“announces”

There are now almost a quarter of a thousand tags densely covering every single post I’ve written since February 8, 2006. Hopefully, these will mean a better related posts, better serendipity. The categories themselves should also be a nice way to navigate around the archives. Among the many new categories, there were many surprises, like questions, arguments, rain, touching, or three, and there were many, many long overdue ones, like interesting people, inspiration, introductions, sex, symbols, ethics, venting, transhumanism, or experiments.

After commenting, you can now choose to be notified by email of new comments to the post. This is long overdue and the hope is it will keep conversations alive. You don’t need to comment to subscribe by email to a post’s comments, you can subscribe right through the new form at the beginning of the comment section. Finally, you can now subscribe by email to the posts themselves, to all of them or only the favorites, and even just to a weekly digest (sent on Sundays). The subscription form is right below the ELZR logo. These should be an easier way to keep track of this blog than RSS (which a surprising amount of people still don’t have the foggiest idea about).

Apropos of Elie Wiesel, I’m in the strange process of choosing a name for myself that Americans can pronounce. Most automatically  call me “ely” (ee-lie, rhymes with fry) but I’m not a big fan. I think I’m going to go with “elie” (eh-lee, rhymes with jelly), which I like the sound of. Plus, I totally dig girlboy names.

A fun thing, renaming oneself. We should do it more often.

Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.

But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.

The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.

After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.

The 2month silence was worth it. Brace yourself.

A JS library JS’s first great app? Indeed. jQuery is the shit. It makes JavaScript, and particularly the intersection between JS and HTML, more fun than you thought it could be. It is one big lump of syntactic sugar, sweet as only truly elegant thinking can be. It is crossbrowser, lightweight (~20kb, compressed), and it leverages your CSS knowledge. jQuery + FireBug is raw sex. You’ll find yourself traversing the DOM just to feel the wind on your face.

Espanhol llano es espanhol escrito sin acentos, ñ (que se suele sustituir por nh, nn o simplemente n), dieresis o signos de puntuacion iniciales (¿¡).

Perfectamente inteligible para hablantes del dialecto ortografico dominante, el espanhol llano entra en auge a la par que el teclado, cuya dificultad intrinseca para escribir caracteres especiales se vuelve el argumento original a su favor. Hoy en dia las razones para usarlo son enormemente variadas.

Which is in itself quite wonderful news (artificial languages need all the help they can get), but the Globe and Mail article is also one of the best introductions to the language I’ve seen, so do check it out—web version or print scan—if you’re interested in Toki Pona (and if you speak Spanish, don’t forget to check out my Spanish manual on it).

(via Sonja, the beautiful mama pi toki pona).

PLBRS.com – Super Poderes Lexicos gdl.Uruban.com – web local

Hope you like these two and please do tell me your first impressions-what works, what doesn’t? are these things at all helpful to you?

Thanks.

22 and 23/jun/07

Bad time management. Sorry. :)

24/jun/07

Plbrs

1. Better Definition Structure. Definitions are now grouped visually under grammatical category (like, say, all the definitions of the word as a noun, and then all those of it as an adverb). They’re already grouped sequentially in the original dictionary but it’s all very redundant and clumsy (every definition has the grammatical category indicated at the beginning). This is a big improvement. Try it out by searching for “correr” in both plbrs and DRAE.
2. Expanded Abbreviations. Most abbreviations are now automatically expanded, which works wonderfully in most cases though there are still several fringe cases like “usado o usada o usadas o usados”, which will be corrected tomorrow.
3. Improved the simple design. Added a “definir” button, a neat magnifying glass icon, made topbar type smaller, and chose slightly better color combinations. Moved slogan below and added a small explanatory sentence. Added Improv’dDaily and NotReality icons.
4. Improved status reporting. Now besides the loading image a message appears saying that your query is being searched. If multiple queries are being currently searched all of them appear in the message.
5. Improved Not Found message. The query you were looking for now appears on the message (duh!)—thanks chemito! Message trimmed. Added fallback link to a Google search for your query.

Uruban

1. Much new content! 8 new places added, together with photos and descriptions. It’s all terribly paltry and sketchy but it’s a beginning.
2. Improved design. Gave the website a blue-green color scheme and generally beautified the whole thing. Added Improv’d Daily link.
3. New copy. “Enciclopedia Local” is the new main slogan, “Haciendo que la Web Local No Apeste” the subslogan.

Going to the U.S. on May 15. Staying chiefly on Texas but maybe visiting nearby states. Just my 3 sisters and me (yey!). One or two weeks. Any ideas on interesting things in the area? Whatever it is, we want to hear it! Thanks. (We do know about the San Marcos outlets and they are great, but we want to expand our southern horizons.)

Can’t believe what a coward I’ve been. I guess it wasn’t until I read recently about how Jon Lech Johansen humilliated Hollywood by releasing a program to easily break DVD’s much vaunted DRM (when he was 15 years old), or about “the college droputs that run >youTVpc.com for millions of people on just two low-end desktop computers that I realized how big a wuss I am.

Take Imagery. In a way, I never wanted it to be very popular because I knew I was doing something maybe-legal by scraping Google. I wanted to scrape Flickr and Yahoo! but feared they would be even less likely to see my scraping in a good light. I wanted to create a picture cache to make Imagery much faster and reliable (and to lessen the leech on independent websites) but fretted about bandwidth costs and about whether people would get angry about my caching.

Or take the Spanish dictionary of the Spanish Language Academy. It’s a tremendously useful, gratis dictionary and yet it has a butt-ugly, nonhumane interface. I’ve been bitching about it for years. And I’ve been thinking about giving it a new interface for that long, but, again, what if they don’t like my scraping? (In all probability they won’t. They’re the quintessential staid, monolithic organization.)

A lot of what ifs. But most importantly, so what? So sue me. Well, actually, most important is that I think these scrapings are an overwhelmingly good thing. I see them as a lot of fun—for me, for the scrapees (who’ll get to see how it’s done, ehem), and for the people who will enjoy just how much they never imagined missing. I see them as criticism by example.

So here’s Domburi and here’s NotReality. The idea of Domburi has changed somewhat from its inception (oh, the shame, so many goals not accomplished), it shall now be a collection of search superpowers instead of limiting itself to imagesearching. I believe, with an arrogance that I can’t believe but that I’ve missed, that I have a thing or two to teach Google in its own turf, not just in forgotten backwaters like imagesearching (where Imagery still kicks Google’s ass easily). So I’m starting really tiny now with only a simple redesign of Google search results (there isn’t even imagesearching yet). I’ll be fleshing it out in the coming days, daily, with the daylog here below.

Not Reality, otoh, is still what I’ve always wanted it to be: my webfront for my interface experiments. It’s really simple now but I’ll be improving it daily too.

So please visit the websites, leave your feedback in this post’s comments, and come back often to check out the daylogs—there are loads of interesting things in the pipeline! Thanks for reading.

12-14/May/07

Endless fiddling on Domburi. Collapse of the incrementalism. Obsession with pipe dreams.

15/May/07

Not Reality


Domburi

1. Ajaxed requests. Loading icon. Everything happens on the same page. Title changes. Very lightweight script behind the scenes: the now deprecated but still unsurpassed moo.ajax.
2. New one-column format with even results shaded. Results turn yellow on mouse over, which is silly interactivity, but surprisingly pleasant. Entire result is a link. No numbers anymore showing order.
3. Displayed URL is now a link that shows results only within the website. This idea from SearchMash, of which I just found out yesterday, and which is a website run by Google where it tries out new interface ideas without the Google brand skewing perception. Very intriguing.
4. Displayed URL is now cased smartly. So instead of greysanatomyinsider.com you get GreysAnatomyInsider.com. It extracts the case from the result’s title, uses some general heuristics (like upcasing after a ), and if all fails, it simply capitalizes.
5. Results displayed in-page. This had been the idea ever since I decided to expand Domburi from image searching. I wanted to make the whole searching experience feel faster and more like what Ben Schneiderman calls direct manipulation. It has been much harder than I thought and it was this point where I spent most of my fiddling (I also played for hours with the two-columns layout…). Here’s what I ended up with.
   
   1. Results seem to open in the entire page, with only the result entry on top. They really open in a full-screen iframe but the effect is surprising. To return to the results you can simply scroll out of the iframe, click the result entry, or…
   2. Pixelside. This is a strange but crucial feature that even if invisible and initially nonintuitive I find very, very promising: it’s simply a 1px-wide, 100%-height leftmost line. Right now you can click on it when on a full-screen result and return to the resultlist (and from there you can click again on it to return to your full-screen result). It is incredibly fast (in Fitt’s law^WP terms, it has “infinite size”), handy, and habituating—and I imagine lots of cool ways to enhance the feature. The only problem is that crappy IE doesn’t allow leftmost pixels! So I’ll have to make up for it with JS. I cringe with only the thought.
   3. The title (but not the entire result, which is JS triggered) is a normal link so if you want to open results in a separate tab just middle-click or CTRL-click it.
6. Strange cool script used. More details to follow. If you’re interested, check out $.
7. Works in Firefox, IE, and Opera. Not tested yet on Safari. Some weird bugs on Safari but it broadly works.

16/May/07—20/Jun/07

10-day trip to the US (haven’t told you about that!) with days way too happily busy. Too many books afterwards (63!) to do anything but read for several wonderful, obsessed days until all the stress and overcrowding of the house finally bring me down. Languishment in captivity.

21/Jun/07

Not Reality

Domburi

# Fixed logo to point correctly at home. Thanks volve!
# CSS fiddling for greater clarity, minor improvements, and cross-broswser compatibility.
# Added Google Analytics tracking.
# Height adjustment menu. A simple (though surprisingly troublesome) addition that makes Domburi much more useful, you can now adjust the height of the embedded windows and so can view  and compare two or three results at the same time! Imagine this with dragging and width-adjustment…

22 and 23/jun/07

Bad time management. Sorry. :)

24/jun/07

Domburi

Not Reality # New Book Section! With great quotes and cool photocovers.