On opinion polls
August 31st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Update 31 Aug, 17:30: my first attempt with Google translate yielded a horrible result for some reason. A later attempt performed better than Bing Translator. Try for yourself to see what works better since I will not investigate further right now.
Update 31 Aug, 17:44: it seems I had attempted to try a Swahili-English translation by mistake. 
I didn’t suspect I was that much off since it almost translated whole sentences like one would expect.
The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter has a good article (in Swedish) on opinion polling. For an online translation, try Bing Translator or Google Translate. 1
1 Note that Bing is a bit slow (at least in this case) and requires JavaScript support in order to provide the translation step by step in your browser. Note that Bing Translator has a side-by-side view that may be useful to match Swedish original sentences with their respective English translations in a more practical manner. Other than that, it outputs reasonably comprehensible text, although there are some particular oddities (e.g. DN.se is replaced with F1racing.NET (eh…?). I vaguely recall a third alternative to use instead of Google’s or Bing’s, but I can’t find it right now.
Insanity
August 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Just for fun (if you can call it that):
If you click on the image: yes, it’s still a relatively “small” amount of complaints1, and no I haven’t read them, and maybe it’s just me, but I find this picture just a little ironic for some reason or other. Also, if you must know, I was just trying to determine the searchability of one of my own pages. 
1 For the purposes of this post, let’s ignore the merits of the law to begin with.
“Humans” to carry high voltage in Iceland?
August 18th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Now that is an interesting design.
Filenames and UNIX
August 2nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
David Wheeler posted a nice analysis of the problems with filenames in UNIX / Linux / … Well worth a read for those who need technical expertise in this area.
A problem with mainstream media
January 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In the Swedish Metro yesterday, it reads: (my translation)
The Internet went down when the tablet was launched
[...] It turned out to be a tablet computer – and perhaps an Internet killer. In any case those who were there in San Francisco, only specially invited guests saw the launch live, had problems reaching the Internet to talk about what they saw. [...]
The corresponding Swedish text:
Internet gick ner när plattan lanserades
[...] Det visade sig vara en läsplatta – och kanske en internetdödare.
De som fanns på plats i San Francisco, bara speciellt inbjudna såg lanseringen live, hade i alla fall problem att komma ut på internet för att berätta om vad de såg. [...]
Regardless of interpretation I have trouble seeing how this article could reflect well on the newspaper.
ASCII pOrtal
September 28th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Who needs a powerful computer, when you can run ASCIIpOrtal? Now that game is geeky.
Note to fellow time wasters: if (for whatever reason) you want to compile from source, you need to compile PDCurses 3.4 first. Then copy it to / put a link in the source directory.
Vacation pictures from the Middle East
July 28th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Update 30 Jan 2010: Burj Dubai renamed Burj Khalifa, height redefined.
Last week I came home after spending 10 days in the United Arab Emirates. Here is a clickable selection (pictures linked to are 30% the size of the originals) of my impressions.
Making friends at the Dubai Aquarium Tunnel at Dubai Mall.
A piece of Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi.
Cranes are a mandatory part of the skyline.
Very strict regulations here.
The Grand Mosque.
This fellow seems to handle the climate better than me.
Back to Dubai and Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building at 828 818 meters.
No comment.
Pictures from Atlantis and The Lost Chambers in The Palm, Dubai:
Thumbnails and respective linked images available under CC by-sa 3.0.
Model rocket launch
April 27th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Here’s a nice rocket launch (seems rather similar to an alternative clip which is shorter and has no high quality version, but might contain some more pieces of info), apparently reaching about 1350 meters (4441 feet, according to a comment). Features one very smooth landing, too.
Open Graphics Project moving forward
April 13th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
