Bitsenbloc

Google Translate has a new feature that can help to destroy the only real barriers of the internet, language barriers.

This tool, not only translates web pages, but now also translates search results. Now we can introduce, for example, the word hijab and ask google to search this word in arabic. Then Google will translate the results and the pages that might interest us.

This way, we’ll be able to see what other language communities think about any subject.

Awesome!

For an unknown reason, Banshee, a music player for Gnome, is unusable in my system (Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty). It is way too slow, and sometimes it even freezes. I had to uninstall it.

Does anybody know the possible cause of this problem?

Update: Rhythmbox also freezes when I listen to podcasts… And I don’t like amarok’s podcast feature :’(

Google Docs is, in fact, a WYSIWYG html editor that produces poor quality code.

The most interesting part of it is its version control system, that allows to keep track of modifications easily.

If Google added an option to edit plain text, that allowed me, for example, to edit LaTeX source, I might use it.

When I started my PhD (hydrology) I adopted my team’s tools. This means that, till now, for crunching numbers and plotting data I mainly used Visual Numeric’s PV-WAVE.

It is true that PV-WAVE has been quite useful to me, but I wasn’t happy with it because:

• I don’t enjoy the language itself.
• It’s graphical capabilities aren’t good or practical enough.
• It’s not free software (as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”), so I’m investing my time in learning a language that I won’t be able to use at home and that probably I won’t find in my next job.

I needed a replacement.

The possible options were:

• Python
• Matlab / Octave / Scilab
• …

Python is a very good language. It forces you to write clean code, its free and its community is big. But it is a language for general purposes, so it is not efficient at reading and writing text files with data and at plotting graphs.

Matlab is a very good option, but it is not free. Octave’s plotting capabilities are not that good and I was told not to even try Scilab because of memory handling issues (we deal with lots of data).

Finally I found R (aka GNU S).

After some days of using it I found that

• I enjoy it a lot
• The code I write is clean and beautiful
• It is functional, like scheme.
• I can read text files with only one line of code. That’s very important.
• It’s data types (like data.frame) are very useful.
• I can plot beautiful and meaningful graphics easily.
• It’s GPL.

I guess I found my language. But before being sure, I have to use it for a while.