Scott's Blog

Here's a cool little demo app . It translates from one language to the other, as you type. Technorati Tags: programming , ajax , javascript

I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life . Some good info here like: There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home. It reminds of an article a few months ago that the hardest workers (in terms of hours worked per week) in Brasil are typically the owners of small businesses.

I'm thinking that in 2006 I may purchase a new toy and I'm thinking of two of them: One is the GP2X . It's basically a Linux game machine and costs only USD$200.00. Another device is less suitable as a game machine, but more suitable as an e-book reader. That's the Nokia 770 internet tablet, also a Linux machine. This one's quite a bit more expensive at USD$360.00, but the screen is a lot nicer and it has Wi-Fi connectivity. These machines are very close to perfect, and I'm a little torn between the two. The GP2X is inexpensive and with MAME should be quite the game machine. The Nokia 770 would be a very nice e-book, can be used for e-mail, browsing the web, PIM , but the battery lasts only 3 hours . I wish the 770 had a IR device so I could possibly use it as a universal remote. I like the fact that they are open Linux devices. This means that there's a chance that someone will make a compelling application for it, like a program to keep track of my gol...

Del.icio.us is great Digg is maybe even better, but reddit.com is my current favorite. Like del.icio.us it's very clean and at the moment it provides the best (most interesting) links of the three. I also like the fact that they wrote the site in Python and have hundreds of millions of hits each day . Through reddit I also found this related article: Getting it Right (blink.com founder on why blink failed, and del.icio.us didn't) . Here's my saved list at reddit. I think their mascot should be a frog that says "reddit" instead of an ET.

This is a very interesting article which compares the menus of a school in NY state and a school near Paris. I can't believe the crap that American schoolchildren are given, it's embarrasing. Near the end of the article is a little funny: I had this difference in sophistication vividly demonstrated some years ago, when I was a student in Paris. I had been hired to babysit a five-year-old boy twice a week, in the hopes of teaching him a little English. One evening, as I was preparing a snack, I held up a piece of cheese. "Nicolas, in English this is called cheese . Can you say that?" "Cheeeese!" "Very good! Cheese. What would you call this in French?" "Reblochon." Five years old, and he knew his cheeses by name. I checked him on every one in the fridge. He even knew the names of the ones that were unpasteurized. Technorati Tags: food

The pyContest is to make a Python program that pases some unit tests with the fewest number of characters possible. Mine has 191 characters, ranked 68 so far. Here's my submission: c=[ ' _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ', '| | | _| _||_||_ |_ ||_||_|', '|_| ||_ _| | _||_| ||_| _|'] def seven_seg(x): return '\n'.join([ ''.join([l[n*3:n*3+3] for n in map(int, x)]) for l in c] + ['']) The version I submitted is all on one line and doesn't have the assignment. I just prettied it up for you. Here's another, better solution .

Jim Getty has an interesting post on my favorite subject, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. He has scrounged together more technical information about the laptop and offers advice on how and why to develop programs for it. Here's a snippet: What does this mean to you, an open source developer? With luck, a huge new audience for your software all over the world; maybe of order 100,000,000 in ?07, if everything goes really well (there are about 1 billion school-age kids on the planet, and others want the same kind of hardware for more commercial use). Governments want to buy these by the shiploads. Their motivation is obvious: distributing conventional books is expensive, and all you get is a book. A computer at the $100 price point, if it can last 4-5 years, can be justified on that ground alone, much less the other uses of computers, such as the web, VOIP, email, IM, etc. Technorati Tags: olpc , programming