25th June 2007, 11:06 pm
Search YouTube videos by car make and model.
More news on Yahoo reorg. I’m uneasy.
Slate goes video.
Pearson education has a new video podcast network.
Yeah yeah it’s a real estate site meh. I just like the name StrutYourHut. I just keep thinking of
Jabba on a catwalk. (I know, that would be StrutYourHutt.)
Utah.gov gets its redesign on.
BRAINS! BRAAAAAAAIIIINNNNNS! Well, brain images, anyway. A huge database.
New CNET Blogs Network.
Because I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or run away: Harry Potter Hair Accessories.
25th June 2007, 06:03 pm
Hmm, perhaps what finally wrests me away from Babelfish? Google has announced that its translation service now offers single-word translations. Not like you’ve couldn’t do that before, but the new feature offers multiple word choices and even phrases.
You can do the word translations at http://translate.google.com/translate_dict?hl=en . Choose a word and then a language pair (there are ten available on the English version of the page; a few are in beta.) I choose richtig and the German-English translation.
Google translate gave me a total of fourteen different translation possibilities, from the expected “right” and “real” to other translations like proper, and even related German words. Beneath that there was a collection of phrases that use the word or similar words. Some of the phrases looked like what you might see in a language learning book (”sie ist nicht die Richtige für ihn”) while some of them looked very odd indeed (my favorite was “im Urlaub hab ich so richtig Zeit zum Schmökern”, which apparently means “on holiday I have plenty of time to bury myself in a book.” Must be nice!)
More languages would be nice, but I love the amount of information a one-word query gets back and I’m sure there’ll be a Firefox extension for this any second now…
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25th June 2007, 05:27 pm
How lovely! Are you looking for an open source alternative to all the commercial software on your computer? Wondering how you’re going to switch to Linux when all your boxed applications run on Windows? Float over to http://www.osalt.com/ , an directory of open source applications to commercial apps.
There are featured applications on the front page, but mostly the listings are divided into categories including business, databases, Internet, graphics, etc. I went and checked out the business listings. The listings start with popular commercial software — apps listed in this category include Adobe Acrobat, Crystal Reports (!), and of course thousands of Microsoft products. There’s also a listing of open source software underneath that. (The commercial apps have red icons, the open source have green. How subtle. Snirk.)
Pick a commercial app and you’ll get an overview of the product, along with a note of the platforms on which it runs. (Note: several platforms are listed, the ones not supported are crossed out. This is a little confusing at first.) Then you’ll get alternatives to the commercial product. For some listings there are multiple alternatives — Crystal Reports actually had four listed alternatives. Alternative listings have Web sites available as well as platform listings. There is a rating system installed, but most of the software I looked at didn’t have ratings.
I have a couple of nitpicks with this site. First of all sometimes an alternative is listed that I wouldn’t really call an alternative. I love Mozilla, but is SeaMonkey really a potential substitute for Dreamweaver? I also found myself missing Web service listings, which is really outside the scope of this site. (How about a sister site? FreeWebBasedAlt or something.) Maybe sometimes an OS software package is the solution, and maybe sometimes something should just done through the Web.
Extensive listings here though; I learned about a lot of new software. Absolutely worth a look.
