word of the day, via a comment on http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ : 'A skeuomorph /ˈskjuːəmɔrf/ skew-ə-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines'

a good intro from Bruce Eckel. We need a good excuse to deploy some Scala ;)

'We are proud to announce the free and open-source Accentuate.us, a new method of input for over 100 languages that uses statistical reasoning so that users can type effortlessly in plain ASCII while ultimately producing accurate text. This allows Vietnamese users, for example, to simply type “Moi nguoi deu co quyen tu do ngon luan va bay to quan diem,” which will be automatically corrected to “Mọi người đều có quyền tự do ngôn luận và bầy tỏ quan điểm” after Accentuation. To date, we support four clients: Mozilla Firefox, Perl, Python, and Vim, with more to be added shortly.' cool