May 10th, 2008
Over time I’ve been making some smaller changes to the language analyzer (my language identification web app), like manually tuning it to better distinguish between hard-to-distinguish languages, like the Scandinavian languages, Serbian-Bosnian-Croatian-Slovenian, Afrikaans and Dutch, and Czech and Slovak.
But I’ve been wondering what languages people use it for, so yesterday evening, while drinking shochu (in spite of which I could only find one bug today! but I did write a processing and database-intensive function, n00b style, which I replaced with a single SQL query today…), I added logging of the results. Only when the language identification certainty is reasonably high is it logged, and only the result; the actual text inputted is not sent. This, of course, happens in the background. A language is only logged once per client, and results from clicking the “example” button (Tower of Babel extracts – I like that story) are not logged.
This morning I added the top ranking to the page. It’s generated on the server side in order for the search engines to see it. The top 5 languages for the past seven days are printed. At this time, i.e. about 15 hours after the result logging started, these are Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, and Thai.
You can see the currently most inputted languages live: http://henrikfalck.com/languageanalyzer/
Tags: language analyzer, projects, web apps
Posted in projects | No Comments »
January 27th, 2008
“Have you ever wondered what language a blog entry you glanced at might be in?” was the question I set out to work on more than two years ago, if memory serves me right. I always get curious when I see a blog post in an unknown language. I mean not just a language I don’t speak – a language I can’t identify.
I thought it would be a really hard problem to solve – writing a piece of software that could figure that out. It turned out not to be so hard though. Just hours of programming, and probably a lot of luck. Because my initial hunches on how to tune the algorithms proved to be pretty right, and I was, and still am, really startled at how good the software became.
I released it as the Wørd – Language Analyzer Opera widget. Unfortunately the target audience for Opera widgets is quite small, so I always thought of making it into a web page. I don’t know why it took so long, but here it is!
The web page version has some new, cool improvements. It will try to detect as you’re typing, for instance. It also has improved support for Swedish, Serbian, and Afrikaans. And the UI is in my opinion better than the widget version.
So please try it yourself and see how it works. It’s pretty fun to just copy-paste any piece of text your can find on the Internet into it, or just type something in a language you know yourself and see when it gets it right. Here’s the address again:
http://henrikfalck.com/languageanalyzer/
Tags: language analyzer, projects, web apps, widgets
Posted in projects | 8 Comments »
September 24th, 2007
I tried to fight the urge to make a web-based sudoku, but well I just couldn’t keep it up, so after I released Minesweeper I got started. Actually one of the reasons I wanted to do it was to see how much could be reused from Minesweeper to Sudoku – after all the basics are the same: a grid game field that the player modifies until it reaches a goal configuration.
But there are big differences as well. Where minesweeper starts with a randomly generated field, sudoku requires a puzzle to be correct, i.e. soluble with only one valid solution. The greatest challenge though, is to rate the difficulty of a given puzzle. Fortunately, I found one good program that can both generate and rate puzzles. My Sudoku game has an online database of thousands of puzzles, separated into five difficulty levels. Of course, it also has online high scores, just like Minesweeper.
I’m calling it an “alpha” though, because I actually suck at sudoku, so I can’t really test it myself yet. I’ve invited people whom I know like solving sudoku puzzles to test it, and you’re invited as well! Please add your comments to this blog post, and I will be extremely thankful. Things I’m looking at specifically are:
- Are the difficulty levels correctly rated?
- Are the puzzles “good”?
- How can the interface be improved? I know sudoku software usually has some methods for making notations as you solve the puzzle. The next step will be to add that, but how should they be designed?
- Any improvements you’d like to see.
- Any bugs you find.
So please, start solving those puzzles! 
http://henrikfalck.com/sudoku/
Tags: games, projects, sudoku, web apps
Posted in projects | 2 Comments »
