Monthly Archives: May 2004

Lingua Franca & Freudian Slips

On Meet the Press this morning Mr. Chalabi was in the process of calling US forces “occupiers”, but corrected himself mid-word to say “liberators”. Oops. (update – on review with TiVo, I can’t tell.)

Aside from this, I suspect non-native English speakers are often at a disadvantage in live interviews. However, who would wholly trust a translator? I’ve never heard a translator be corrected by the speaker they’re translating. Sure because it’s not a language they’re fascile with, but is there a checksum translator for the original translator?

Frontier going Open Source

According to eWeek: UserLand Frontier is going open source soon. Since it’s mostly a client-based system, will this really make a difference, especially with all the recent acrimony with SixApart’s Movable Type licensing?

Also, client software seems less likely to be taken up by the open source community, as you’ve got to master either operating systems APIs and have a OS developer’s kit or IDE to work. In this case (AFAIK) we’re talking MacOS and Windows, both which do have a learning curve. I’m also assuming since Frontier has been around a long time – I played with it in 1995 – that it’s not so groovy with Mac OS X Panther, etc.

As I’m advocating “a server on every desktop, a chicken in every pot” (ok, or a palatable vegetarian substitute), Frontier might be one of the ways that individuals, but more interestingly enterprises might take some of the technology and make a run with it. Done the right way, it might bump up against Groove or even Lotus Notes.