• Many languages at the same time (most of which I do not know),
• Short-hand annotations, and imprecise wording from people not always familiar with the technical field,
• Database field entries which may have been botched down by inappropriate input methods or bad text transfer from a database to another.

However, I have to admit that a positive aspect is that I (and the team I’m working with) have good knowledge of the technical issues we encounter most often (it’s amazing how electronic car parts fail always the same way).

So, I had to develop a set of tools and methodologies to solve most of the issues found here and I thought that you may want to hear about them (at least, I thought of sharing that knowledge with you).

Raw text

The first issue I often encounter is the presence of badly formed raw text. It’s not readable at all, even by somebody whose mother language is used in the text. For example, we may find “text” like:

And we have to understand that what was actually typed by the original writer was:

%20

This comes from very bad handling of international text (non-Latin text using characters more complex than the usual 7-bit ANSI/ASCII character set A-to-Z and a-to-z). Rather than complain, I found the Branah.com web site, hosting a very useful anything-into-anything convertor, where I just have to more or less recognize the appearance of the garbled data (the example lines that you can see in the photo below, will be an appreciated help here) and it will get translated into useful text.

Quick translation

Then, the text should be actually translated. I could ask a Russian to translate Russian text for me. But what when I have Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Korean, Japanese, etc. in the same job list? It’s better to speed up the process with Google Translate.

For sure, Google is not perfect. But for many languages, it’s providing a relatively good translation (remember that I’m not trying to get a great literary novel printed in a new foreign language).

A few of the tricks from Google Translate

• Detect language: This option is quite good at recognizing the language from even a few words. If it does not work or if you are sure of the language, you can ease its job by selecting the right source language.
• Translation language: You may prefer using your own primary language; But remember that if you understand several others, you can sometimes try them too. A muddy translation may become clearer.
• Simply clicking on the translation may provide alternative translations. Sometimes, the second one is better for your understanding.
• Sometimes, the length of the sentence is breaking the Google algorithm. You may want to try and cut the original text in parts. It’s easy and trial-and-error is a fairly good process.

You may also remember that – by providing new translations of your own – you are helping Google getting better. One thing I personally observed as very efficient is that offering the correct translation for a technical word today, may lead to its use in further translations a few days later (any proposed translation is vetted by experts before incorporation into the internal database, but it can be quite fast – and very useful).

A few other translating options

I do not use them as often, but some other free tools are available too. Some even offer similar services and performance. I would list:

• Babel Fish (aptly named after the nearly-magical universal in-ear translator from “The hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy“).
• Babylon 10 (maybe related to the SciFi TV series of a few years ago, Babylon 5?)
• Bing translator
• BabelXL

Closing statements

Even with really ugly text, with imprecise comments, our team has been able to classify very efficiently horrible text into usable data.

The next stage would certainly be to start using Artificial Intelligence (maybe relying on the existing knowledge about tens of thousands of text snippets) to increase our productivity while reducing this altogether boring task. Do you know a good solution I should check now?

I spoke about small computers that can easily become a network server (Raspberry Pi) and Android boxes which ease publication of videos onto our TV set(s). And, here comes a comment about Marion’s old Vaio laptop having not enough of a battery (please, understand: “What could you do to avoid hauling the ugly laptop to the TV room?“).

So, I started looking for a TV decoder box and a video solution.

I quickly came to the easy conclusion that I would have to use an Android TV box relying on Android TV 8.1 (or better), with Kodi as a video player (I had tested it successfully on a Windows 10 PC a few years ago).

TV box

First, I must select a box. The cheapest ones start aroudn $25. So, there is no budget reason to doge the request. But, if you want to keep a little margin for future expansion, it’s worth looking at 3GB of RAM memory, and if you think about 4K video, the processor must be helped with a small graphic GPU.

All these boxes come pre-configured with Android TV. Even if version 7.1 is enough, you can easily find boxes with version 8.1 (or even higher). But, please, forget about earlier versions. they will be outdated in terms of performance and features. Everything will be short, including compatibility with modern applications.

Suppliers are plentiful. But avoid those who do not even bother printing their name on the box: They are in the business of selling “dumb boxes” and will not support you in case of the slightest technical difficulty. If they don’t even dare naming the box, think about any other business presence.

You can also avoid boxes marked as using chips from Rockchip (strictly no Kodi support – see below) or Allwinner (known for not even developping its own software code…). Source: AndroidPCreview.

Finally, you want a box shipped with a recent version of Kodi (THE reference software for media management) and a “launcher” (a simple user-friendly graphic interface to launch Kodi and/or other applications from the remote without needing a keyboard to key commands in (Remember: this is a family-level application not a geek arena!))

According to my analysis, Android boxes under $50 are usually not feature-rich (or on sale for some bad reason). But between $50 and $95, you’ll easily find good-enough boxes (sometimes even with a small wireless keyboard along with the remote, even if this is not very useful after the first install).

Personally, I chose a cute little plastic hexagon from Evanpo: the T75Z plus, for 63€ at Amazon.fr (you may find it with a small wireless keyboard too).

• Android 7.1
• 4K support
• Processor: Amlogic s912 octo-core ARM Go
• Graphics processor: Mali-t820mp3
• 3GB RAM & 32GB storage
• 5GHz WiFi
• pre-installed Kodi
• 1000 Mb/s Ethernet
• Kodi button on the remote control, to directly launch Kodi.

It’s ready right out of the box.

Kodi and the Synology NAS server

I wanted specifically to use the box to show videos stored on my good old Synology DS413j network server which is hosting all family sensitive or shareable data.

At first, I tried to share files using the Windows sharing (aka Samba/SMB), but I could only get error messages from the Android TV box. So, I moved to another easy solution: Install le NFS file sharing on the NAS and ask the box to grab files from the server using this protocol (Kodi knows both of them; Just click the next option).

I got inspiration (and a very detailed tutorial) from TechJunkie. But the posts from TrendBlog or Esau Silva are quite good too.

No doubt about it: A NAS server is a perfect solution to provide media to the whole family. If you use Kodi (or even VLC) on the box, you won’t even need a NAS with transcoding capacity (it would just be more expensive, not more useful).

Actually, I am trying to make sure that you will get much more than you can swallow here: tens of thousands of character fonts. Not only a bunch of them, but two sources of the nicest kind.

FontPark is nothing less than a 70,000-font archive. You can search, dig, drag, drown into it.

But this is really an organized archive, which makes it quite usable even from the pro designer. and did I mention that most fonts are freeware or free for personal use?

But there are other sources for your character fonts. I found an interesting one because they are free and very accessible while containing real good quality font-ware. Google has built its own web font store: Google WebFonts

What is really special about Google WebFonts is that it comes with an API that most web sites can use to collect the fonts and use them when designing a web site. Actually, it’s as easy as using standard CSS style commands. As in the following example:

body {
        font-family: 'Tangerine', serif;
        font-size: 48px;
}

Definitely good news for the web designers.

• You cannot avoid mentioning the Google webmaster tools. They do a lot of things and contain a performance evaluation but it is very crude and updated at frequency that you cannot control (several days if not several weeks between updates).
• Pingdom: Full Page Test has the enormous advantage of being precise and not requiring anything more than your browser. Give it an URL and it will tell you what happens and how fast. Great.
• Using Firefox, there is a nice plugin to observe the load times and the detail of what is loaded: Firebug. It will produce the graphic display below.



• But if you want to go even one step further, you should complete Firebug with the Google Page Speed extension, which will provide precise recommendations about what you could do to improve your page load times.

In the activities of their new mobile phone, Google and HTC unveiled several videos giving us a peek looking (somewhat simplified but still real) into what is done to produce a modern mobile phone. Admire it and remember what the phone was tested against before bringing back your broken phone to the warranty department and claiming that your younger son just ate the corner of the display when -actually- you drove over it with your car…

See also:

• Nexus One design
• Display and 3D framework
• Nexus One manufacturing (nice shooting of industrial equipment)
• Nexus One: Day One (advertisement)

Update: I just learned that Internet Explorer 8 is now becoming the web browser most used in the world. Even if there is a lot of other good competition, Microsoft is still holding its position (from DownloadSquad).

In the beginning was Google which installed its servers in China in 2006. The “do no evil” company accepted the conditions of the government of the PRC and included heavy filtering and censoring of its search results (looking for Tienanmen will produce wildly different results in and out of China). But in January 2009, Google discovered that some hackers obtained some detailed information out of its own servers at this was targeting both American companies and Chinese political opponents or partisans of free speech in China. Subsequently, Google announced its intention of both lifting the censorship and leaving China.

What is still very unclear:

• Is Google really serious about these two options?
• Is the main reason for its ire, the political chase or the technological spying? (the US government including Hilary Clinton pushed hard with Google)

What is clear:

• The breach of information seems limited (only email subject lines have been breached, not contents).
• The hackers were affiliated to Chinese official bodies and did not only target Google.
• The hackers used some social engineering and security issues present in Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF, which were probably known but not closed by Microsoft and Adobe.

So, when such information appears in wide open channels of the world press, what happens? Most experts started commenting on the security loopholes in Internet Explorer 6 (and about Adobe PDF reader, too). Many people observed that Internet Explorer 6 is rather old and it is unfortunate that so many people still use it despite the known fact that it is a security liability when browsing the Internet. With such a rush, some very official people also asked for replacement of Internet Explorer (mainly v6) to be replaced with more modern browsers. Even representatives of the German, French and Australian governments asked their countries to replace Internet Explorer with something else.

The competition has seen this as a godsend since it created a rush for the other available browsers. For example (see the graph on the side), Firefox saw a brutal explosion of its downloads in Germany (nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in four days): about three times more than usual. It has been true in other countries even if it was not measured as precisely, and it has been observed by the other browsers Opera, Safari, Chrome (currently profiting from heavy advertising in some European countries like France).

This was definitely a good thing since it was bringing better browsers to many computers. It could have stayed there but there were several reaction and parallel events happening at the same time. The first one was that Firefox was preparing a major upgrade to the successful browser (in many parts of the world Firefox is now used by more Internet users than Internet Explorer). Named v3.6, this new version is bigger than what could have been expected from its small number increase (from 3.5 to 3.6 should have been a minor upgrade). This major event accelerated the rush, with people looking for features like:

• Built-in skins, to make it more personalized
• Faster, more stable
• More security conscious with the addition of user-level messages about risks, including reminders about what plug-ins are outdated and must be upgraded.
• Visual tab previews, which show you the tabs when you press Ctrl-Tab
• Aptitude to browse without leaving too many footsteps and traces in your PC (good for clean browsing like when you visit Adult sites)

This version is also appreciated by developers who will find a bunch of little improvements (like CSS gradients).

This is not only a great story to read. This is a great browser and you should consider downloading Firefox 3.6 now!

If you are not completely convinced, you should also consider downloading the newest Opera browser. Opera v10.10 has been available for a few months now and it also offering these advantages, plus some neat features like:

• Opera Unite: to easily share information between Opera users and browsers, without using a web site or a share folder on some social network.
• Opera Turbo: to adapt Opera to very slow Internet connections.
• Speed dial: to get a faster access to some web sites you choose (bookmarks on steroids).
• Mouse moves for faster commands.
• Opera link: to share bookmarks, speed dial configurations between several machines where you use Opera.

Opera is clearly my preferred browsing solution (even if I need to test my web sites on everything I can find, Opera is the central hub of my Internet browsing). Go and download Opera v10.10 now.

And, if you are not sure yet, I can also offer the small and fast browser from Google: Chrome. Since it all started around Google and China, it was worth mentioning, of course.

All this has been going so fast that Microsoft needed to do something. Of course, they have a newer version of Internet Explorer (IE8 is included in Windows 7 and can be downloaded freely. But this was not enough, too many people were starting to complain that Microsoft may wait about a month before updating IE6 in the normal update cycle. Even worse, some experts started telling the world that Microsoft actually was aware of this flaw in IE6 for many months. In such conditions, not doing anything usually turns out to produce a public relations nightmare and prepares for bad wind.

So, Microsoft rushed an out-of-band update to IE6 and Windows Update is now offering the correction to all Windows users still using IE6 (of course, you still have to use Windows Update and it is well known that too many people do not have this configured or do not accept the proposed updates – this is wrong and one the reasons so many PCs are infected with Trojan horses, virus and adwares). Now, if you did not move to a later Windows version and if you did not take advantage of the much better IE7 or IE8, it’s time to upgrade your old hag.

We can expect to see a few more updates to this story in the future, but there is a lesson to be learned (by Google, and most Internet users):

Always keep your browser up-to-date and refrain from clicking on any link in a mail message you did not expect.

Additionally, there is a lesson for Microsoft:

Sorry! but even the older software has to be kept alive when you are or have been the near-monopoly on this technology. This comes with responsibilities.

There are few things that you can do to significantly improve the speed of your Internet connection. Of course, you can switch to another Internet Service Provider, but it’s a mess. On the opposite, it is easy to have an sub-optimal connection because of the response time of the DNS server of your Internet Provider. This server offers a translation service a domain name (for example, www.roumazeilles.net) into its equivalent numeric IP address (the only one that the web browser really understands and needs).

But all DNS servers are not born equal and if those offered by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) have an advantage (they are nearer to your own computer), they are not always the fastest ones. NameBench gives you the opportunity to easily and automatically check what DNS server is the most efficient (and to compare it with your own current DNS configuration).

In my own personal case, I just reduced DNS times by 50% (no less!) while I thought I had a rather good configuration. As a matter of fact, Neuf Telecom servers are faster that those from Free…

This works on Windows, MacOS as well as GNU/Linux.

By the way, for those of you who may be wondering, Yes! I included the all new Google DNS as one of the tested options and it was far slower than most of the other freely available possibilities.

Google decided to celebrate with an anti-latin graphic to great their visitors.

This is probably quite feasible supposing that you have enough data and enough CPU/database power. Google has it all (and plenty of power for sure).

I am not quite sure if this undeniable technical step forward is really good news for individual liberties.

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

This is why, while the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was preparing a night without IPv4 to reach the largest possible public, Google launched a version of its search engine reserved to IPv6: ipv6.google.com (If you are like almost everybody, you will not see anything at the end of the link).

Now, we all have to switch as soon as possible.