Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

The Internet as Linguistic Bridge Between Cultures

I had a fantastic series of conversations over Instant Messenger recently with a Chinese national who saw my TinyOS in C# somewhere and added me to his/her Messenger Buddy List.  The whole conversation was in Chinese on his/her side and Chinese/English on my side with BabelFish helping out.  It was amazing.  I have some very-limited familiarity with a large-ish number of language grammers (English, Spanish, French, Amharic, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic...the later four adding breadth, but not nearly as much depth as I'd like, mostly on the linguistic structure and alphabet/syllabary side) and I found that BabelFish results are much more easily understood in the English-to-Whatever translation phase if the English word order is similiar to the destination language.  Also, if you know a particular colloquialism in the destination language, you can coerce BabelFish with the right English phrasing.  Also, if you avoid ambiguous words that could cause verb-noun confusion and find unusual but clear ways to phrase in English, the resulting translations can be much more effective.  This makes me wonder (possible Masters/PhD thesis here, anyone) if an English-to-Clearer-English preprocessing or pre-compile stage to any automated translation software could dramaticaly improved one's success with these kinds of tools...

I was told by my new friend: 

I've looked at building a .NET NAnt BuildServer to assist in Continuous Integration...however, I've stumbled upon Draco.NET which may do me one better.

"Draco.NET is a Windows service application designed to facilitate continuous integration. Draco.NET monitors your source code repository, automatically rebuilds your project when changes are detected and then emails you the build result along with a list of changes since the last build."

W3C Home Page Table-less Layout: HOWTO. [ via Zeldman ]
The W3C explains how they do a three column, tableless layout on their front page. [More Like This WebLog]

This is pretty slick...I've got a few sites that could benefit from a tableless layout...

The Five Biggest Myths About Web Services

Myth No. 1: Web services is brand new.
Myth No. 2: Web services has so many shortcomings, such as security, that it will prove to be a disruptive element in an organization's IT efforts.
Myth No. 3: Interoperability will never happen. We've all got to have the same operating system to make Web services work best.
Myth No. 4: Getting Web services means getting rid of all your current software and developing new programming languages to handle the Tower of Babel you're going to face.
Myth No. 5: Web services is the endgame--the goal we're aiming toward.

Great list of the 5 biggest myths about Web Services...up at PatrickWeb's list of the 5 Next Big Things.

Good Books [Joel on Software]:

A few months ago I read The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, mainly because it has become extremely popular at business schools, and it looked fun. It was interesting, and fun. I didn't understand how the book's theory, called the Theory of Constraints, could possibly be applied to software development, but it was still interesting enough, and I figured if I ever found myself running a factory again, it would be helpful.

Last week I discovered his newer book, Critical Chain. This book applies the Theory of Constraints, introduced in The Goal, to project management, and it seems to really make sense.

I first read The Goal more than 10 years ago when it was recommended to me as a must read by my boss at the time. I was working in the design department of a factory and it seemed to have much more relevance to me then than now. I read it again a few months ago and was astonished at how much more I got out of it. I think a lot went over my head all those years ago. I also read the sequel, It's Not Luck where Goldratt expands upon his theory and applies it more to everyday life. It's the kind of book you read over and over squeezing out a little more understanding each time. Heartily recommended. I think I'll have to get hold of Critical Chain - this sounds good too.
[Adrian Bateman (VisionTech)]

I'm in the middle of the Goal also...one of the many great books recommended to my by my boss.