Products the world needs: personalized, global dictionary

As I go adding "boffer" and "steampunk" to my current version of Thunderbird, I find myself reflecting on another useful service: an online system that lets me define my own global dictionary enhancements. This would ideally be a web service that I can direct programs to, to say, "include all the words from here".

Of course, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here: getting programs to use the API wouldn't be simple. But more and more programs have built-in dictionaries, most of them redundant. And I am getting very tired of adding words like "Atenveldt" over and over and over again. There is much jargon in my life, and I'd rather put it all in just one place...

Products the world needs: personalized, global dictionary

As I go adding "boffer" and "steampunk" to my current version of Thunderbird, I find myself reflecting on another useful service: an online system that lets me define my own global dictionary enhancements. This would ideally be a web service that I can direct programs to, to say, "include all the words from here".

Of course, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here: getting programs to use the API wouldn't be simple. But more and more programs have built-in dictionaries, most of them redundant. And I am getting very tired of adding words like "Atenveldt" over and over and over again. There is much jargon in my life, and I'd rather put it all in just one place...

As if I didn't hate domain thieves enough already...

During today's massive update of the Period Games Homepage, I'm discovering a new horror. Many of the sites I point to are now dead, which isn't a surprise. Many of them have been taken over by domain thieves, which also isn't a surprise.

What *is* a surprise is that many of those thieves have turned on robots.txt files that wind up blocking the Wayback Machine from producing results: it appears that archive.org respects robots.txt a little *too* much. The result is that a large number of useful pages are just plain inaccessible -- I can't even get at their archived versions. Grr...

(BTW, time for another reminder that archive.org is one of the most important and unsung sites on the Web -- the Wayback Machine is the only really good archive of the Web's history, and is often invaluable. I've given them another donation today...)

As if I didn't hate domain thieves enough already...

During today's massive update of the Period Games Homepage, I'm discovering a new horror. Many of the sites I point to are now dead, which isn't a surprise. Many of them have been taken over by domain thieves, which also isn't a surprise.

What *is* a surprise is that many of those thieves have turned on robots.txt files that wind up blocking the Wayback Machine from producing results: it appears that archive.org respects robots.txt a little *too* much. The result is that a large number of useful pages are just plain inaccessible -- I can't even get at their archived versions. Grr...

(BTW, time for another reminder that archive.org is one of the most important and unsung sites on the Web -- the Wayback Machine is the only really good archive of the Web's history, and is often invaluable. I've given them another donation today...)

Credit where credit is due

While (as mentioned earlier in the week), I still find the Ice Dance compulsories to be about the dullest thing at the Olympics, the Original Dance section is actually proving to be quite a bit of fun. While it's far from consistent, some of the couples have clearly made a real effort to take an extant dance form and figure out how to be at least *somewhat* true to it, within the constraints imposed on them. Both the western bar dance (the first one) and the Indian dance have been delightful to watch, precisely because they were working hard to inject the right nuances from the original form.

Although I have to say, I find it downright funny to discover that neither of the country and western dances have been done by American couples. Just goes to show that *everybody* gets their culture looted for these events...

Credit where credit is due

While (as mentioned earlier in the week), I still find the Ice Dance compulsories to be about the dullest thing at the Olympics, the Original Dance section is actually proving to be quite a bit of fun. While it's far from consistent, some of the couples have clearly made a real effort to take an extant dance form and figure out how to be at least *somewhat* true to it, within the constraints imposed on them. Both the western bar dance (the first one) and the Indian dance have been delightful to watch, precisely because they were working hard to inject the right nuances from the original form.

Although I have to say, I find it downright funny to discover that neither of the country and western dances have been done by American couples. Just goes to show that *everybody* gets their culture looted for these events...