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Light of Firefox (tomoshibi 灯) from Mozilla Japan

mitcho — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:58:54 +0000

Here at Mozilla Japan Firefox 3.5 Headquarters,¹ we just launched the new and improved Light of Firefox (in Japanese, tomoshibi (灯)) for Firefox 3.5. The Light of Firefox is a real-time, interactive website which shows sparks on a map of Japan for every manual download of the new Firefox from mozilla.jp.

The name tomoshibi means “torch” in Japanese. As a new Firefox brings new technologies and possibilities to all corners of the web, so too will the tomoshibi light up the night in Japan!

The site was designed and coded by Daisuke Akatsuka of the Keio Kakehi Lab (xlab), the same fine folks who brought you interFORest.

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The (Shiretoko) Revolution Begins Now

mitcho — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:15:43 +0000

As many of you know, the upcoming Firefox 3.5 was code-named Shiretoko after the Shiretoko National Park on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. The Shiretoko Foundation and Mozilla Japan just launched a very cool open-web-powered promotional website, interFORest, together with a very powerful educational site, discovershiretoko.org/. I just went to interforest.org/ and registered for my own virtual tree to be planted on the virtual Shiretoko Park. This tree banner will keep track of traffic through my site to the interFORest site and will grow this tree accordingly over time. You can then go to interforest.org and see all the trees growing on the park. With your help, we can grow it into a forest!

If you are reading this through a feed reader or planet, click on the permalink to view the banner embedded below:

Place one of these personalized canvas-powered virtual tree banners on your site to spread the word on Firefox 3.5, the Shiretoko Park and Foundation, and the power of open communities. All the cool kids are doing it. ^^

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Ten Grand Is Buried There

mitcho — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:58:07 +0000

By now many of you have probably seen this new Microsoft Australia campaign, “Ten Grand Is Buried Here.com,”¹ which calls Firefox “old” and Safari “boring”:

I’m not sure what this is saying about me, but my immediate reaction was to go check whether tengrandisburiedthere.com was available. To my surprise, Microsoft had yet to snatch it up! A few hours later, here’s the result:

Go ahead, visit the site and give it a try!

Note: Not being a marketing guy, I just threw some text together to introduce Firefox. If someone has some better copy for this display, please let me know.

As of this writing, this domain actually has yet to serve anything. ↩

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Matt Mullenweg recommends YARPP on Tekzilla!

mitcho — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:13:13 +0000

A new user of my WordPress plugin tipped me off to a recent Tekzilla segment where WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg recommended Yet Another Related Posts Plugin as one of his personal favorite WordPress plugins. Thanks Matt! ^^

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Ubiquity interview in Chinese

mitcho — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:07:55 +0000

Mitcho on Ubiquity i18n / l10n on YouTube

This past weekend was Mozilla Party JP 10 here in Japan and one of the speakers was Bob Chao (趙柏強) of Creative Commons Taiwan and MozTW. We got to talking in Chinese and he got a video interview of me talking about Ubiquity and our upcoming Parser 2 and the challenges of localization. I’ve never talked about my Mozilla work in Chinese before so it was definitely a challenge and I stumbled a lot, but hopefully some of the ideas got through.

前天我參加了Mozilla Party 10，一個日本 Mozilla 社群的會議。我在 Mozilla Party 才認識台灣 Mozilla 社群的趙柏強，我們就開始講國語。因為我自己很想念用中文，所以我非常高興有這個機會跟他談話。以後他拍一端 video，我給台灣的 Mozilla fans 把 Ubiquity 介紹一下。我的中文真的亂七八糟，大家對不起喔。 ^^;

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Contribute to Ubiquity! No Coding Required!

mitcho — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:20:01 +0000

Jono’s recently been thinking about how to get users involved with aside from programming, and he decided to put the textual content of Ubiquity’s builtin commands and the new interactive tutorial on the wiki for all to edit.

Changes made to these wiki pages will be tracked and edits will be moved back into the Ubiquity codebase as early as 0.1.9.

Combined with the imminent internationalization of Ubiquity commands, allowing contributors to localize commands without digging into the JavaScript code, there will soon be lots of different ways for to get involved with the further development of Ubiquity!

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Start Panic!

mitcho — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:06:05 +0000

Just saw this nice demo of the a:visited browser history security issue in action. Visit startpanic.com and click “start” to see it in action.

Read about how this security hole works here. Hopefully flashy demos like this will bring more attention to this issue.

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Dates in the Month of May that Are of Interest to Linguists

mitcho — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:51:42 +0000

Happy May! May, as you surely know, is an important season of celebration for linguists. Some of my favorite items are below.

From Dates in the Month of May that Are of Interest to Linguists by the late James D. McCawley:

May 6, 1939. The University of Chicago trades Leonard Bloomfield to Yale University for two janitors and an undisclosed number of concrete gargoyles.

May 23, 38,471 B.C. God creates language.

May 29, 1962. Angular brackets are discovered. Classes at M.I.T. are dismissed and much Latvian plum brandy is consumed.

May 31, 1951. Chomsky discovers Affix-hopping and is reprimanded by his father for discovering rules on shabas.

Unfortunately May 31, 1951 was a Thursday…

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Foxkeh Strikes Again!

mitcho — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:12:51 +0000

I just wanted to point out that our beloved Foxkeh is featured¹ on apple.com! He can be found on the Twitter business profile page in the first photo in the gallery:

Okay, maybe “featured” is a strong word… ↩

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Command Chaining with Oni?

mitcho — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:41:29 +0000

There are two challenges to implementing so-called command chaining, but only one of them is choosing a linguistically appropriate structural standard and parsing it. The other is the underlying difficulty of processing each individual “clause” in sequence, asynchronously. Alex Fritze blogged about how a project like his own Oni could dramatically simplify this underlying process.

Ubiquity, Oni, and Composability:

but I cannot instruct it to give me list of translated google results:
translate (google foo) to German  // doesn't work
Or email me the resulting list:
email(translate (google foo) to German) // doesn't work
…So how does Oni relate to this? Oni is a browser-based “embedded structured concurrency framework”. It allows you to write asynchronous code as if it was synchronous, adding back the kind-of composibility that is lost when juggling concurrent strands of execution (such as e.g. pending XMLHttpRequests) with ‘conventional’ sequential languages.

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The Hit List: Better Software Through Less UI

mitcho — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:48:32 +0000

The Hit List is a to-do list app for Mac OS X with a beautiful interface and some nice features. Creator Andy Kim’s latest blog post (Better Software Through Less UI) is excellent reading for the Ubiquity community. He describes the thought process behind the design of a new clean and “frictionless” interface for specifying how tasks are repeated. After throwing out the regular combinations and templates of different input widgets, his solution was to implement a partial natural language input interface:

There is no myriad of buttons and fields to choose from. All the user has to do is directly type in what he wants.

Here are a couple other choice quotes which will ring true for the Ubiquity users and internationalization folks in the audience:

For this to work without driving the user mad, the natural language parser has to be near perfect. The last thing I want is for this to come out smelling like AppleScript.

Problems
This design isn’t perfect as it has two glaring problems. One is that the user has no easy way of discovering how complex the recurrence rules can be. This isn’t such a huge problem, but a way to solve this is to include a help button to show example rules or to include an accompanying iCal style UI to let the user setup the recurrence rule in a more typical fashion. I didn’t include these in the initial implementation though because I wanted to see how users would react to this kind of UI.
Another problem is localization. Even if I write parsers for a few more popular languages, it won’t accommodate the rest of the users in the world. Again, the solution is an accompanying traditional UI, but for now, I’m leaving it the way it is until I get some feedback.

There’s a trend in the wind, my friends: the incorporation of near-natural language for more humane interfaces.

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Ubiquity in Italian

mitcho — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:43:12 +0000

flod put up a nice blog post on thinking about Ubiquity in Italian. flod points out that what seems natural to him as a speaker is the use of the imperative form of the verbs, but that some verbs may not translate neatly, even following the overlord verbs proposal:

For example, the verb “make” is quite difficult to translate (too generic): “to make” could be “fare”, but “fare grassetto” (”make bold”) doesn’t make any sense, people would use more specific verbs:

make bold -> trasforma in grassetto (sounds like “change to bold”)
make page editable -> rendi pagina modificabile

This is a great point. Although the overlord verbs may naturally map into many languages, it may not be perfect for some commands in some languages. Where would English overlord verbs not translate well into your language?

I suggest on flod’s blog that a “synonym” system could be implemented to map single verbs to specific overlord’ed functionality, but these would definitely have to be done on a language-specific basis, unfortunately adding a little work to the localization process.

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Ubiquity in Portuguese

mitcho — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:49:33 +0000

Felipe, a Ubiquity user, put together a wonderful look at what Ubiquity might look like in Portuguese. He has some great points here particularly regarding the “map” verb used in English—Felipe points out that Portuguese does not have a very common “map” verb and that it would be much more common to use enter me dê (literally me give) to use a verb to request a map. This is a great example of how Jono’s overlord verbs proposal may be an important aspect of our i18n efforts. The post is also timely as we’ve recently been discussing in our regular meetings (open to all!) that Portuguese may/could be the focus of our next parser construction efforts.

What would the challenges be for Ubiquity in your language? We’d love to see an increasing number of blog posts on this topic in different languages. Thanks Felipe! ^^

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Grand Unified Weekly

mitcho — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 06:36:22 +0000

I just want to take a moment to plug a new podcast find. I’ve been subscribed to Slate V for a while, but they recently started producing a hip new weekly digest of fascinating science stories. The creative choice to put the show together as an edited screencast and use of Exposé as a transition is genius.

Check out Grand Unified Weekly.

They read PNAS so you don’t have to.

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The Mori no Ike Songbook 1996

mitcho — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:57:38 +0000

Mori no Ike veteran and friend Kikai (aka “The Machine”) scanned his copy of the 1996 Mori no Ike songbook distributed to villagers and staff:

Long long ago, in the tiny po-dunk town of Dent, Minnesota, population 156, where a rag-tag bunch of gaijin (guy-jean) lived hippy lives while wearing hapi clothes, spending their summer speaking, living, learning, eating and singing Japanese.

From those years past I now resurrect the sacred song book for anyone who is interested, to share, educate, or practice their Nihongo no Uta’s during what has come to be known as “the off season” for many villagers.

Catalogued and printed over 10 years ago, the 1996 song book for Mori No Ike, the Japanese language village of the Concordia Language Villages, is just as timely today as it was in years past. Hopefully, this online publication will help bring back songs that have dissappeared with the passing of sensei through the ranks, out of the camping life and on to wider and greater adventures.

Talk about kicking it old school. My question: what the heck is トンバイ?

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The Future of Driving

mitcho — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:50:34 +0000

Not sure how I missed this revolutionary new auto industry startup before,¹ but last week’s news that the State of Hawaii has signed up definitely caught my attention. Better Place’s ambitions plan involves a combination of smart invisible technology, quickly replaceable (not just rechargeable) batteries, and a business plan that makes drivers “subscribers.” I dug up a profile of the company, its plan, and its visionary, Shai Agassi, who definitely gets it:

When I ask Shai if he’s worried about a competitor stealing his idea, he stares at me like I’m an idiot. “The mission is to end oil,” he says, “not create a company.”

UPDATE: This story just came much closer to home.

that noun phrase is chock full of cognitive dissonance. ↩

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Bathroom Graffiti

mitcho — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:59:18 +0000

On my continuing quest for good audio content, I’ve recently subscribed to the University of Chicago Law School Faculty Podcast and so far I’ve been very pleased. Today I was listening to the latest installation: Dean Saul Levmore’s talk on “The Internet’s Anonymity Problem.” He opened the talk with an anecdote about graffiti at the Med and bathroom graffiti. This immediately reminded me of a Scav Hunt item which I completed in my first year:

From the 2004 Scav Hunt list:

Item 80. Brain Farts: The Collected Works of The University of Chicago Bathroom Graﬃti (organized by theme, but attributed to location). [102 points. 15 bonus points for an inset detailing the entirety of the “Grout Work.”]

I spent a day or so going around campus with a friend (so I didn’t have to be snooping around in ladies’ rooms) taking pictures and compiled the booklet. In good Scav Hunt spirit, I opened the booklet with this tongue in cheek forward:

The anonymity and collaborative nature of bathroom graffiti makes it an amazing reflection of the world we live in. People can write what they want to in their own honest words—it is a clear window into the modern human psyche.

Oddly enough, the latter part of this passage on anonymity jives with Dean Levmore’s talk. For posterity’s sake, I’ve made a compressed—but still pretty big—PDF version available here:

Brain Farts: The Collected Works of The University of Chicago Bathroom Graﬃti
4.9 mb - pdf

Make sure not to miss the highlight: the three pages of grout-fiti, collected from three different buildings. I might even venture to say it’s the groutest collection of egroutica ever compiled.

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The West Wing and Election 2008

mitcho — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:24:02 +0000

The New York Times had a nice article the other day on the eerie (but perhaps uncoincidental) similarities between this year’s presidential election and The West Wing seasons 6 + 7, but this video from Slate does a nice job laying it out visually:

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ワンセグ TV coming to the iPhone

mitcho — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:28:23 +0000

From Asiajin:

Softbank Mobile announced today to release 1-seg digital TV tuner device for iPhone in the middle of December. The 80-gram device provides the feature of TV over WiFi (converting TV signal received to IP-based data for iPhone) and doubles as a battery extender. Three hours continuous TV viewing is available.

I’ve seen a number of these ワンセグ (wansegu, 1seg) digital TV tuner-enabled phones around the office and in trains. I’m not a huge TV watcher, even in Japan,¹ but I have to say these phones are pretty cool. In the land of one-hour train commutes, there’s definitely both appeal and demand. I’ve sat on trains next to everyone from hip high schoolers to grandparents watching TV on these phones.

Frankly, however, I think the fact that it’s a separate device (even if it can be unwired) will still limit its attractiveness. I’ll be curious to see what the interface is like.

Growing up I watched much more Japanese TV than American TV. Heh. ↩

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The Big Chart

mitcho — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:08:33 +0000

The Counter-Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America (CICINA) hopes to definitively identify the best thing in the world. And don’t worry—CICINA isn’t like the “east-coast media elite”:

“We are like you—only more so.”

Brilliant. Watch the video:

(via kottke)

The Children of America

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