Anaphoric spinach: good band name?
— February 28th, 2009 4:15 pmTravel plans complete! OMG.
— February 28th, 2009 1:19 pmHad a great day with @dalbanese! Now: packing! 
Listening to The Bugle: John Oliver talking about his dinner with Natalie Portman and President Clinton.
— February 28th, 2009 3:28 amWith skill and patience, I got Expedia and Orbitz to produce the exact same crazy itinerary. Orbitz a dollar cheaper, but maybe rounding. :/
— February 27th, 2009 4:04 pmAs I tend to sleep on planes anyway, I’m currently looking into an itinerary full of red-eyes… smart or stupid?
— February 27th, 2009 2:47 pmIt’s snowing!
— February 27th, 2009 2:10 amLet my power adapter at work… I don’t know what to do with myself… Read? Watch TV? Just go to bed?
— February 26th, 2009 1:06 pm
Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists from mitcho on Vimeo.
Below is a transcript of this video. Please distribute this video far and wide to anyone who may be interested. ^^
Free yakiniku for these hard times: http://airyakiniku.cosaji.jp/
— February 25th, 2009 5:24 am楽しい楽しい確定申告！
— February 25th, 2009 4:40 amIt’s 10 am… why are my eyes tired?
— February 25th, 2009 1:19 amExcited to have @dalbanese is in town! Looking forward to grabbing dinner!
— February 24th, 2009 8:10 amThank you to everyone who contributed data to how your language identifies its arguments! The data collection is ongoing so please contribute data points for languages you know!
Currently when writing a command in Ubiquity you must specify two properties for each argument: a modifier (the appropriate adposition—the direct object excluded) and the noun type. Here are some quick examples from the standard commands:
email:
noun_arb_text)to (noun_type_contact)translate:
noun_arb_text)to (noun_type_language)from (noun_type_language)This way of specifying arguments has a few shortcomings. First of all, it requires you to identify each type of argument by unique adposition, which does not support languages with case marking nor languages with sets of synonymous adpositions (e.g. French {à la, au, aux}). Second, as we saw in how your language identifies its arguments some languages don’t mark semantic roles on the arguments at all and the current system of specifying arguments is completely incompatible with these languages. Third, the current specification requires command authors to make localized versions of their commands, specifying the language-appropriate modifiers.
If you’ve ever subscribed to a new Ubiquity command before, you know the red screen of doom. Ubiquity currently takes users to this page every time they wish to subscribe to a new command. The current design is meant to encourage users to be aware of the possible security implications of enabling and executing a command, to avoid getting a trojan horse.
The current screen, however, does not make subscribing to commands foolproof. I personally know I’ve subscribed to a number of commands without reading through the code, defeating the purpose of the anti-trojan horse display. Moreover, the page doesn’t give you any information on how you can use this new command. Especially given the inherent limited discoverability of a natural language interface, taking a moment to help the user actually learn the command becomes key.
Today I did a quick mockup of what a friendlier command feed subscription page might look like. Take a look at this screenshot with some of the features marked:
You can also check out the page itself. If you’d like to visualize it without the “trust” warning, you can also view the trusted version.
This mockup here is but a first iteration. What do you think about this subscription page? What is missing? What should be changed?