Posts from — July 2009

A quick post while I’m waiting for Peyton to arrive…

I’m at a university in Barcelona. There are some summer students here, some staff, some people from random parts of the world here for the conference. This creates an interesting problem: I can’t really tell what language to address people in. I could divide them into three groups:
- Students and staff who speak Catalan and Spanish.
- Students and staff who speak Catalan, Spanish and English.
- Conference attendees who speak English and often some other language (typically not Spanish)

So, I’m generally addressing people in Spanish, but I can’t help but wonder if I’ll end up talking to an English-speaker in Spanish because we both know enough to get by and won’t bother to ask.

Actually, I know slightly less than what is needed to get by, leading to a rather hilarious exchange at the airport.. will post about that later.

I’m about to begin my second big trip of the year: a couple of weeks in Europe. I haven’t had time for blogging lately because I’ve been so busy keeping afloat with all this travel and work, but I hope to resume after my return. I still have posts about Chile to write!

I’m leaving Thursday evening for Barcelona, where I’ll be attending ICDAR (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition). I’ll be presenting my paper Low Cost Correction of OCR Errors using Learning in a Multi-engine Environment (PDF).

After Barcelona, I’ll be heading up to Paris, followed by Madrid, Toledo, Seville, Cordoba, and Granada. I’m very excited about the trip, but a bit stressed about getting some things done.

Anyway, time to finish packing.

I forget where I heard it, but a Farsi-speaking commentator was talking on TV a few weeks ago about “Death to America” and similar chanted things coming from Iran. Apparently, that is the literal translation, but the sentiment is more aptly translate as “Down with…”. So, “Death to Ahmadinejad” (reportedly chanted by some protesters) is not really a call for assassination.

There’s something hilarious about the tone in this Fox News piece about religion in the Netherlands. It’s like the reporter had a bad vacation there or something.

The very best quote is at the end:

The next move in The Netherlands is probably a suicide pill. Not for those who are terminally ill, but just tired with life. While it hasn’t been legalized and is probably several years off, people are already talking about the idea.

Thanks for the unsourced, weasel-worded hearsay just tossed in at the end of the report!

As I’ve said before, my main problem with fox news isn’t its ideological stance, it’s just that it’s so often filled with terribly journalism. The same goes for other cable networks, but fox seems to be the worst.

(video via 1gm)

Google’s recent announcement of Chrome OS generated a lot of press, not surprisingly. As usual with the tech press, a lot it consisted of mindless hype or knee-jerk contrarianism, but several blog posts I read seemed to have a thoughtful, skeptical (in a good way) outlook.

Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context
Discussing the relative failure of iphone web apps to native apps”:

Mediati was right that not just developers but users wanted native third party apps for the iPhone. The difference from what Google is promising with Chrome, however, is that web apps will be the native apps on the system. Presumably all of the default applications from Google itself will themselves be the Google web apps we already know. It’s an eating-your-own-dog-food issue. What irked about Apple’s endorsement of iPhone-optimized web apps as a “really sweet solution” was that, of course, none of the iPhone’s built-in apps were web apps. They were all written in Objective-C with Cocoa Touch. Apple’s own iPhone apps set a high bar for user experience — a height that could not (and still can’t) be reached with web apps running in MobileSafari.

and countering the “oh, it’s another linux distro” meme:

Whatever Chrome OS turns out to be, it isn’t going to be that kind of “Linux”. They’re using the Linux kernel, yes, but they’re building something new and original on top of that. Linux is to Chrome OS what BSD is to Apple’s iPhone OS — which is to say something that users will never see, smell, or notice.

Google’s Microsoft Moment
On Google’s public perception:

when Google evokes Apple or Microsoft or Oracle in its style of communicating ideas, and when cell phone ads on TV say “Powered by Google”, an average consumer’s conception of Google essentially shifts to seeing this company not as “those guys who do the search engine” but instead as another consumer electronics company, like Samsung or Sony, but a little more hip.
This would be okay, except that I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads — we’re just a bunch of geeks in Mountain View!” And while that might be true for the vast number of engineers who define the company’s internal culture, the external impression of Google being just another tech titan like Microsoft will gain footing, making the audience for Google’s messages less tolerant of ambiguity and less forgiving of mistakes.

On taking criticism:

Worse, because most of the dedicated detractors of Google have been either competing companies or nutjobs, it’s been hard for Googlers to take criticisms seriously. That makes it easy to have defensiveness or dismissal of criticisms become a default response.

Why Googlers should read Anil Dash’s post
Matt discusses Anil’s post (above), and how our internal concept of Google can differ drastically from how people see us from the outside:

Many Googlers, especially old-timers, still think of Google from early days, when we were the underdogs in search. But many people outside the company perceive Google as a huge company with an outsized shadow. We can scare people, even when we’re trying not to.

Lots of good advice there, and some of the comments on that post are worth reading.

Why it doesn’t matter that you can’t run Photoshop on ChromeOS today
Abe counters the surprisingly common argument I saw in some of the crappier articles on the subject:

“I’m not interested in ChromeOS, since it won’t be able to handle heavy-duty programs like Photoshop.”
That might be true today, but it won’t be true forever (or even for long).

I read one article that said that nobody would use ChromeOS because it can’t run Office (can’t find the link right now). Then just last week, Microsoft announces plans to extend Office to the browser. Heh!

The subtitles added to this video are pretty hilarious:

(some of the text may be NSFW)

From a TechCrunch post about a novel ‘released on twitter’:

Who says 140 characters isn’t enough to say something constructive? Matt Stewart is writing an entire novel that way.

OK, where to begin.

First, I don’t think anyone said that 140 chars isn’t enough to say anything constructive, it’s just not enough to say most things constructive. Second, by “writing an entire novel that way”, they mean writing a novel the regular way, then using a script to chop it up into tweet-sized chunks and pipe it out in pieces to twitter. So really, you could have done this with any book. Also, you could have done this with any character-length restriction. It’s meaningless.

Some have written that twitter makes you a better writer by forcing you to be concise. I disagree. Twitter can make you a more concise writer, but that’s not synonymous with a better writer. If you wanted to be an even better writer, why not just restrict yourself to 100 characters? How about 80? I’m not arguing against the utility of the character limit, but I think its usefulness is for the readers, to allow for easy skimming.

I’ve never really liked Michael Jackson’s music that much (with the exception of some Jackson 5 songs). It’s not bad, but I never understood why it was astronomically popular. Regardless, the media coverage of his death was absurd. It’s a news event, to be sure, and it should have some coverage, but if you’re a “news” organization, at some point you have to decide what is important. The Jackson “coverage” drowned out major national and international stories. MTV, VH1 and BET can focus on it, sure, but they don’t have an obligation to cover the news.

I guess I can’t really think of a celebrity whose death really made me sad. Actually, I’m having trouble thinking of any living celebrity whose death would make me sad (more than anyone else’s death would make me sad). Radiohead is my favorite band and Louis CK is my favorite standup comedian, and if any of them died, I’d mostly just be sad that they won’t be creating anymore. I guess it’s just me.

“Intervention” by Arcade Fire may be my favorite of their songs. It’s such a big sound, and this song seems quite well-suited to the group’s composition.

(now that I’m a bit less tired)

The acting in the movie was pretty good, but the movie was bad in just about every respect. The writing was awful, the structure of the plot was terrible, and the direction and editing were distracting. The movie peaked at least 30 minutes before it ended, leaving all of us thinking: “JUST GO TO THE BIOGRAPH THEATER AND BE DONE WITH IT”. Even Dillinger’s death was drawn-out but offered no pay-off. I really didn’t care what happened to any of the characters.

The camera work and lighting focused a lot on handheld shots (during action scenes) and the lighting was not full, movie-style lighting, but was just “normal” lighting. Instead of feeling like i was watching John Dillinger, I felt like I was watching someone film a movie about John Dillinger. Unfortunately, I was.

QED.