cookiecrook²

11:33 AM #

Deuspanglish and Chinjaporean

James Tikalsky left a comment on my "Chinese language" post that I was going to respond to with another comment, but I started typing so much that I decided to give it a post of it's own.

James argued that Chinese could never become a global language because of it's difficulty to learn to read and write. He suggested that Arabic or Spanish might be a better choice because they're both widely spoken and much easier to learn... These are very good points, but difficulty to learn is irrelevant if enough people know it already. Considering that at least a billion people speak Chinese suggests that it will be around for some time. Of course, going between a western and non-western or pictorial to phonetic language will be difficult to grasp at first, but English is widely thought to be harder to learn than most languages. All vowel sounds and many letter combinations such as 'gh' of 'ch', have multiple pronunciations. Silent letters such as in 'kn', 'gn', and many vowels at the end of words throw more confusion into the mix. Be that as it may, the American media and entertainment industry have contributed to it's wide adoption all over the world.

True, China has masses of relatively uneducated people, but education can change greatly in a generation or two. As new generations of Chinese people are educated and as the less effective principles of socialism diminish, the balance of economic power may change substantially. I make no claim to be a language expert or a global economy expert, and I am not implying that this will happen in my lifetime, but the trend is definately starting.

For example, Gaelic may never die completely, but I think you would be hard-pressed to find a person today who spoke Gaelic with no English. As a culture, we are too reliant on global communication and technology which by its very nature cannot support every language available. Without a major breakthough in artificial intelligence, software translation programs like Babelfish will continue to fail miserably. Sure, you can grasp the basic meaning from a computer translation, but it doesn't make for intelligent conversation or an in-depth analysis of the language.

The "global" languages I speak of may not be the languages as they are today. All languages are constantly evolving so they will probably be hybrids of various western and non-western languages. I believe the western one will be largely based on English, but it is quite possible that Spanish will provide a huge influence. The non-western language will most likely be based on Chinese but probably in the form of a Roman character set like Pinyin or Romanji.

I'm just dreaming, but I look forward to your responses. Maybe James is right, I already know some Spanish and, since I live in Texas, it would probably be more useful to me.

3:25 PM #

Does WAP still suck?

Happy Holidays everyone... Jessie and I got some new mobile phones a couple days ago and I was wondering if anyone had some recent real experience with wireless internet access (I mean on your phone, not wireless broadband for your laptop). I played around with it a couple years ago and decided that it sucked royally, but maybe it has changed a little bit since then.

The main problem at the time was an overall lack of standards in an industry that developed the technology as a means to sell phones instead of as a useful medium for useful exchange of data. Every phone included a different display and a different browser and the wireless gateways that served this data all acted differently. WBMP images were so low on quality that they weren't useful for anything other than a small logo. I decided then that the "wireless internet" would only be valuable to me if I was involved in day trading or international banking.

I've seen some of the PDA browsers recently that seem to throw another wrench in the mix. They register as mobile devices in the request but attempt to display HTML and CSS according to normal screen display standards. While this probably works well most of the time, who's to say what the next device will do and why should I care? I don't have any desire or capability to test for several hundred different phones, interfaces, and browsers.

As wireless bandwidth capability increases, do you think WAP will be scrapped completely in favor of plain-Jane HTML? Either way, I probably won't touch it again until 1) I get paid to; or 2) the W3C says "Go!"

11:00 AM #

Web accessibility helps everyone...

Last week, the W3C released the third and final recommendation in it's Web Accessibility Initiative, the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG). As you may or may not know, the first two recommendations, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, involved how web developers should create web pages and how authoring tools, like Macromedia Dreamweaver, that auto-generate this content should also adhere to these standards.

The User Agent Guidelines refer to how web content is accessed by web users through a "user agent". Usually, user agents are in the form of a web browser or various other types of media players, such as Apple Quicktime, Windows Media Player, or Macromedia Flash.

The first goal of the accessibility initiative is obviously to provide access to otherwise disabled users that may be blind, deaf, have a mobility impairment, or any number of other disabilities. However, the underlying benefit to non-disabled users is that compliance to these standards will give us much more control over how we access the content. Some of these benefits will include greater selective control over which scripts to run (Mozilla and several others can already block pop-up scripts) as well as better playback control over multimedia content like audio, video, and Flash. Greater standards support, full keyboard access, and added naviation mechanisms such as link indexing will ensure a higher level of control to disabled and non-disabled users alike.

The recommendations were just finalized so don't expect any software to comply with them anytime soon, but look for this to be implemented within a few years. In the meantime, try some of the user agents that are already moving towards this goal. Mozilla and Netscape 7 are great browsers available on almost every platform while Chimera is a new Cocoa application designed specifically for Mac OS X.

10:09 PM #

Learning Chinese...

I recently mentioned that I think English and Chinese will be the global languages eventually. I already know English, so now I've turned to learning some Chinese... Thanks to YiMay Yang and Cassandra Chang, I'm learning some useful phrases.

Some are obviously more useful than others.

11:44 PM #

Dream catcher...

I very rarely remember my dreams. In fact, I'm lucky if I remember more than five a year. Strangely enough I remember two from last night and thought I'd record them for the CC archives. They were both anxiety dreams. Let me know your interpretations...

1. I was a drummer in a band. We were playing a set and I could not keep rhythm; not because I was off time, but because my drum sticks were too heavy and I couldn't move them fast enough. The left one was an odd shape and especially large, sort of like a bowling pin. The other one was a normal size but weighed at least twenty pounds. I don't remember how the dream ended other than the fact that I was struggling to play the entire time.
2. I was driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic but for some reason we were all driving very fast on a very curvy road. I had a concrete wall on the left side and cars in every other direction. In the middle of one particularly sharp curve, I decided to change the radio station — at this point my alarm clock was going off and the dreaming me didn't like the sound of it — and I leaned down so far that I couldn't see over the dashboard but I kept accelerating around the curve. The right brain only wanted to turn off the noise and the left brain was struggling to sit up and watch the road. It was an odd sensation. I think the right brain would have won (I was dreaming, after all) but I woke up. Maybe that was the left brain's way of throwing the knock-out punch. "Oh yeah, well you have to get up and go to work now..." Arggh.

9:14 PM #

Lame car...

Would you buy a car that would only drive on 95% percent of the roads out there? I mean paved roads, not mud.

Would you buy a car that blind people could not ride in? I don't mean drive, I mean blind people weren't even allowed in the passenger seat. Color blind people weren't allowed, either.

Would you buy a car that had a maximum speed of 45mph but used twice the gasoline as a car that drove 90?

Some people do.

Would you buy a car that had a really nice stereo if only some of your friends could hear it? I don't mean your deaf friends.

Would you buy a car that took more time and more money to fix? Or even worse, would you buy a car that mechanics refused to fix; instead you would have to buy a brand new car.

Would you trust a mechanic who didn't know what web-safe colors... er... I mean... who didn't know what brake pads were?

Would you buy this car if most of the cars out there were already like it? Would you know the difference? Would you care if you did?

Some people don't.

7:44 PM #

More car trouble...

My blew my radiator this morning on the way to work. Grrr... I was going to try to buy some equipment before December 31st and deduct it as a business expense, but now that I've dropped close to a grand on the car, I can't really spare it. I was using my car for work though, so I think I can still deduct it anyway.

4:21 PM #

Pixel Tees

Alan Watts, the man behind 16color.com and the caption of the team who beat us at this past year's SXSW Iron Webmaster Competition, has unveiled his latest project, Pixel Tees.

Pixel Tees uses a Macromedia Shockwave interface to allow users to create graphics for t-shirts. When the user is finished, they can order the shirt for themselves, or save it and sell it online for a profit. Sweet. Anybody want a cookiecrook t-shirt?

11:48 PM #

Nephew pictures...

We finally got some pictures of my nephew, Julian. Here's a little teaser for you. He'll be one month old this Sunday. Aw... He's growing up so fast...

11:23 PM #

Bad car day...

I spent the day home from work today because of an ill culmination in my vehicle's well being. It's currently in a long overdue visit to the magic voodoo car doctor. I should make a public apology for my behavioral tendency to 'pretend it doesn't exist and have it all go away' when it comes to my car.

There have been small signs a checkup was in order for some time now but the past two days were quite unavoidable. My power window mechanism decided to break and roll itself down in the middle of one of the worst rain storm's Austin has had in months — the rest of the drive to work was somewhat unpleasant — but I tried to ignore the problem further by duct-taping the window shut. She wasn't having it. This morning my axle made enough noise that I immediately drove it to the mechanic.

I think the worst thing about going to the mechanic is that I know almost nothing about automotive maintenance and I have to trust that they aren't screwing me. Sometimes I pretend to know what I'm talking about, but I wonder if that exposes me as a charlatan even faster.

I used to know a really honest mechanic, but he tended to ogle my wife more than I was comfortable with. We go to a different place now.

7:38 PM #

Taken.

This week, I've been watching the SciFi Channel's mini-series "Taken". It's got a nice spin on the extra-terrestrial story, from the Roswell crash all the way to present day.

Speaking of the SciFi Channel, I think they've got some of the best identity branding of any channels I've seen. Maybe it just really appeals to my market, but it's got me hooked. I wonder which design firm came up with their identity.

10:39 AM #

W3C updates website.

The new W3C website was updated using using Cascading Style Sheets instead of tables for layout and positioning. Now Netscape 4 has truly joined the ranks of deprecated browsers. From now on, I get to tell every future manager that the people who invented the web don't style for ancient browsers, so why should I? Web Standards Now!

11:51 PM #

No spam today... Imagine that.

It's 11:51pm and I haven't gotten any spam today. If I make it another nine minutes, this will be a first in several years.

... pause ...

Sweet. I made it... Just to clarify. I still get spam, but it's automatically deleted by my custom junkmail filter. I think I've fine-tuned it enough that I'm finally satisfied with the results. For the past several weeks, I've been getting only one or two a day.

I was never satisfied with conventional junkmail filters because they always deleted a few messages that I wanted to keep. I set up my own and coupled that with a few anti-spam practices I've learned over the years. Let me give you a few tips on avoiding junkmail:

1. Disable your preview pane when deleting spam. Most junkmail now is sent in HTML format with images. The tricky thing about this is that they can essentially use images as a read receipt for your specific email account. The server that sent it can know and log that an email sent to your account has been viewed. Without getting too technical about how this works, just remember not to view any emails you know to be spam. Most of the time you can tell by the Name or Subject fields. I think this practice was the number one deterent for my repeat spammers. If they can't verify a valid address, they don't want to spend the money on bandwidth.
2. Do not post your email address on the web unless you need to. While this may seem self evident, some people still give out their email address whenver asked. If you need one to log into a site, try to make one up first. "a@a.com" is a favorite of repeat of mine. Some of you may have also noticed that it's hard to find my email address on this redesign of my site. When you do finally find it, it's my Hotmail account: a blockable address from a company with powerful anti-spam practices. You'd be surprised how many junkmailers are unwilling to spam an account from a company that has some lawyers on retainer.
3. Read the web forms you fill out. Most of the time, they use clever wording to trick you into "opting-in" to some spam lists. Just take your time and you'll avoid some headaches before they start.

That's most of it. Let me know if you have any more anti-spam practices. I'm still working on my junkmail rules in Entourage and AppleScript. They are by no means perfect, but today's success proves they are a step in the right direction.

10:29 AM #

Crazy browser?

I recently heard about a new web browser called Crazy Browser. Like many before it, it uses Microsoft Internet Explorer as a rendering base, but unlike the other clones, this one actually adds some nice functionality. It seems that the designers of Crazy Browser took a few ideas from Mozilla (tabbed browsing, popup blocking, multiple windows in a single process) and built them into their Explorer-based clone. Very nice.

The funny name is a sign that the product is probably pushed by developers and not marketing. Watch out; if the application gets popular, marketing will take over, change the name, and destroy the simplistic beauty of it. (Am I bitter? Do I sound bitter?)

I'm still testing, but since it has the IE rendering engine, I'm sure the the page display will be adaquate. Hopefully there aren't any new bugs in the interface. If not, this could turn out to be my new default Windows browser.