Go participate in a survey on the AAC audio codec and help find out if it is everything it is cracked up to be [AAC at 128kbps public listening test]. Actually, I went to do the test myself and couldn't tell the difference between the files used in the test. So, I guess they're all good for my purposes. 6:13:08 PM    comment []  

"A synthetic language employs morphemes to indicate the relationship between units of a sentence (the boy's dog); an analytic language uses prepositions and word-order (the dog of the boy). No language is wholly one or the other. The tendency in English has been for analysis to replace synthesis, but in French the future tense derives from an auxiliary verb which has now become a morpheme, and it is arguable that in English 'll has become a (synthetic) morpheme denoting the future tense" [Traditional Grammatical Terminology]. 6:02:49 PM    comment []  

Now this is just too cool. Synthetic Morpheme came up first in a Google Directory search for "wired slashdot". I don't know how that is possible. I don't come anywhere close to the top in a Google Web search. 5:43:40 PM    comment []  

A week or so ago, I started using the Mozilla Firebird browser on a laptop at home. My goal was simply to make the machine more usable, since it only has 32MB of RAM. Firebird has a much smaller memory footprint than the standard Mozilla browser and it has made a big difference for that laptop. However, once I started using Firebird, I discovered that it is a pretty good browser in its own right. So, now I am running it exclusively on my desktop. My desktop system is a 1.7GHz P4 with lots of RAM, so speed wasn't the real issue. However, I find that I like the simplicity and configurability of Firebird over the bulkiness of the standard Mozilla suite. 5:41:01 PM    comment []