Scanners

Scanning is one of those places where confusion reigns and there is essentially no good open-source software to be found. XSane is the closest the open-source world has come, and it's not very Windows-compatible.

So it might be a reasonable idea to investigate this as a possible relatively simple target UI application.

Anyway, SANE is the Linux project for scanner drivers. There is no Windows support.

Comparative literate programming

Now here is an article that is bang-on the kind of stuff I want to write: a comparison of JavaScript typing completion code with a newer, cleaner, Clojure one that is literately woven from the article itself. This is transformational exegesis, or at least a first stab in its direction. (The jQuery code isn't actually quoted all that much.)

BONES Scheme

A Scheme-to-assembly compiler for all your bare-bones Scheme needs. It's a little stripped-down for performance (some error checking omitted, and so on).

Marpa, German, and ParZu, oh my!

I spent most of May working through my old natural-language tokenizer, adding a vocabulary-driven lexer/lexicon for German, all in preparation for undertaking a Marpa-based German parser. That's looking halfway decent at this point (except I need to do much better stemming), and then I decided to do a general search on German parsers and found ParZu.

The unusual thing about ParZu, among parsers especially, is that it's fully open source. That is, it has a free license, not a free-for-academics-only license - and it's hosted on GitHub. Also, I can try it online. So I fed it some more-or-less hairy sentences from my current translation in progress - and it parsed them perfectly.

So here's the thing. I kind of want to do my own work and come to terms with the hairiness of things myself. And then on the other hand, parsing German by any means would allow me to jump ahead and maybe start doing translation-related tasks directly....

It's a dilemma.

Ceylon

Ceylon (I keep wanting to type "Cylon") is a language that compiles to the Java VM, node.js, or browser JavaScript engines - which is inherently cool.

But the thing I like best is the declarative tree structure syntax - that is the kind of expressiveness I like!