We are releasing gaim 1.1.4 today, just a week after 1.1.3; we found a couple crashers (one a security risk) and are now working around a bug in glib 2.6.2 (on some platforms). It always gives me a thrill to release even for something like this, that I’d rather have caught for 1.1.3.

In other news, its been snowing all day, but not really sticking to the roads until recently, it has been too warm of late. It made for a slow and boring day at work, consistently wishing it would snow enough to justify going home. Thankfully I’d gotten in early and skipped lunch, so I was able to leave at 4:30, I can’t imagine having stayed till 6 as I usually do. I found out last night that Andrius is engaged, yay! :-) I had an a fairly good talk with Vincas at Pub Quiz (one of our teams won!), nice and geeky, on Unicode and the text replacement plugin. Oddly, hyphenated isn’t able to reproduce the wide character bug that has been reported, and I am unable to find the report. Ah-well, such is life.

This is rather interesting, apparently they have software now that approaches translating by learning from the efforts of other translators. “Software learns to translate by reading up” talks about this development. This sort of learn from experience approach works exceptionally well at recognizing spam, which I realize is not quite related, but it is the same sort of language recognition problem that the traditional hard coded rule sets have been failing at. It will be interesting to see how well this sort of thing works.

Michelle Malkin has a good run down of the No Child Left Behind Act in “The Revolt Against No Child Left Behind.” This bill is being challenged in all sorts of ways, which I think is good, as I do not like the idea of the Federal Government meddling with our schools and our children’s education. Local control is far better, with local control you can occasionally get good things going, as for instance somewhere in southern Virginia the kids are being bussed to the local churches for religion classes during the school day. Can you imagine a federal program doing that? In this era of “separation of Church and State”?