Another blog bites the dust

I’ve recently been fascinated with some aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP) having worked on some of them at my day job.

One of the key aspects that are very important for a computer program to understand natural language is called Part of Speech Tagging (POS or POST).

Basically, in the POS tagging phase, the computer assigned the part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc) to each word of the specified text, thus allowing the computer to figure out what this text is about and perform later analysis with it.

If you don’t already know, Jim Gray, a computer scientist and Turing Award winner has disappeared at sea on Jan 28th 2007 while solo sailing his boat on a trip to Farallon Island near San Fransisco.

His friend, Werner Vogel – Amazon’s CTO, has harnessed the help of Amazon’s Mechnical Turk to get people to search for any interesting items in a couple of satellite images. If users mark that these images are worth further investigations they will be treated as such.

Google Gmail recently got a new feature allowing one to open Word documents using Google Docs and we can safely assume that PDF and Excel (for use with Google Spreadsheets) documents are on their way as well.

Sometimes a Word document can be quite big with lots of added stuff like images, drawings and so on.

If Google can handle the on-the-fly (or at least on-mail-receive) Word documents conversions I do think that they can (and hopefully will) handle Movie files conversions like I suggest in my previous post about integrating YouTube/Google Video with Gmail.

If you haven’t done so already, go check out (and hopefully use, afterwards) idproxy.net.

As written in idproxy.net’s about page:

idproxy.net acts as a bridge between these two worlds. You can sign in to idproxy.net using your Yahoo! account, and then create one or more OpenID accounts for use elsewhere on the Web.

Basically, if you have a Yahoo ID, you can sign-in and create an OpenID for yourself at idproxy.net thus allowing you to use your Yahoo ID and password to connect to any OpenID supported site.

Everyone else has written about it and since I’m a bit behind on my feeds reading list I just got around to check it out.

OpenID Tests is a testing tool allowing you to test your OpenID server and OpenID page. This is such a great tool and could save an OpenID developer tons of work.

All I can say is “Hip hip Hurray” to the fine folks at JanRain on yet another fine OpenID piece of software.

I just read Simon Willison‘s post about idproxy.net.

It’s funny, I just talked about such a service in a previous post and also mentioned I’m working on the same service. I was suppose to release it a week ago but had some other issues to attend to as well as some learning curve with using JanRains’ PHP OpenID library and only manage to get it almost working yesterday. I was planning on release it this week, but since Simon already released idproxy.net I’m rethinking that :-)

I’ve just finished upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.1. This is my first post in 2.1 and if it goes well, it will mark the succesful upgrade of this blog to the new and fine WordPress version.

In the process I had the oppertunity to also verify that my MicroID Plugin for WordPress as well as my OpenID Delegation Plugin for WordPress works in version 2.1 as well as they did in WordPress 2.0.x.

I just read on the official Linden Blog that they have completed an initial version of hosting Mono within SecondLife.

What they have done is to compile the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) into Intermediate Language (IL) code and they automagically gain all the advantages of the .NET Runtime – Just In Time (JIT) compilation, advanced Garbage Collection and, hopefully, the ability to extend SecondLife with other .NET supported langauges (though that’s a personal wish ;-) having .NET so close to me – my Advanced .NET Debugging blog)