Does anyone have real-life experience with working with a programmer in countries like India through a service like Technical Outsourcing or Coders4rent.com? Tell me your stories. Was it easy to convey requirements? Were you happy with the communication? With the quality of the work?

(via Catalagoblog) Library Juice 6:24: "I've made a stab at a typology of the "amusing search," with
lessons and questions arising from each."

(via languagelog) Wiktionary: Colours. A wiki dictionary with translations of thousands of words in hundreds of languages.

LANGUAGE = DISEASE? (in the comments): "The fact that for thirty years or more it's been possible to get certified as a linguist without knowing any languages beyond your native one seems to me a perversion of the order of things that likely presages Armageddon."

So now you can make a documentary or a movie all by yourself and sell it online.

Welcome to the TEI Website: "Initially launched in 1987, the TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent."

Numbers in Over 4000 Languages

I have a bunch of books I'd give away of someone would want them (if they come and pick them up). Is there something online where I can do that?

I wrote an article called Themes and metaphors in the semantic web discussion. I tried out a new approach to semantics in blockquotes, but don't know much about CSS, so let me know how it can be improved...

I'm looking for a political cartoonist who is interested in doing a cartoon or 2 a month for my redesigned website about Colombia. Subject matter will be much about Colombian politics, and how it relates to US politics (so characters include Bush and the Colombian president Uribe). I can work with you to develop the cartoons (ie, you don't have to know too much about Colombian politics, we can work together).

Anyone know where to look?

(via Simon) PHP.net have implemented a javascript autocomplete for their function search. Note that this is not the browser autocomplete that lists things you typed in before. Instead, this dropdown lists all valid functions starting with "my". Very, very useful.

Simon notes that the javascript is not being shared (it's scrambled), and in the comments Sergi points to this autocomplete script (which isn't half as nice). A quick Google reveals:
- How to make your own.
- You can ask IE to show the dropdown on your form elements.
- How to make your own (another one).

I am very dissapointed that the W3C isn't putting these controls in the HTML specs (correct me if I'm wrong here). Things like autocomplete, list or table sorting, ordering lists or validation should be taken care of by the browser by specifying a simple html tag or attribute.

All this javascript is nice but it isn't really going anywhere - if a truly useful and compatible javascript library for this stuff that didn't require lots of customization was going to happen, it would be here already. (With my respect to the authors of the various libraries out there - they're doing a great job - but it's not good enough. Not easy enough to implement. Not standardized enough.)

CMS Feature Directory: a unusual inerface to a faceted classification system where you can order "facet layers". I'm not too crazy about this interface myself.

Paolo Valdemarin Weblog:
"As an example, in Dave's taxonomy you can find:
- Politics
-- Presidential Election of 2004
--- Dean Campaign
--- Clark Campaign
--- ...
If Howard Dean would have his own taxonomy, it might contain something like:
- Howard
-- Presidential Election of 2004
--- Politics
--- Budget
--- Ideas
--- ...
Same topics, different nesting according to the different points of view."

Wrong. Same terms, different topics (although you could come up with some level of cross mapping that might work for you). Dean's topic "Presidential Election of 2004" is not the same as Winer's topic "Presidential Election of 2004", although they use the same term. Dean's "Presidential Election of 2004" is probably somewhat similar to Winer's "Dean Campaign" topic.

The Rockridge Institute, with George Lakoff as a founding member, tries to "reframe the terms of political debate to make a progressive moral vision more persuasive and influential." (via Language Log)

opensourcexperts.com: "Wouldn't it be great if, as in open source software development, several people could come together to fund the development of a feature?" Sure would. I hope this works out.

Nelson's Weblog: tech / semanticWeb: "Each of the individual applications using RDF I know of could have been done more easily with plain XML. What's the payoff for using RDF? Where are the fantastic semantic inference applications?"

languagehat.com: CHINESE NEWSPAPERS IN NYC.: "With more readers comfortable in English, the newspapers have revised their format, printing Chinese text horizontally, from left to right, rather than vertically, from top to bottom. That allows them to insert English phrases like "early decision" or "the official preppy handbook" into articles. (Reporters use English keyboards, writing Chinese characters by typing in a phonetic version of a Chinese word; this brings up a menu of possible Chinese characters.)"

Language Log: An abortion by any other name...: "There's a sharp terminological contrast in recent news articles about an abortion bill signed by President Bush. Proponents of the bill call the procedure "partial-birth abortion"; opponents tend to call it by its medical name, "intact dilation and extraction", or else refer to it by some other non-gruesome-sounding label." "Pro-life" vs. "Pro-choice" indeed.

(via Ben) WWT Swan Migration Satellite Tracking Project: Live tracking of swans migrating! It actually graphs each swan individually. Nifty.

(Via Matthew Berk, Forrester Analyst) Yahoo is quietly getting better fast. This is been out for a while - they implemented a new way of narrowing the selection of products, called SmartSort. It's an interesting interaction pattern that uses sliders to let users choose which facets are more important to them. There is also a FacetMap style range facet that lets you choose a price range.

So I saw the Matrix, and I liked it. Not the best movie ever, but alright. I've got a few lingering questions though:
(See inside - WARNING: SPOILERS)