Henrik Falck's blog » widgets

The Amazing Language Analyzer Web Application

Henrik Falck — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 06:52:00 +0000

“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/

The Days of Web Standards

Henrik Falck — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 10:53:00 +0000

As I mentioned before, I was going to appear at The Days of Web Standards, 2007. And as also mentioned, I was working on an ajax messaging library. I’m sitting here at the Days in Akihabara now, listening to one of the last presentations for the day. There’s quite a lot of people here, and there’s a certain conferency mood in the air. I have the W3C on my left and the Mozilla Corp. on my right. Got some nice Firefox stickers.

I combined the two mentioned matters and did a presentation and demo developing a chat widget using the freshly-released Ajax Messaging Library. Well, it’s in early beta quality with many features planned but not yet implemented, but it works! Even on stage (except for a small bug, hehe). Anyway, it’s out there now! I’ll write more about it later.

P.S. I did the presentation in my socks; my shoes were drenched this morning by Typhoon no. 4.

CSS Nite Vol 19 Recap, and Sequel

Henrik Falck — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:35:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my other blog, I was going to hold a presentation at CSS Nite Vol. 19. Considering I haven’t held a presentation since my university days (what the heck kinda company am I working for, really?), I think it went really well, and it was very fun to do. I’ve uploaded the slides as well – not that they’re much to see in themselves. I did a demo constructing an Opera widget live on stage, and contrary to what one would have expected, it actually went quite without mishaps.

I’ll also have a presentation on The Days of Web Standards 2007 on 14~15 of July. My presentation is on Sunday the 14th at 14:30. It’ll be a bit longer and also on widgets (although this time too I’ll try to sneak in as much talk about web application development as possible without Marketing noticing). I’ve got some pretty nifty ideas for a live coding session and demo… I hope someone will attend. Anyway, there are many very interesting speakers scheduled…