Automagically-translating chat thingy

blog entry posted by lalo (Lalo Martins) on 2008-12-19 20:23:00

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Usually, I have to communicate with the people in the building's management office via Google Translate. It works, but it's awfully painful to be constantly flipping the language drop-downs back and forth. (It's two drop-downs, one for source and one for target language.)

So I wrote a little javascript gadget that does the hard work for me, and also keeps a “log” of the conversation. You can peruse it at http://lalomartins.info/transchat.html

(Attention though: this is not a chat app, not in the modern sense. It's “chat” in the old-school sense, of actually talking to a person that's in front of you. It's... an interpreter widget, not a chatbox :-) enjoy and spread if you wish...)

Mass unblocking in the Great Firewall of China

blog entry posted by lalo (Lalo Martins) on 2008-08-02 22:13:00

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Seems a batch of sites got unblocked. Wiki.edia (marvel as I blog in regular expressions) is accessible (again), Wikibooks, Reuters, CNN, and a lot more.

Still blocked: blogspot, livejournal, wordpress (no surprise here -- lots of political blogs), BBC, certainly more; most importantly, Sinfest and CRFH :-( (why the f* is CRFH blocked? Zombies? Satan?)

Also, the web feels slightly faster in general!