[15:46] <cong06> hey ebel!
[15:47] <ebel> hello!
[15:47] <ebel> How are you?
[15:47] <cong06> I'm good!
[15:48] <cong06> you?
[15:49] <ebel> good good
[15:49] <ebel> playing with open source machine translation, apertium
[15:49] <ebel> http://www.apertium.org/
[15:49] <ebel> You can translate things offline on the command line http://www.technomancy.org/language/apertium-command-line/
[16:25] <cong06> I'm not sure how I feel about the online interface...
[16:25] <cong06> oh, I guess the commandline interface is quite a bit better though
[16:27] <cong06> they don't have swahili...
[16:35] <ebel> yeah.
[16:35] <ebel> it's open source, so you have to make your own
[16:36] <ebel> it's from a spanish university, so it has loads of spanish languages
[16:36] <ebel> It doesn't have irish, our native language either.
[16:40] <cong06> well, I'm tempted to start one for swahili, but I'm not sure I trust my swahili...
[16:47] <ebel> :D
[16:47] <ebel> hehehe
[16:47] <ebel> you're swahili not so good?
[16:48] <cong06> not really :/
[16:49] <ebel> well, better than nothing...
[16:49] <cong06> yeah
[16:49] <ebel> My irish is also terrible. I'm going to try to work on the irish one
[16:51] <ebel> I'm a big believer in 'worse is better'
[16:51] <cong06> than nothing?
[16:51] <ebel> http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
[16:51] <ebel> cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
[16:51] <ebel> most 'it must be perfect' systems never deliver and are always under development
[16:52] <ebel> even linux was like that
[16:52] <ebel> it was initially "just for fun" and "nothing big and professional"
[16:55] <cong06> I'm still reading the article (super slowly)
[16:55] <cong06> but are you talking about this?: http://xkcd.com/844/
[16:57] <ebel> hehehe
[17:00] <cong06> ok. that makes sense.
[17:00] <cong06> this would be a more "open source" alternative
[17:01] <cong06> where the code needs to be readable so others can more easily edit it
[17:05] <ebel> well not really.
[17:05] <ebel> In closed source software, they still need to have readable code.
[17:05] <ebel> Since they have to maintain it.
[17:05] <cong06> yeah. true.
[17:05] <ebel> However I believe that if you have something that's half working, there will be more volunteers,
[17:06] <cong06> oooh, than if you have something that doesn't work at all
[17:06] <ebel> if you're paying people, you can tell them to work on the code/translation, so it doesn't matter if they aren't enthusiastic
[17:06] <cong06> because some user wants to make it perfect
[17:06] <ebel> e.g., if there was a half done swahili translation, but there was a few mistakes, you'd probably be much more likely to submit a few patches to make it work.
[17:07] <cong06> that's true. half the reason is I'm too lazy to figure out how to start the project >.<
[17:08] <ebel> hehehe
[17:08] <ebel> yeah apertium has some bad documentation. Lots of hunting around :)
[17:13] <cong06> I'm rather confused by his discussion at the end (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) about C++...
[17:13] <cong06> on one hand he's arguing for worse-is-better using C++ as an example
[17:13] <cong06> on the other he's saying that C++ sucks.