I have been a Firefox user for a while now and after I switched to the Mac that did not change. I found that Safari was just not up to snuff for what I needed to do. I happen to have run into SafariStand, which has some of the features that I really like to use. I have the ability to do a quick search from the context menu and have open in a new tab, which I used in Firefox with the context search plugin. It also offers web archive clips, history flow, a sidebar with previews of the open pages and more.

To complete the mix, I installed Inquisitor to have more powerful searches. There was some hubbub over the program, because the author added affiliate links in the search results and did not disclose that fact. However, now it is well known and that can be disabled if desired.

Right now, this combination makes Safari work great and meets my needs. Will I keep using it? I am not for sure, because Firefox 3 is looking pretty good and with all of its additions and new theme it may just pull me back.

I stumbled upon a good freeware application for the Mac called FinderPop. It super charges the contextual menu allowing me to move/copy files and simulate the send to context menu in Windows.

Windows XP running in VMWare Fusion under Leopard runs much faster when you are using the bootcamp partition. If you do not use the bootcamp partition then allocating the full space for the virtual disk image will improve performance some. Of course, your results may vary as this is only in my non-scientific tinkering.

I started my Masters in August of 2003 after taking a year off from school. During that year I looked for a job and traveled around Europe. While I had fun traveling, I did not have fun looking for a job and did not have much luck either. So, when I got the call from an old professor to come back and get paid to do research I said yes.

The money I was getting was coming from NASA, which added a “cool” factor to it as well. I was working on a project to add a natural language interface to the space shuttle problem reports to allow quicker and easier gathering of information by engineers. It was a good project and lot of fun to work on. Besides learning more about natural language processing and information retrieval, I also learned Perl. Perl has since become my preferred language when dealing with NLP problems.

I worked on that project for a year, before I decided that I was not real happy at UCF and would want to move on. I ended up getting a job in the Office of Research as a software engineer working on web applications for research/grant support. It was a good atmosphere to work in and let me learn more about dealing with non-technical customers and how to handle situations of conflicting desires from different bosses.

Because of the graduate classes I took as an undergraduate I was able to graduate with my Masters in December of 2004 (1 1/2 years after I started). I tried to take as many classes dealing with artificial intelligence/machine learning as possible, but there were not so many offered at UCF. Some of the classes I took were a waste of time and some of them netted me some new friends that I still have today. All in all it was not a bad education, but after spending my undergraduate and Masters there, I knew that I could get my Ph.D. there.

I did want to get my Ph.D., but not from UCF. I started looking around at other universities to try and find a fit. I was hoping to do research on information retrieval or natural language processing and really wanted to work with Japanese as well. I could not find anything inside the U.S. where I thought I would have the language help if I needed it. I started looking to Japan and reaching out to professors there and that is how I ended up at the University of Tokushima.

I have been looking for a good free or cheap Windows application to make nice photo slideshows like iPhoto does for a friend in Japan. I happen to find Microsoft Photo Story 3, which is a free product from Microsoft that accomplishes this. It is not as nice as what can be done with iPhoto, but it does have a nice feature of custom creating music. A tutorial can be found here.

Sometimes after starting something new we long for what is old. The old might not have been better and could even been a little worse, but we still seem to have some desire to return to some part of it. I think this is probably, because new things cause discomfort and the old seem like a comfortable warm blanket on a cold day. Eventually, the new thing becomes not so new and gradually becomes comfortable and we can see things in perspective, but getting there is a pain.

Since I have only moved into my mac-kingdom recently, I did not know about a great site called MacHeist. I have already gotten a good number of free apps from them from doing some of their missions. Now, as we speak, they are revealing their next bundle of great shareware that they will sell for a deep discount. The great thing about it is that 25% of the money they make will go to a charity. So it really is a win-win situation.

A new version of OAR is ready. This version has a number of updates including a revamped web aspect that includes classes for searching Google and Yahoo web and image search. This version will break much code previously based on OAR. This means that you should skim the code and see if the updates are worth the rewriting.

I thought I tried this before and it failed, but with the latest version of Mono “shift_jis” is a valid encoding.

Conference Date: June 12th -13th, 2008
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Site: http://www.iceis.org/workshops/nlpcs/nlpcs2008-cfp.html

Important Dates
Deadline: March 3rd, 2008
Decision: April 4th, 2008
Camera Ready: April 14th, 2008