I’ve always kind of wondered whether this is kind of tribute to blue jeans/bleu de Gênes, but I’ve never had the courage to ask, mainly because if I’m wrong they’re going to think I’m fucking crazy.

Also via Margaret Marks, a machine that does perfect translations in a number of European languages.

For a client I need a shared hosting solution with storable.pm installed. WebFusion/HostEurope/Pipex won’t do it. Any ideas?
(Update: thanks for a couple of suggestions, but I’ve decided to dive into PHP.)

From Kitten. There’s lots of good stuff coming out of the WordPress community, but not what quite a lot of people seem to have been requesting for a while: a functional multi-author system. At the moment WP trumpets its various user levels but no mention is made of the fact that same-level users can all [...]

Toast oven => PC. There’s loads more good stuff on GeekDIY.com.

Seriously, if I write this blog in Portuguese, will someone invite me onto Orkut? Or am I better off just heading down the Brazilian bar down the street? All these do-good schemes always end up in trouble - just check the story of rioting at the Forum over in Lorna’s Shorts.

This is interesting. Unipeak reproduces my site (your site) dynamically on theirs, as it were, turns off my ads, and turns on theirs. The site is presented as a tool to help among others the poor old Chinese, but the fact that my material ends up being cached by Google as if it were theirs [...]

For reasons that are unclear to me, the burlesque leader who ruled Dublin during carnival used to be known as Mayor of the Bull Ring. Barcelona’s Mayor Clos is so damn serious that he wants to close our bull-ring, but the chances that he’ll stop making a fool of himself the rest of the time [...]

Sez Rob (via Memepool). There’s a generation-by-generation analysis of the techniques buried somewhere around here, but it has got slightly less amusing recently: early last month I was getting up to 200/hr - not good, even if they do go straight to trash - and, though that problem has been killed, new contact emails receive [...]

I reckon that most of the money invested by local and regional government in providing e-services, ranging from bog-standard pages for rural councils to the more ambitious attempts seen here in Barcelona, was wasted. This is because most projects served either as a means to funnel money to new media businesses set up by the [...]

There’s a guide here. Looks pretty clunky to me and dynamic generation of pages just shunts the MT rebuild issue down the row. Textpattern looks interesting in a hippy kind of way, but I may have to start sending postcards again…

Dinner’s taking a shower, so here’s a very interesting notion from Brice Dunwoodie re the next galaxy in the Googliverse:

Kaleboel figures for insignificant reasons in an academic paper by Fernando Tricas-García and Juan Julián Merelo-Guervós. The Spanish-speaking Blogosphere: Towards the Powerlaw? (PDF) introduces a spider-based tool developed by the authors, the Blogómetro, and includes the following interesting comment:

Yet another triumph for capitalism: try out show me your ass and spit at me on Burger King’s Subservient Chicken.
Via Language Log.

WiFi-SM (via wondering) sounds good:
I’ve been using WiFi-SM for one month and it’s amazing ! When somebody suffers on earth, not only I know it, but I can also feel a little bit of his/her pain. I don’t feel guilty anymore and I can enjoy life without limitation. I love WiFi-SM
Here’s the blurb:

Den mailed to point out a site run by a Barcelona taxi driver, Francisco Dugo aka Taxi Tupi, with a webcam and lots of lovely photos. How public-spirited!

Here. Now all I need to do is stop the cat vomiting on the kitchen table.

This is the kind of news that must break the hearts of the beards who want to establish little, backward Islamic fiefdoms:

This is what I call a good post:

The headline figure this morning is 20%, but the survey (.doc) asks the question twice and the other answer is different. First there’s question 3:

I’m going to read you a list of apparatus and new technologies that are being used more and more frequently in Spain. Tell me, please, of each one whether you have [...]

This stuff should be subsidised, not banned, although I can’t work out whether the machines used to produce it are translators or generators. Here’s something I received this morning (URL omitted):
Our soft pensil makes sound.
Our noisy round eraser is thinking and our children beautiful spoon arrives.
A golden glasses smells at the place that any round-shaped [...]

As a second-class Anglo-Saxon, I would have immediately and incorrectly assumed that the use of the word shatnes in connection with wool and linen referred to the increase in hygiene and decrease in mortality that resulted from making undergarments from the latter rather than the former (PDF).
Via LanguageHat.

There they go again, blaming the courier (via Prandial). It would never have happened in Roxboro, where peaceful co-existence is the order of the day.
In one of those coincidences that herald intestinal difficulties and a tepid spring, it turns out this week was also the last at work for the man know for inventing [...]

Says Jon Cusack of his new child, Jon Cusack v2.0:
I wrote in the birth announcement e-mail stuff, like there’s a lot of features from version 1.0 with additional features from Jamie [his wife].
Fine, but someone explain to me how you put the release date back three months to enable glitch fixes.
Via Boing Boing.

If CNET are so bloody clever, how come I receive their Morning Dispatch at five in the afternoon? Three concepts for further study: IP mapping, time zones, personalisation.

This is even cooler (or dafter) than SVG: an image constructed (and manipulable) using just CSS (explanation here).

Just a warning that the site may be even more chaotic over the next couple of days. This is because I’ve taken a deep breath and decided to do stuff like kick out virtually all non-data tables in favour of CSS2-based layouts (= quicker site + more display/media options) and switch to UTF-8 (= more [...]

Això és la llista dels llibres que més s’estan venent dins el grup específic de codis postals que constitueix Microsoft. Es diu un purchase circle e hi ha mes aquí. A Anchorage (Alaska) es llegeix sobre escapar, viatjar, sobreviure, els gossos y Microsoft .Net.
Via Scobleizer.

How global government could make some lonely shepherds very happy.

Weg, dus. Vind ik niet erg: Kaleboel bleef altijd belachelijk ondergewardeerd.

I can’t think of a better web project to come out of Germany than the Technical University of Munich’s LEO. Their collaborative online GermanEnglish dictionary is outstanding, it’s free, and it’s getting in the order of three million hits a day. Now these excessively good people have announced a FrenchGerman version, to be launched early [...]

Good post by Mark Liberman on Language Log:
Captain John Dunn, of the Shreveport LA police department, is quoted by CNN as attributing the failure of the speech recognition technology in their new PBX to “Southern drawl and what I call lazy mouth”… Message to Captain Dunn: the fault is in your system’s technology, not in [...]

This is so silly I can’t believe anyone’s taking it seriously.

In LA County mag je de tech terminologie master/slave niet meer gebruiken in contacten met de locale overheid, zegt BoingBoing:
The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived. As such, it is the County’s expectation that our [...]

Biomedcentral:
Sydney Brenner va dir que va preveure el dia en que - així com la National Academy of Sciences ja no té una secció per a la biologia molecular perquè cada biòleg és essencialment biòleg molecular - [cada biòleg] sigui biòleg computacional. Però es deuen tractar les qüestions culturals abans que això pugui succeir, va [...]

USA Today (2003/11/03):
“Bio[tech] ha arribat a ser el millor amic de tots,” diu Rick Weddle, director del International Economic Development Council. [Però intentar crear ocupació en la biotech] “sembla invertir els estalvis de tota la seva vida en bitllets de loteria,” diu economista Joe Cortright.
Entretant, grangers a Gujarat (Bharat Textile, 2003/11/04) i al Midwest [...]

Transblawg posts re the adaptation of the language used in British novels for the American market and vice versa. This subject also occasionally exercises John of Iberian Notes (2003/10/17, for example), who thinks that it’s time we Brits started caring again about the eccentric pastimes of folk who were so very rude to us only [...]

Ik ga vanmiddag naar het film noir festival te Manresa om Parranda (1977) te zien en dan naar director Gonzalo Suárez te luisteren. Dichter bij wat ik beschouw als de plaatselijke traditie is Pedro Tembourys Kárate a Muerte en Torremolinos (2001), nu uit op DVD. Deze film schijnt nog slechter te zijn dan de mythische [...]

Some of the recent obituaries of super-poet Willem Wilmink (1936-2003) managed to avoid mentioning his writings in Twents, despite the fact that this part of his work - he also translated, wrote and rewrote extensively in Dutch - enjoyed a large following in Twente.
Let’s start by locating the two languages. Linguists classify Dutch and Twents [...]

Cànem o coral?
L’estampat sobre cotó (calico-printing) va ser introduït a Gran Bretanya de la Índia en 1676, 150 anys abans de Barcelona. Un home anomenat Lane es va enriquir en el Manchester del segle dinou amb un patró del com Hugh Miller, escrivint en 1852, diu que El Vell de Dalt tenia els drets. Per [...]