I was very fortunate to hear Pinetop Perkins at Antone’s. I was planning on going to his concert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in September. But Antone’s is a small intimate blues club. (photoes by by Jack O’Diamonds). For those who don’t know Pinetop Perkins, he is a 95 yr. old blues piano player. He originally was a blues guitarist but early in his career he injured his arm due to a fight with a choir girl and he switched to piano. His official website lists him as “one of the last great Mississippi bluesmen”, but others consider him part of the Chicago school of blues. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Ka and Stomp out loud – Las Vegas
I was in Vegas for a conference and went to both Cirque du Soleil’s Ka, and Stomp Out Loud. My tour book said something like the following. In a city which is all about technology, Ka is the most technological of all the Vegas shows. The show has a multiple part stage. Each part can raise and lower, be moved forward and backward, and tilt. At one moment the performers are on a flat stage, the stage starts tilting and it is as if the performers are climbing a hill. The stage finally is vertical and the performers are twirling acrobatically on a face of a cliff. It’s mind blowing and Vegas all the way. The last time I went to Las Vegas I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere. Ka is darker and less overtly athletic. The other show I went to this time was Stomp Out Loud at Planet Hollywood. This one was decidedly low tech making use of brooms, newspaper, barrels among other things to make rhythms. Pretty cool.
Writing a Flex Application – part 2
I finally have a reasonable demo of this application. Now I need to do a thorough job of testing and debugging. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is a chat client where two people can be messaging in different languages and the chat system translates from one to the other. One feature of the chat client is shown in the screenshot above. If you mouse over any translation, you can see alternative translations. So if one translation engine did a poor job in translating a chat message, you can look at translations from other engines. We hope that this feature, as well as several others, will improve the usefulness of this chat system.
The backend of the system is in PHP connected to a MySQL database server. I am using Flex for the client side component.
As I mentioned in my previous post, this system will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of multilingual instant messaging systems and is a continuation of Bill Ogden’s work on Computer mediated multilingual translation.