Archive for November, 2006

How to name email attachments

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

Here is a suggestion. If you send a homework assignment or a resume as
an attachment, please consider that the person receiving it (an
instructor or potential employer) is likely to get such submissions
from other people as well. If you name your submission “HW1.tar.gz” or
“resume.pdf”, chances are that your recipient will have other files
with the same name. It is much better to name your file with some
identifying information about yourself, e.g., your name or user id, e.g., “HW1-CS499-johnson.tar.gz” or “Alice.Smith.resume.pdf”.

A message from the spelling police or “Riding the subway with Verlaine”

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

NYC subway cars occasionally feature poetry excerpts on the inside
walls. Some are great. I was very pleased to see the beginning of
Verlaine’s “Automn Song” (”Chanson d’Automne”). Unfortunately, the
spelling police discovered a typo: “saglots” instead of “sanglots”.
Here is the full text of this wonderful poem:

Chanson d’Automne

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;

Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

Text compression as proxy for AI

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

A very interesting challenge:

http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/rationale.html

The goal is to compress Wikipedia losslessly. Intuitively, some
semantics aware compressor would do really well here. The problem is
that no one seems to know how to build one. The best entries so far are
all string-based (e.g., http://www.compression.ru/ds/).

EU wants Bulgarians to change the way they speak

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

According to http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=72473 and http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=72419,
the EU wants the pronunciation of EURO in Bulgarian to be made
consistent with the latinized pronunciation (”euro”) instead of the
currently adopted “evro”. What’s next? Change Sofia’s spelling to
Sophia and Bulgaria’s pronunciation in Bulgarian to “bulgaria”?