Schinckel.net

From my referrer logs, I noticed someone had used Google Translate to translate some of my site into Brazilian, or something (pl-BR, IIRC).-Portugese (pt-BR) (Thanks Bob). I don’t speak, or read this language at all, but I have done a bit of German and French at school and University. So, I thought it might be fun to translate a few of the pages from my site into these languages on the fly, and see how accurate the translation engine is. It seems pretty good. Highlights for me were:

• Himmelsbevorzugungen, wo Tugend anordnet. Und was würde dieses sein, aber den Tiger malen und schnitzen den Swan?
• Notenfußball & le football de contact
• Je suis un professeur de conception et technologie, y compris la conception assistée par ordinateur, l’électronique et une variété d’autres choses.
• Comme un biscuit de fortune, seulement sans fortune, et pas un biscuit.

I am amused at the Ads that Google Adsense places on my site, and the one that has kept coming up recently finally got my attention, and I visited it. Screencasting is actually something I would be very interested in. I often need to teach others how to do something, and the ability to add this into my website might be useful. Unfortunately for Camtasia Studio, I use a Mac, so I will have to look for other software. And there seem to be some free ones out there worth looking at.

X11, or XWindows, is a throwback to the glory days of Unix, when you often ran software on one computer, but wanted the display to appear on another. Apple bundle a version of this with Mac OS X, but for some reason it doesn’t install on Tiger. You can install the X11 SDK, or Software Development Kit, but the User install is somewhat hidden. What you’ll need to do is install it directly from the Tiger DVD, under /System/Installation/Packages/X11User.pkg Most people won’t need X11, but if you want to install osx2x, and use one mouse and keyboard between a Mac and a PC, then you will need it. I recommend, if you have a Mac and a PC next to one another, that you do this. It is very cool.

I’ve posted before about crap features of Word. The biggest bug, IMHO is the handling of objects (images, text boxes and the like) that are near a page border, and the Layout style is _Square _(or others, other than In Line With Text). When you move the object too close to the top of the page, it jumps up and sticks to the top of the page. Here is the Text box on my page. When I press the up arrow (keyboard) with the Text box selected, it jumps up to the top: You cannot place it closer to the top of the page, without it being right at the top of the page, and outisde of the border, and over the header. This is bad, bad stuff.

I uploaded my XML file last night, and it’s analysed it, and given me some useful feedback.

You appear to like Chillout the most, with Wicked Beat Sound System your favorite, which makes sense, since they have the most playtime in this genre. Chillout is your favorite common genre, and you have more Rock songs than anything else. Honey is your favorite overall artist, but you listen to BBC Philharmonic the most. Jet ain’t too bad, either.

**Genres **22; **Artists **1,381; **Albums **2,050; **Tracks **6,039; Total Time 18.46 days **Last Played **Cotton Fields, by _Beach Boys _ **Playcount **6,498 **Total Playtime **19.54 days You can see what it’s like now, by visiting Schinckel’s iTunes Registry. I might make a script/program that checks to see if the computer is online, and if it is, gzips the XML library file and uploads it. That way, these would be updated regularly.

Found a nice site/idea today when checking referrer logs: http://www.itunesregistry.com/about.php Basically, it allows you upload your iTunes XML library file, and it analyses it and compares it to others’ libraries. It is a great idea - much better than connecting to a database and sending individual queries/messages. I’m not sure how it would go with matching up artists/albums where there are slight differences (spelling errors made by tools who can’t spell Adagio, or think it’s _The _Eagles, not just Eagles.) Still, as a note to self, I’ll have to check it out. (And it should be cross-platform, since both versions of iTunes export an XML file).

Sam Deane’s excellent site Elegant Chaos has been hacked: the home page looks like the following. SpyKids From Brasil ... We are: poerschke FDL Hualdo LordX ... spykids@bsdmail.com It’s hardly news, but if anyone has his email address, they might want to let him know. (SpyKids, or ScriptKiddies…?)

I’m thinking about leaving Blogsome: I’ve been pretty happy with their hosting solution, and bugs tend to eventually get fixed, but there are two issues I can’t continue to live without:

1. Posts posted via XMLRPC don’t have categories set.
2. Posts posted via XMLRPC have quotes and double quotes escaped, breaking stuff.

I’ve got an account set up on http://schinckel.globbo.org. I’ll probably continue to post here until I get the template/theme set up how I want, and then move everything over.

Boing Boing: Bottled water is evil You clearly haven’t tasted Adelaide water if you think you can’t tell the difference between bottled and tap water…

I have no burning desire to learn Java. I’m proficient in python, did a fair bit of Pascal about 12 years ago, followed by some C, a touch of C++, and recently a whole chunk of AppleScript. Daily, I possibly spend more time coding for bash than anything else, except hand-coding HTML. I’ve recently started playing around with PHP and MySQL, and ages ago did a bucn of JavaScript. I’m not saying learning another language is not a good idea. I just wouldn’t mind if the three tertiary institutions in my city didn’t only offer the same language as part of their Computer Science degrees. Not that I’m seriously considering going back to University. It just might be nice to find a course that taught python, Obj-C, or C++, rather than Java. Still, it might be fun to learn it…