Sunday, March 20, 2011

A comparative look at Machine Translation


Machine translation has to go a longway before it can become an established way of doing translations. Recently while reading a news item in Japanese I tried out my own translation skills learnt a long time ago and tried to see how it compares with machine translation. Here are some results. Some did not recognize the language and Google recognised it as Chinese with all the Hiragana / Katakana characters left in place with only Chinese characters translated into English and to get an all English translation the language was set to Japanese.

Original News item March 21, 01:00 AM Japan Time

北澤防衛大臣は、防衛省で記者会見し、福島第一原子力発電所について、19日に続いて、上空から表面温度を測定した結果、3号機の格納容器の上を除いて、1号機から6号機まで、いずれも100度未満で、専門家の分析で、使用済み燃料を保管するプールに水が入っていることを裏付ける貴重なデータになるという見方が示されたことを明らかにしました。

Bing Translator:

Members expressed the view that Kitazawa, Defense Minister at the Ministry of Defense briefing and Fukushima first nuclear power plant on the 19th followed, from surface temperature measurements taken, except on the containment of no.3 unit aircraft from No. 6 MK until none less than 100 degrees, expert analysis, storing spent fuel pool water contains valuable data to be unveiled.

Google Translation after indicating language as Japanese:

Sawa Kita Defense Minister, the Ministry of Defense press conference about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, followed by 19 days, the surface temperature was measured from the sky, except for the containment of Unit 3, Unit 1 6 Unit until, in less than 100 degrees both in expert analysis, it was shown clearly to the view that as valuable data confirms that the water has entered the pool to store spent fuel.

Yahoo- Babelfish:

Defensive Minister of State Kitazawa the reporter interviewed at the defensive ministry, following on the 19th concerning the Fukushima first nuclear power plant, 1 from the machine 6 to the machine, each of them made that the viewpoint that is shown under 100 degrees, with analysis of the specialist, it becomes the valuable data which supports the fact that the water has entered into the pool which keeps the spent fuel, clear the result of measuring surface temperature from the sky, 3 excluding on the Containment Vessel of the machine.

My Traslation :
Japanese Defense Minister Kitazawa at the defense ministry's briefing following the 19th unvieled the results of aerial surface temperature measurements on reactors 1 to 6  at the Fukushima Nuclear Power station. The results of surface measurements indicate that on reactors 1 to 6 were below 100 deg C except directly above the containment vessel of reactor 3. This result according to expert analysts is an important data indicating that water has entered the pool containing the spent fuel  rods.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Streaming video from Japan

It is also available on my blog, if you would like to review.

Donate generously to the relief effort.

Improved Publishing in LightSwitch Beta 2

Publishing LightSwitch application in Beta 1 had presented some challenges in some cases. Review the following posts:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/fd8c1dfa-668b-4417-a16f-492163f65721
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/bffa8ffa-a24e-448e-8f6e-bf5ce19bc1ac
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/5b8eb0ba-f883-486d-8b57-202f5d8921a1
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/devdocs/thread/5de8743a-8b82-4ba0-992a-9f538c7f5574
This time around I hope the problem has been resolved. I am not sure if this was due to installing VS2010 SP1 but the problem remained even after removing the SP1.
As promised, publishing to WIndows Azure now seems to be possible. Addionally users can leverage SQL Azure for parking their data used in LightSwitch applications thus getting all the needed stuff in one place. Jump start on your SQL Azure skills (Read my book: http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2011/01/do-you-want-free-copies-of-my-latest.html )
In Beta 1 you needed to add a Windows User while designing the application for those applications you chose Windows Authentication. Now the application can take in any of the Windows Users without the need to including them explicitly while designing the application. However, User authorization (authorization to use resources) are controlled from within the applicaiton.
Now you have clients and Application server.
Two languages to develop your application:
Visual Basic
C#
Two authentication schemes:
Windows
Forms
(Unauthenticated can also be deployed).
For clients you have two options:
Desktop (~ Intranet)
Web        (~ Internet)
Application Server
1. On end user machine
2. Hosted on a IIS Server
3. Hosted on Windows Azure
This post is based on the MSDN article at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lightswitch/gg699332
Certain of the comments in this post are my own.
Please note that if you have invested time developing with Beta 1 they are not compatible with Beta2. Perhaps you need to redo.
Review this post:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/lightswitchgeneral/thread/6e7a9dbd-60cc-4aa1-9574-9e5ad5498a54

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Much anticipated LightSwitch Beta 2 was released today

The Beta 2 of Microsoft LightSwitch a RAD developer tool was released today for full story read here:
Two significant features:
In this Beta one could publish a LightSwitch application to the Windows Azure Platform (promised in Beta1)
 
Extensibility to go beyond what is availbale out-of -the box (You need Visual Studio Professional at a minmum)
The audience:
Business analysts and power users (no novices) who are tired of using Excel, Access etc
The Wizard is the king in this program and he does all the heavy lifting and you don't even notice a thing.
Well in Beta 1 the Wizard had his problems and hope we have a more robust wizard.
These following are available for MSDN Subscribers and I will have to sweat it out till the lowly ones like myself can download.
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