Category: Internet development

Predictions, assumptions, … about how the Internet will change (perhaps).

SOPA protest – Wikipedia blackout

Since I consider this some kind of historical Internet event, I’ll dedicate a short blog post:

The English Wikipedia will be taken offline for as long as 24 hours as a form of protest against the U.S. “SOPA” law, which is considered a threat for Internet Free Speech by the Wikipedia community and many others.

So… no ‘lemme look that up on Wikipedia’ from Wednesday 5:00 UTC to Thursday 5:00 UTC.

In this context I’d like to recommend watching Cory Doctorow’s speech on what he calls The Coming War on General Purpose Computation – the content mafia trying to shape the Internet may just be the beginning… For those who have a preview of what’s to come already (i.e. those living in China, for example): here is a direct link to download the video in MP4, and here is a torrent through which you can get the same MP4.

My instant messaging communications platform

I’m using this setup for quite a while now. It’s great in many ways – here some of the reasons:

  • I can access it from multiple hosts at once
  • I can use one unified user interface for all instant messenger protocols and IRC
  • I can access the platform even through my mobile phone via GPRS / WLAN
  • I have logs of all communications in one central place

This is how a few free software components work together to make it possible:

Overview (OpenDocument format)

Or as PNG file (rendered with GIMP):
Overview (PNG)

Discovered Google Translate

Some days ago I discovered Google Translate, Google’s automatic translation service. I’m aware that it’s not exactly new, and for example babelfish has been there for years, supplying us with extremely bad and most of the times quite amusing translation of websites – but the news is: Google Translate knows Chinese! I have been using Worldlingo for that for a long time, but this website is often very slow and full of advertisement. I can’t judge which translation engine is better though.

Oh, and the best thing: Google Translate can be integrated into your browser 🙂 Here is how:
For Konqueror, go to Settings / Configure Konqueror… / Web Shortcuts and press the New… button. Now you can specify a name for this web shortcut, for example “Google Translate english/chinese” (this is the name as it shows up in the web shortcuts list). Then, paste the following into the URL field:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&text=\{@}&langpair=en|zh-CN
Finally, specify the web shortcut itself, for example “ench”. From now on, you can just type “ench some english text” into your URL entry field, and the translation will be made. If you have a closer look at the URL I specified above, I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out how to add a web shortcut for chinese/english or any other language that Google Translate supports 🙂
For Firefox, download the appropriate search plugins from mycroft.mozdev.org and use the search field next to the URL field.

On a side note: My website is now available in eight (!) languages. Five thanks to Google Translate 😉

P.S.: . o O ( Hmm… that URL is long and doesn’t get wrapped. So now it overlaps the menu on the right. Man that looks ugly. I should tweak this theme a bit, I guess… Nah, too lazy. )