I’m taking a break from revising for tomorrow’s exam in Spoken Language Processing. I’ve been studying Hidden Markov Models. There’s more to do yet, however.

ezhtml
In case you’re wondering what the meaning of that entry below is, I’ll explain. In order to relieve the boredom of typing HTML, I have tried to automate as much as possible through my site engine. One of the things I’ve done is to enable it to understand typical formatting constructs like asterisks for bold and underlines for italic. This is done by a function in the source code called ’ezhtml’ (geddit?) The first implementation was too simplistic—it was confused by any asterisks or underlines anywhere else in the line. The challenge was to make it work in the expected manner; to give at least the illusion of intelligence. I think I’ve got it working now. It really is amazing what you can achieve with about six lines of regular expressions!

Multi-lingual site
I’ve been considering a couple of possibilities for internationalizing my site. It’s something that I definitely want to do, but I’m realistically not going to translate every page. The diary is a good example. I’ve got two options:

1. Make miniature versions of the site in each alternative language (i.e. drop out every page that isn’t translated)

2. Show the translated page where available, and the default language page (English) where a translation is not available.

I think that the second option is preferable, as long as it’s combined with an explanation somewhere.