods, so that the rest of the Apertium system can continue to grow.
Java port of lttoolbox
Raphaël Laurent worked with Sergio Ortiz Rojas to port lttoolbox to Java. lttoolbox is the core component of the Apertium system; as well as providing morphological analysis and generation, it also provides pattern matching and dictionary lookup to the rest of Apertium, so a Java port is the first step towards a version of Apertium for Java-based devices. Raphaël finished an earlier line-for-line port contributed by Nic Cotrell, first making it work; then making it binary compatible.
As it stands currently, lttoolbox-java can be integrated into other Java-based tools, facilitating the re-use of our software and our extensive repository of morphological analysers. Tools such as LanguageTool, the open source proofreading tool, also make extensive use of morphological analysis, but OmegaT, the open source CAT tool, could use it for dictionary look-up of inflected words; it could even be used with our own apertium-morph tool: a plugin for Lucene that allows linguistically-rich document indexing.
FreeRBMT
On the 2nd and 3rd of November, we held the first FreeRBMT workshop, which was heavily inspired by the Google Summer of Code program, both as a way for students and mentors to meet in person, and to provide the students with an opportunity to present peer-reviewed papers about the work they completed during the program. The entire proceedings are available from the University of Alicante; in particular, we would like to highlight the papers which were successfully presented by the students who took part in GSoC:
Apertium goes SOA: an efficient and scalable service based on the Apertium rule-based machine translation platform; Minervini, Pasquale
Development of a morphological analyser for Bengali; Faridee, Abu Zaher Md.; Tyers, Francis M.
An open-source highly scalable web service architecture for the Apertium machine translation engine; Sánchez-Cartagena, Víctor M.; Pérez-Ortiz, Juan Antonio
Reuse of free resources in machine translation between Nynorsk and Bokmål; Unhammer, Kevin; Trosterud, Trond
A trigram part-of-speech tagger for the Apertium free/open-source machine translation platform; Sheikh, Zaid Md Abdul Wahab; Sánchez-Martínez, Felipe
In addition, the following paper was presented by the mentors of a successful project (Michael, the student, was unfortunately too busy to participate in its writing):
Shallow-transfer rule-based machine translation for Swedish to Danish; Tyers, Francis M.; Nordfalk, Jacob
We would like to thank Google for providing us with the opportunity to participate in the Summer of Code program; in particular, Leslie, Cat, and Ellen, for making it run so smoothly. We would also like to make special mention of two students: Ankitha Rao and Daniel Beck, who, despite being unsuccessful in their applications, continued to work on their proposed projects (an English to Hindi translator, and a module for multi-word units, respectively). Finally, we would like to thank all of the students, mentors, and administrators who contributed their time and skill to Apertium.
By Francis Tyers and Jimmy O’Regan, Summer of Code Mentors for the Apertium Project
Filed under: Video, Mobile, Android
Android users have been able to broadcast video to Ustream.tv for a couple of months now, but there was no way to watch Ustream shows on your Android phone until now. Ustream Viewer has just hit the Android Market, allowing for free, unlimited on-the-go viewing of the popular video site.
Ustream Viewer will work over either wi-fi or 3G. The iPhone version of Ustream Viewer has been around since early this year, but Android still has the advantage, because Broadcaster is Android-only. It’s not that the 3GS can’t stream video, it’s that Apple has been rejecting streaming apps. Mark this one down under “Droid Does,” I suppose.
[via TechCrunch]
Watch Ustream over wi-fi or 3G on your Android device originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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iPhone – Apple – Android – Android Market – Download Squad
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Filed under: Commercial, Holiday Gift Guide
Applications and Operating Systems
- AVG Internet Security 2 year protection for 3 users – Free after MIR at NewEgg.com
- Microsof Office Home and Student for 3 pcs – $59.99 at TigerDirect.com
- Microsoft Office 2008 Home and Student for Mac – $109.99 at Bestbuy.Com
- Windows 7 Home Premium Uprage – $109.49 at Amazon.com
- Windows 7 Ultimate x64 OEM – $164.99 at ZipZoomFly.com
PC Games
- 5-day long one day only sale – tons of games at half price at Steam
- LucasArts premier pack – 7 games for $49.99 at Steam
- THQ Complete pack – 18 games for $49.99 at Steam
- Fallout 3 GoTY edition for $19.90 at GoGamer.com
- Unreal Tournament 3 for $5.90 at GoGamer.com
- World of Warcraft for $4.90 (Friday/Saturday 11/27-11/28 ONLY) at GoGamer.com
- Popcap Complete pack feat. Chuzzle, Peggle, Bejeweled, Bookworm (44 games total) – $99 at Popcap
- Crysis Maximum Edition for $19.95 at Direct2Drive.com
- The Sims 3 for $29.95 at Direct2Drive.com
- 30% off all downloadable games from the EA Games online store
iPhone Games
Gameloft is offering the following titles at $0.99 each – pick up $25 worth of games for $5!
- Castle of Magic
- Real Tennis 2009
- Blades of Fury
- Terminator Salvation
- Brothers in Arms – Hour of Heroes
- Shrek Kart
Thanks to Engrish.com for the awesome image!
Black Friday software deals you can score online originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Download Squad – Microsoft – Video game – Electronic Arts – Games
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Filed under: Video, Windows, Macintosh, Linux
If you’re a fan of the AVI or xVid formats, you’re out of luck with this release of Handbrake. These formats have been dropped in favor of pushing H.264. The good news is that you should now be able to rip DVDs in real time, or darn close. There’s also a time-saving Live Preview option, so you can check the quality of your rips without waiting until they finish.
[via TUAW]
Handbrake 0.94 transcodes DVDs even faster originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Mac OS X – Linux – Microsoft Windows – HandBrake – Download Squad
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Okay, you can admit it. Either you love the Twilight books and movies, or you pretend to hate them for fear that you might actually dig it. In any case, you certainly have a Twilight fan you can send to this virtual Twilight tour of Forks, Washington, and the surrounding locations from the movies (click “explore locations”).
The mashup uses Bing Maps (our Bing Maps API profile) and Silverlight to let the user explore points of interest, such as the Cullen House and Forks Hospital. Everything is layered over the map of the actual city of Forks.
Some locations, such as the beach, are many miles away from Forks. Semi-transparent, clickable mileage markers pan the user to these far-off locations. This is where Silverlight seems to shine, providing a smooth transition, then zooming in eerily to the clicked location.
But there’s an even bigger reason the map uses Silverlight, as Bing evangelist Chris Pendleton explains:
The application uses Bing Maps Silverlight control not just for location context, but also because of the native integration with media elements like video and audio. In fact, the Bing Maps Silverlight control interactive SDK has samples on how to overlay scalable (and non-scalable) video feeds right into the control. So, technically, you could do this with you favorite character.
As much as I prefer a JavaScript map implementation, it’s hard to argue with this user experience. For certain interactions, Flash and Silverlight maps are the way to go. And I’m sure once all you Twilight fans see this site, you’ll agree.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Computing’s greatest accomplishment of this decade will likely go unremarked in the popular press.
I call it the “death of the black box EULA.” (Picture from the blog Fortunes Pawn Luncheonette, December 2007.)
Free software wounded it in the early 1990s. The Internet stabbed it again. But it was open source, in this decade, that struck the fatal blow.
Users under 25 may be unaware of what I am talking about. Let me explain how the scam worked.
- I have this black box. It does tricks. I sell you the tricks it does with fancy TV ads or in glossy magazine spreads. You want my black box. You want it bad.
- I will let you use a copy of the black box, but I will not sell it to you. I will take your money but you are not buying anything.
- All this is covered by an End User License Agreement (EULA), written in a form of elvish. You signed it when you ripped open the black box.
- The EULA states that the box may not work. The EULA states the box may do nothing. Regardless, I keep your money.
- The EULA says you can’t look in the black box and try to fix it. You can’t even see what’s inside. You might steal it. Maybe I will talk to you on the phone about it from India.
- Here is another black box. It fixes the first one, makes it better. It’s more stable. You need an upgrade, maybe a new computer, but you really, really want this black box. Seen the ad?
- Wash, rinse, repeat.
The black box EULA is descended from licenses IBM wrote in the 1950s, when computers filled great rooms and the value of calculating, say, the pay-outs for a horse race were worth a fortune.
Software was unstable then, even more so than now, and without the EULA companies like IBM might have been sued out of business by angry customers. The computer revolution may never have happened without the black box EULA.
Companies like Microsoft brought the black box EULA into the 1990s intact. Even though PCs were very reliable, even though software storage had become stable, and even though the creation of software was no longer a black art, the black box EULA remained.
The black box EULA made Bill Gates a billionaire 50 times over. It made many other people wealthy too, rich beyond their wildest schemes.
But the black box EULA was always hopelessly one-sided. It was unfair to customers. And lawyers could provide no help — they had written the black box EULA and were sworn to uphold it.
So folks like Richard Stallman struck a blow against wealth and said software should be free. Not only free but visible so you could see it, smell it, kiss it, touch it. Fix it, improve it. And they wrote their own license, which they dubbed copyleft.
The war against the black box EULA was on.
The free software folks won applause, but the people who needed complex black boxes were skeptical. They knew you couldn’t just give stuff away, that software writers need to eat, too. Even if Linus Torvalds was happy with hamburger while the customers ate steak, a way was needed to get him a hamburger. And a beer.
This is what I have now spent a half-decade covering. Open source is a transformation enabled by the Internet, born of righteous indignation, and driven home by hard-headed businessmen and women on both sides of major transactions.
So now you have an alternative to the black box. The makers of black boxes know they can’t hold customers to their EULAs forever. They have to compete with free. The eye of Gates has fallen. The age of men has begun.
The black box is now encased in plastic and steel. You can return an iPhone to the store. The EULAs are still there, and they retain their legal weight, but they no longer control the market.
It’s a good time, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, to look back from these heights and see what has been accomplished.
The black box EULA no longer has the power to cloud mens’ minds. It is dead as a controlling force in the software world. You can open the box, see what’s inside. You are free to tinker with it, to freely connect with it, and you no longer think of it as a black box that holds all light, but as a physical product, with a warranty.
There are obligations on both sides. It’s a fairer and more just software world. It’s worth celebrating this Thanksgiving.
Happy Turkey Day.
Filed under: Text, Utilities, Windows
One thing about laptops that drives a lot of my customers nuts is the touchpad. If I had a nickel for every time someone brought a laptop in complaining that their mouse pointer suddenly jumped somewhere else on the screen and messed up their typing, I’d have at least $10.15.
Hey, I’m in a small town – that would nearly count as an epidemic.
TouchFreeze is a tiny, open source program designed to fix this problem once and for all. Once you install it, TouchFreeze sits your in your system tray and waits for you to begin typing. When you do, it temporarily disables input from your touchpad.
Be forewarned: TouchFreeze may not work with your laptop’s touchpad. It worked on my two Acer test systems just fine, but certain brands may be a bit less cooperative.
[via Addictive Tips]
Automatically disable your touchpad while you type with TouchFreeze originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Download Squad – opensource – Microsoft Windows – Laptop – Acer
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Over the last 10 years, Web-based advertising has become huge–a $23 billion business which could eclipse print and television. Despite the rapid growth, Web-based advertising is still an immature industry. There are new businesses being created, ranging from social networking sites and open source ad networks to mobile apps with location-based content.