This is the original speech, here is the same text with some search and replace. The poster took out the words he disliked to make a point. It’s a good point, and a shame that Karl Rove can’t come up with better talking points.
Year: 2007 (page 10 of 18)
It is always part of my plan that one day I will be a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). I finally did it. I just received my CPA license from the state of Colorado.
For most people, it is not too difficult (relatively speaking) to be a CPA. All you have to do is to get an undergraduate degree in Accounting, pass the CPA exam (very hard), and work for a public accounting firm for a couple of years.
For me, I did it the difficult way. I got my accounting undergraduate degree from Baruch and passed the CPA exam many years ago. But since I didn’t and will not work for a public accounting firm, I didn’t have the qualification the traditional way.
So I got my MBA in Finance from Fordham. Then, went back and got an advance certificate in Accounting this year. Now I have all the qualifications to be a CPA in the state of Colorado. They have something call the “education in lieu of experience” qualification for CPA in Colorado. So I did it. Another step on my life plan is complete.
Check back to find out what my life plan is soon.
I use SSL on my web servers for privacy and not authentication. Since it is my own use I don’t care if it’s from Verisign or Thawte. Also why shell out cash for the certificate when a self signed certificate will do just fine?
Internet Explorer used to permit you to install web server certificates by examining the SSL certificate and importing it into your key store. Version 7 of the browser took that away and made it more difficult to import them into the key store.
Here is how I imported the web server certificate into Vista. Read more
Wow. All this for a GunBound password. My nephew plays that game too, need to make sure he stays out of Sao Paulo.
The funniest part is that the kidnapped player did not give up the password to his account.
It would never work in Disney World but this is just plain cool. A 1:1 scale Gundam RX-78-2. See more pictures at Gizmodo.
It’s not just pouring cats and dogs, the thunder is shaking the house. This is very cool. Wonder if we’ll lose power?
Update: Power went off and then turned immediately back on. My server was not set to power up in that case; I just fixed it.
Updated: I’ve rearranged the code a little bit so that I could selectively translate parts of the notice. The updated javascript sections is located here.
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I had to switch back to the old copy of the ATPP WordPress plugin. My problem is most likely due to a configuration problem on my end, but I was getting hammered by HEAD and GET requests from Babelfish and WorldLingo.
I managed to add some javascript to my sidebar so that browser URL is compared with the URL the server thinks it served. If the two are different then the page is translated and a notice is displayed.
Here is the code.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
var browser_url = location.pathname
var server_url = “<?php echo(@$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]); ?>”
var orig_link = “<?php bloginfo(‘url’);echo(@$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]); ?>”
if ( browser_url !== server_url )
{
document.write(‘<div class=”trans-notice”>’)
document.write(‘<p>Please note: This page was originally written in English.</p>’)
document.write(‘<p>The text has been translated using an online service such as Google or Babelfish.</p>’)
document.write(‘<p>The original page can be viewed <a href=”‘,orig_link,'”>here</a>.</p>’)
document.write(‘</div>’)
document.write(‘<br />’)
}
//–>
</script>
If you click on http://blog.dembowski.net/archives/de/ the server will still see it as http://blog.dembowski.net/archives/ (without the /de/ at the end). The browser will see the real URL with the /de/ and compare what the server is reporting. If the two are different then the notice is displayed.
The notice will also be displayed if someone used /?p=123 to access a post. That’s not how my permalinks are setup so I’m not concerned about it.
From CNN’s website: “Starbucks out of China’s Forbidden City” which made me ask “What was a Starbucks doing there?”
Lily and I were there in 1998. The Forbidden City was more museum like than anything else. The big sign in English read “Palace Museum”. The whole city was filled with people looking to make money so I’m not surprised that a Starbucks was there.
I know that Starbucks has been asked to leave, but the Chinese government should reverse that decision and let Starbucks stay.
Why stop with just having a Starbucks? There are huge sections of the Forbidden City just dedicated to storage and are in disrepair. They ought to be able to fit in a mall without impacting the existing buildings.
Imagine how cool the golden arches would look viewed from Tiananmen Square? I mean with the population being what it is I think that would be a prime Costco location too.
Well be careful what you wish for. The new version of the translator plugin has a load balancing/fail over option so that if the primary translator is unavailable and does not respond in time then the request gets sent to the next translation engine.
That is a very cool option. It also means your webserver gets hit massively by the translation engines. My web traffic went from 5,000 hits (900 visits) last week to 21,000 hits yesterday.
In terms of network traffic that’s not even 100kbs. In terms of application hits (Apache web server) that’s huge. I’ve rolled back the version from 5.01 back to 4.0. I had to load up phpmyadmin and zap the options from the plugin to get 4.0 working again.
The new version has some very cool options. If I can turn off the load balancing and set the error page that comes up to my own page then I’d be set.
I’ll e-mail the author and get it sorted out.
Update: I’ve found the problem. It had nothing to do with ATPP, it was how I configured my logging software.
In 2006 I started playing with a translation plugin for WordPress. It was free and I liked the 1.0 version. When the author took the next version for purchase only (no longer free) I waited for version 4.0 and plunked down the money to obtain it.
The plugin ATPP works reasonably well. It does not do the actual translations (that would make for huge plugin!) instead it sends the data to Google or Babelfish per the configuration of that language.
Translation has led to some interesting comments from viewers. I get many hits from search engines which include the translated web pages. The viewers don’t select the translate button, they go straight to the translated page.It’s all machine translated so the basic gist is preserved but I’m told the grammar and flow is awful. Lily says the Chinese text reads like those vendors in Chinatown who are hawking things in English, and they don’t speak English. One commenter stated in Spanish that he’s never seen such bad language.
I just received version 5.01 of ATPP and it now adds the ability to check if the page is translated or not. With the inclusion of the following PHP code in your sidebar.php (or anywhere you’d like; I may change it) you can now warn your readers:
<?php if(function_exists(“tgInTranslatedPage”) && (tgInTranslatedPage())) { ?>
<!–skip translation–>
<div class=”trans-notice”>
<p>Please note: This page was originally written in English.</p>
<p>The text has been translated using an online service such as <a href=”http://www.google.com/translate_t”>Google</a> or <a href=”http://babelfish.yahoo.com/”>Babelfish</a>.</p>
<?php
$original=@$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’];
?>
<p>The original post can be viewed <a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘url’);_e($original); ?>”>here</a>.</p>
</div>
<!–end skip translation–>
<br />
<?php } ?>
I wrapped it in a <div> so that I can style it easily. In my style.css file I added
.trans-notice {
font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, Georgia, Arial, serif;
font-size: 0.9em;
border:#ccc 1px solid;
background-color:#FAFAFA;
margin: 0 5px;
}
.trans-notice p {
margin: 7px;
}
This gives a warning in English that will hopefully explain why the text reads so poorly.
