Top Minds Tapped by Translation Task

The past few years have shown that U.S. government intelligence goes only so far. One of the biggest challenges is recognizing vital information in foreign languages — and acting quickly on it. That’s why the military would love software that can listen to TV broadcasts or phone conversations and read Web sites in Arabic and Chinese, translate them into English and summarize the key elements for humans. But each of those steps has long bedeviled computer scientists. Perfecting them and combining them — well, that is “DARPA hard.” That means it’s difficult even by the extreme standards of the Pentagon’s next-generation technology arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Site – http://biz.yahoo.com

Google Code Search

Google Code Search is now live — it gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. It includes: Support for precise searches using regular expressions Restricts by language, license, or filename with advanced operators A search index that includes billions of lines of code Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making them searchable in one place. Results are also accessible via a GData feed, which we hope people will use to create plugins for their favorite editors and IDEs.

Site – http://www.google.com

How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language

The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you’re currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who find themselves in such dilemmas.

Site – http://www.fullduplex.org

Ubuntu, VMWare, and WinXP

At work, I run Ubuntu Linux Drapper Drake with VMWare player.  I had to go to http://www.easyvmx.com/ in order to create the virtual machine for WinXP.  Then the install was easy using a regular Windows XP cd.  In order to get the VGA drivers working I also used vmware-tools with the vmware player.  Makes a great environment to build those installers and such at work.  When running my virtual machine my boss asked if I switched back to windows.  I minimized the window and right back into Ubuntu!

Site – http://www.vmware.com

VMware “Miles Ahead” of Microsoft Virtual Server

“Between Microsoft Virtual Server and [VMware] ESX, there’s no comparison,” said Chris Wolf, an independent consultant and author of Virtualization: From the Desktop to the Enterprise. “Bells and whistles-wise, ESX is still miles ahead of Virtual Server,” he said.

Site – http://it.slashdot.org

The coming RIA wars: A roundup of the Web’s new face

A host of powerful new methods for rapidly creating compelling browser-based software (aka Rich Internet Applications) have recently come to market, or are rapidly heading there. While the technique getting the most press by far these days is still Ajax, there are a number of new approaches that are intent on dislocating this often finicky and hard to work with — though very powerful — browser software model. The goal? To help us more easily develop the next generation of Web applications that are every bit as good as or better than desktop PC applications.

Site – http://blogs.zdnet.com

Hacking Perl in Nightclubs

I’ve found the experiences of dancing and programming to have a great deal in common. With both I am immersed in an abstract world of animated structures, building up and breaking down many times before finally reaching a conclusion. Indeed, when the operation of even the dullest data-munging computer program is visualized, for example in a debugger, it does seem to be dancing around its loops and conditions — moving in patterns through time.

Site – http://www.perl.com

Google Web Toolkit – Build AJAX apps in the Java language

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

Site – http://code.google.com

Ubuntu

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. It is developed by a large community and we invite you to participate too! The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

Site – http://www.ubuntu.com

Yahoo! User Interface Library

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses. Download the entire library, its documentation and examples from Sourceforge.

Site – http://com1.devnet.scd.yahoo.com

Cause for Concern? Americans Are Scarce In Top Tech Contest

The results have been carefully tabulated by a computer and, thus, are beyond dispute: Of the 48 best computer programmers in the world, only four of them are Americans. But what that bit of data says about the state of the U.S. education system is open to debate. Back in February, I wrote about a computer-programming competition run by an outfit called TopCoder. That event was part of the run-up to the global finals held last week in Las Vegas. If you have trouble putting “computer programming” and “spectator sport” in the same sentence, you haven’t been to one of these contests. From the gasps, moans and cheers as the audience watched the scoreboard tracking the contestants, you’d have thought you were at a World Cup match.

Site – http://online.wsj.com

User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS

The User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) is both a GeoSpatial application and a platform through which developers can create new, derived applications. uDig is a core element in an internet aware Geographic Information System. uDig has been developed with a strong emphasis on supporting the public standards being developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, and with a special focus on the Web Map Server and Web Feature Server standards.

Site – http://udig.refractions.net