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Category Archives: General

Elevator Spam

11-Jul-05

As a “welcome back to work” gift this morning, I find that all our elevators at ISI have been equipped with TV screens courtesy the “Captivate Network“. Ugh. “Captivate”, oh so aptly and ironically named. They’re basically small TV screens that deliver, via wireless update, “quality programming” (news, weather, stock quotes, advertisements) to riders of […]

Back

11-Jul-05

Returned from the other side of the world late last week; Was a groomsman at my sister’s wedding in the little town of Yakima, Washington over the weekend. Now, making a feeble attempt to transition back into everyday life. Busy, busy, busy. Turned on my desktop this afternoon, for the first time in a month. […]

engaged.

29-Jun-05

Last night, 6:30pm, at Hong Shu Lin station (????) (on the Red Line of the subway, the last stop before Danshui (??), where the subway goes above ground, out of Taipei city, in the more scenic semi-countryside), we watched the sunset and I proposed to my girlfriend. I guess this begins a new era of […]

taiwan

24-Jun-05

been in taiwan for about a week now. forgot how oppressive the humidity is, and how good the fruits and vegetables are (amazing how things can taste when you breed fruits for flavor instead of resistance to pesticides/long-ripeness for shipping). had dinner with a couple blogger/social-software guys from Academica Sinica a couple nights ago. it […]

latex

13-Jun-05

Urgh, LaTeX. Tools with clunky UIs, nonintuitive markup, unhelpful error messages on failed compiles, and a glass-cannon bibliography manager. Resourcelist: a latex primer mac-tex: latex resources for mac the one thing that made it worthwhile: automatic citeulike2bibtex export TexShop my latex tool of choice on the mac, for now Kile my linux-based latex tool-of-the-day (yes, […]

pydev 0.9.4

09-Jun-05

neat! a new version of pydev (a python IDE plugin for Eclipse) is out. Among other fixes are good $PYTHONPATH handling and a more robust debugger. My day just got so much brighter =).

Programming-Binge and Crash-Sustainable Development

07-Jun-05

Saturday morning I had a great idea. I realized my work in modeling second language learner phonology errors was really an approximation of a finite state transducer framework. And the bugs and speed issues I had been dealing with for much of the last 3 months were not on the linguistics side but more on […]

CiteULike

05-Jun-05

Richard Cameron’s brainchild CiteULike is a social software driven, web-based content management system for academic papers. It’s a lot like del.icio.us (socially-browsable, public bookmarks, organized by tags and folksonomy rather than by strict hierarchy), but with more support for the metadata typical to academic papers. It also imports and exports to bibtex, for low barrier-to-entry. […]

Google Does Machine Translation

01-Jun-05

Neat, google is finally getting around to using their in-home statistical machine translation stuff, instead of Systran’s old rule-based. Been expecting this for a while, ever since they bought Franz Och from us here at ISI a year or two ago. Hehe, it’s funny to read layperson commentary on slashdot: There are five levels of […]

Talk at NCCU

27-May-05

Giving a talk at NCCU while I am in Taiwan this summer, entitled Creating a Virtual Language Tutor that Understands Learner Speech . Not the most exciting of titles, I know. Feel free to ask me if you are interested in attending. Here is the abstract.