Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.

African but only in name

There is a new (for me) CMS system called Joomla. Joomla is a phonetic spelling for a Swahili word.

I thought, how cool, at last a world class Free Software project by Swahili speaking Africans.

However, I checked the biographies of the project participants. Turns out that all of them come from developed countries. Africa’s contribution is limited, in this case, to a relatively unfamiliar language, which provides cool names for projects.

Blogs of Israeli hearing impaired persons

Tsalaf, who moderated one of the Israeli deaf&HOH forums, now has his own blog (in Hebrew): http://www.tapuz.co.il/Blog/UserBlog.asp?FolderName=shabluli. So far he wrote about hearing aids and about finding out that a friend is losing his hearing.

This is a welcome addition to the emotional and moving blog by Shira, a deafened woman, who has always been active in civic life: http://israblog.nana.co.il/blogread.asp?blog=150892. She writes about her medical history, daily struggles and general political advocacy activities.

Postmodern approach to translation

Tal Cohen has a personal opinion about Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book “Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language”. Hofstadter, of course, has an opinion about the process of translating an expression of an idea from one language into another language.

I have a simpler (?) problem to consider. An utterance in one language (say, language A) can be translated into one of several utterances in another language (say, language B). The original utterance can have one of several possible meanings, depending upon the context. To each meaning correspond one or more translations in language B.

Now, in a computerized translation system, we would like to be able to specify, for each utterance in the original text, enough of the context in which it lies, for the software to be able to fit a good translation into language B.

The question is how to specify context. We need to know also how much context to specify. If we specify more than this amount of context, we are really translating into a different dialect of language B.

Selecting a powerful programming language for a project

I have an ill-defined project, whose precise definition will need help from powerful concepts provided by strange and/or powerful programming languages such as Haskell, LISP/Scheme, O’Caml, or Prolog.
To be fluent with such a language, I need to invest some time learning and mastering it. Only then will I be able to determine whether it is really useful for my project.

So my Wish of the Day for today is for a selection guide, which lists a series of questions about the project and then makes a reasoned recommendation for one of the powerful languages for that project. For example, if one of those languages is indeed beautifully abstract but is poor in having runtime libraries and does not provide for linking to alien libraries (imported from mundane languages such as C, Perl or Python), then the language is ruled out for a project, which needs extensive support for manipulating XML files, playing with sockets and doing direct file I/O.

Google – really dangerous or victim of propaganda?

I have read in yet another blog that the blogger is appreciating what Google are doing but is sacred stiff of them.
Thus, the anti-Google propaganda has started.
Since it is well-known that they have a formidable competitor, which is now in its corrupt monopolist stage of life, I am wondering whether the danger from Google is currently real, or is merely propaganda spread by the current formidable competitor.

Carribean Sea as a source of electricity instead of tropical storms?

Tropical storms (hurricanes, cyclones, etc.) are caused by hot ocean water, which heats the air above it.
It may be a good idea to install power stations, which convert the heat difference between water and air into electricity.
The power stations would float on the sea and pump electricity into wires which connect them to land.

This idea can kill two birds with one stone:

  • Less damage from hurricanes and cyclones, because we are denying them some of the energy which powers them.
  • An additional source of renewable energy.