Petar Mimica’s blog

Digital democracy, Plato and web 2.0

How the digital democracy can actually be counterproductive to a constructive dialogue.

How Social Media is Ruining Your Mind

The constant use of the Web in general and social media in particular appears to be literally ruining our minds.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Engines of Cognition

No way to summarize this one without doing it injustice

What peak oil looks like

If you want to know what peak oil looks like, look around you. And read this post, too.

Note: this is a first in a series of weakly posts which mostly serve as sort of a reminder of what I have been reading in a given week. The posts listed here are not necessarily new, nor is there any particular criterion according to which they are chosen.

The truth about violence

A long post by Sam Harris, but worth the time! It provides a non-pacifist (however, non-aggressive) point of view about (male) violence and how to deal with it (as a male).

The biofuel grind

A post on Do the Math blog about the biofuels. It is a very quantitative and exhausting overview of the capacity of biouels to replace the conventional ones.

The mechanics of disagreement

An old post by Eliezer Yudkowsky on why changing your mind is not a concession you make to others, but a benefit you reap for having them point out an error in your model.

(Note: this is a review of an iPhone/iPod Touch game.)

It has been almost nine years since I played Carcassonne for the first time. It is great fun, and we spent many evenings playing building roads and towns, ruining other people’s cities and generally (at least in my case being nasty to fellow competitors.

That is why I could not believe it when I heard that the game has been ported to the iPhone/iPod Touch. The thing is, I played Carcassonne online (I think it was on BrettspielWelt) a few years ago and the experience was suboptimal. It was played in a browser, so the responsiveness was not at its best. Even worse, the cards were too small and it was difficult to really get into the game as I had to be very careful not to oversee some detail on the small icons. It might be that that online version has been improved in the meantime, but I did not play it for a long time now.

Today, while listening to the 47th episode of the MobileMacs podcast, I heard one of the authors mention that there is a version of Carcassonne for iPhone and that has been developed over the last 12 months if I heard correctly. Without any hesitation I purchased the App (costs 3.99 EUR), though I dreaded what I would find when I open it. The reason why I dreaded is because a similar thing happened to me with the Battle for Wesnoth when it appeared on the iPhone. I really love the version of the game for desktop, but the iPhone version never managed to convince me to play it for more than five minutes (update: this refers to an early release, see below).

But Carcasonne…well, they have really *solved* the interface problem. The game is fast and responsive and very, very playable! Here is a little video from the creators:

I think that the fundamental difference between Carcassonne and Battle for Wesnoth is in the dragging vs. clicking. Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game, where one uses mouse to select units and then clicks to the field where they should move or attack. Such interfaces have proven to be very much incompatible with the touch screens. The analogue, real world version of Carcassonne is a “pick and drop” game, i.e. you pick the card and then drop it in place. And if you are not satisfied, you just pick it and drop it somewhere else. And this is exactly what the programmers have done in the iPhone version: you tap (to pick) and then tap again (to drop) the card. The game helpfully only allows you to drop the card there where it is allowed. And if you are not happy you just drag it somewhere else. Now that is what I call a simple and effective interface!

The multiplayer mode works also well, if you can find available players on the server. There is also a local multiplayer mode, where you play against AIs. But what I found really nice is the solitaire mode. Here you need to complete a series of tasks in sequence (complete a size 2 town, then size 3, etc… until size 6; the same for roads). Once both a town and a road of a size 6 have been completed, the game is complete. This mode becomes much more interesting once the “random” sequence of cards which player draws is pre-determined for each “town” being built in this way. This enables the creation of a high-score list for each town, both locally on the iPhone as well as globally.

Nice work, TheCodingMonkeys!

Update: A commenter pointed out that I said about Wesnoth refers to one of the early versions (probably the very first release if I recall correctly). I have checked the latest version of Wesnoth and it has indeed been improved. The game is very responsive now and the interface is more intuitive.

I regularly have to deal with four (natural) languages (and a few programing languages, but that is for another post). Normally I do not have to directly translate from one language to the other. Which is a great relief. But sometimes I do have to translate a word or a phrase. And so, apart from leafing through a dictionary, what else can be used to translate words? And, more importantly, how can it be done efficiently on the web?

(Mis)using online resources

A long time ago (when I still lived in Croatia and the years were still numbered with “199?”) I used Babel Fish, which was (I think) run by AltaVista then. The problem was, it and all the others I tried were hopelessly inaccurate. But they was fast, and if you were already fluent (in both languages), it would tend to speed up the things. For example, these days Google Translate does a very good job of “The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak” (check this page if you do not know why exactly that sentence in both English and Croatian:

Duh je jak, ali je tijelo slabo.

The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak.

However, a grammatically incorrect

Duh je jak, ali je tijelo slab.

is translated as

The spirit is strong, but the body is weak.

(Note: tijelo == body, but also tijelo == flesh a sense of not being spirit). There are still some things to be ironed out, but it basically works. However, consider the following:

Danas sam zaboravio ponijeti mali crveni kišobran.

Today I forgot to bring a small red umbrella.

However, put “small red umbrella” into plural

Danas sam zaboravio ponijeti male crvene kišobrane.

Today I forgot to bring a small red umbrellas.

and the grammatical integrity cannot be guaranteed in both languages. As I said before, if you are fluent in both languages, even a online translation which is approximately correct is a great help. However, you cannot trust it to translate a letter for you unless you can already translate between languages. Nothing new there I know, but it is important to keep in mind that we are not yet there with automatic translators, though I am impressed by how they handle, for example, declinations in Croatian.

OK, moving on to slower, but more accurate online dictionaries. For example, I use LEO for translating to and from German. Dictionaries are good because they (usually) give a list of possible translations, and even some phrases where the word can be used. However, they have a limited vocabulary and sometimes, especially with German, and especially with German legalese there is just no way to get a translation.

Then there are Wikipedias. Yes, those. The trick is simple: find an article on something and, if you are lucky enough, there is that same article in another language. Perhaps this is a slight misuse of Wikipedia, but then here one relies on the people editing articles to provide interlanguage links for some robot to harvest and create a great multilanguage dictionary which is on the left side of any Wikipedia article! Thank you, Wikipedia editors, you just wrote a dictionary for me to use!

How to translate efficiently (in Firefox)

I hope you are using Firefox, otherwise this section will not be very useful for you. Did you know that Firefox bookmarks contain a field called “keyword”? Did you know that you can use it to translate directly in your address bar? Here is how. (Also here, with illustrations .

Let’s assume we want to use Google Translate for translations from English to Spanish. If you go to the webpage, set the languages and type “one” your address bar will change to something like

http://translate.google.com/#en|es|one

Now bookmark this page and open your bookmarks organizer. Find the bookmark and edit its properties. You will find an empty keyword field. The purpose of the keyword field is to associate keywords with addresses. Type “trans” there, and change the address which is bookmarked so that instead of “one” you have “%s” in the end. Now, whenever you want to translate from English to Spanish, just begin typing in your address bar “trans I want this sentence to be translated into Spanish”, press return and there you have it! The trick is to have keywords for each language pair. For example, I use “trenes” to translate from ENglish to ESpañol, “trdehr” from DEutsch to HRvatski (Croatian), etc. Similar keywords can be made for Wikipedia(s).

Conclusion

You can probably translate anything by searching the internet, but do not forget to be reasonably skeptical. I use at least two independent sources (dictionary + Wikipedia or translator + dictionary), and also do not forget to look into blogs or news articles for confirmation on how some phrase is used if you are not sure. Also, do open from time to time that thick dictionary that is lying on your bookshelf, you will be surprised.

As I blogged before, I do almost all my reading off screens. Of course, as Cory Doctorow wrote, we all like reading off a computer screen, just not books. His argument is that we get distracted too easily because the device we would be using to read a book usually has IM and e-mail clients running, and typically we are multitasking anyay.

Somehow, for me, all those things are the other way around: because I can just switch to my book reading program, I do my reading on my notebook or my mobile phone or my iPod. Usually, if I have to wait in a queue, or if I am waiting for or using public transport, or waiting for a particularly lenghty piece of calculation (not simulation), or simply want to take my mind off of some difficult problem in front of me, or simply can’t resist it I take out my Palm Centro, press the pre-defined key and I am at the page I was before I switched it off (or it itself switched off, an advantage over paper books if there is one). In fact, since I started ereading (four years ago), I have read more books than ever, and probably spent more money on ebooks than I did on books in the four years before that (note: my income in both periods was high enough to support reading habits, so it’s not because of the money).

So what can be used to read on these devices?

iPod Nano/Classic

Believe it or not, you can read ebooks on iPod Nano or Classic. But you need to convert your text into iPod Notes with hyperlinks at the end of each page pointing to the next one. I have used this last time two years ago, but there is at least one webpage where you can do it right now (September 2009). This is not the best solution, as the pages in Notes are short and it is difficult to bookmark, because if you started reading at a particular page, this page is selected next time you open Notes, regardless of by how many pages you have advanced in the meantime. Still, if you do not have nothing else, it can work. Caveat: if you cannot reduce the screen brightness, than reading in the dark is quite unpleasant.

iPod Touch/iPhone

Now we’re talking! Choose your App: Stanza, eReader, B&N Reader, even ReadItLater are pretty useful. Because of the slick interface, all these applications work very well, so it is more a question of getting content into them (more on that in a future post) which differentiates among them. I personally use eReader since it allows user-generated content to be added easily. Caveat: no buttons on iPhone, so one has to constantly touch the screen while reading. Still pretty cool.

Palm (but not Pre)

I use the PalmOS version of eReader application. Since my Centro has buttons, I find reading more comfortable and this more than compensates for the smaller screen.

Desktop

I am a Mac guy. For Mac I use the desktop version of eReader since I have many books in its .pdb format already. Also I find it better optimized for book reading than any PDF viewer I have used (Skim being one of the best, by the way), since it is faster and you can choose among a huge variety of fonts and backgrounds to reduce the eye strain.

What do I prefer? Centro, even when I am at a computer. I like to have a dedicated screen for book reading (just as I prefer to use my good old HP 33s calcualator instead of any calculator program on Mac, Centro and iPod Touch, even if they are RPN calculators…more on this in a future post). What I would like to see: some way to synchronize reading on different devices. I think ReadItLater does a good job already, but I’d like to see it in an ebook reader.