2012/11/28 23:46
When I was a linguistics fresher back in 1990, we were told a well-known anecdote about the early days of machine translation: When the sentence "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (an allusion to Mark 14:38) was translated into Russian and then back to English, the result was "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten".I...
2012/09/25 11:44
Steve Jobs was great at saying no: “Focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products. Where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.”When I read about the Apple Maps fiasco, I can't help thinking that Apple's problem is that their new CEO isn't nearly as...
2013/05/02 17:40
I’m really excited by the upcoming release of
Google Glass. Until now, there’s been an inherent conflict in smartphone design between creating a huge screen and making the device small enough that you can be bothered carrying it around at all times. (It’s interesting how mobile phones were getting smaller and smaller until the advent of smartphones meant a larger screen was required, at which point they started growing again.)
Although Google Glass is looking great, I’m sure it’ll evolve rapidly over the next few years. Apart from increasing the resolution, I expect it to expand from one eye to two, to allow for three-dimensional display. I also wonder whether it’s really the best idea to put the display above the line of vision rather than below it — if you’re using it for reading a book, surely it must feel like holding the book above your head.
However, the main area for improvement is how you interact with it. Google Glass apparently requires you to touch the frame to control it, which is essential one-dimensional and tiring. However, traditional devices such as keyboards, mice and touch-screens are not going to be very effective, either. I’m not sure what they’ll come up with, but I won’t be surprised if Google Glass 3D in 2016 will be accompanied by a Google Glove (or perhaps just by small sensors on your finger nails).
2012/11/19 16:23
I decided to take part in Edinburgh Startup Weekend (also known as @SWEdinburgh) over the weekend.The idea is that you pitch a lot of ideas, pick the best ones, form teams and then develop the ideas into viable businesses over the weekend.I was part of the Yavaly team (to be precise, I was the main developer). Our aim was to create a novel way to match tourists with providers of holiday activities, and we actually managed to create an amazing...
2012/11/13 10:35
Most of the people I follow on Twitter tweet in English, and so do I most of the time.However, I often retweet stuff written in other languages, and I do also from time to time tweet in Danish and occasionally Spanish myself. This shouldn't cause any issues for those of my followers who know the same languages as me, but...
2012/08/31 21:57
In the days before the World Wide Web, the best way to procrastinate on the Internet was probably Usenet.(If you don't know it, it's basically hierarchical discussions ordered by topic. You can read Usenet newsgroups for instance by using Thunderbird...
2012/06/12 18:07
Three years ago, I added a metric clock to this blog, but I later redesigned the whole site and the clock got lost.In the meantime, HTML5 has been getting more and more widespread, so I think it's now time for...
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