Aiet Kolkhi - World of Cultures Weblog

Despite being hailed as one of the best encoding tools on Mac, the company behind the project Techspansion has recently announced it was to close its doors forever, discontinuing VisualHub and other encoding products.

Various thank-you threads have been created and some people even asked Tyler, mastermind behind the code, to release the app as open source, ensuring the future development of the project.

Well, you’ll be happy to hear this is exactly what Tyler has done: VisualHub is now known as FilmRedux and it is an open source project ready for anyone to join the development efforts.

As I have happily used Techspansion products for quite some time, I would like to once again thank the developer for all the great work he has done, as well as for sharing the code!

As Rustaveli, 12th century Georgian poet once put it: ”Everything you give away remains yours, and everything you keep is lost forever.”

It has been a while since I last posted here and a lot has been going on around me, especially in my home country Georgia.  Recent war and November 2007 events are a few examples.

A lot has been said about November and virtually every news service in the world has been actively covering the recent war.

I am not going to discuss November events as I still stand under NDA with the television network involved — and there have been lots of blogs about this, like kvacha.com or resistancegeorgia.blogspot.com, the latter making to The New York Times — and besides this blog is not about politics.

The recent war in Georgia is documented at sosgeorgia.org and on thousands of other blogs, sites and news services worldwide.

I think it is time for me to move forward, get back to all the projects I have been being involved in and supporting for so long.  In fact, I have resumed my duties on most of my projects already, adding a couple of new, interesting ones.

So you will be hearing from me here more frequently.

Today I received a call from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty to comment on Internet censorship issues in Georgia. This was news to me, as I have never heard anyone complain about Georgian Internet content being censored by the Government.

There may have been some market monopoly issues, consumers rights abuse, completely neglecting intellectual property and related rights, exposing youth to pornographic content, publicizing private communication records, etc., but declaring Georgia as Internet censor did sound a bit strange.

According to ImediNews.ge, the recent report of Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) states that the governments of Georgia and Kazakhstan hinder the freedom of expression on the Internet, having or intending to impose strict guidelines regulating Internet content. Continue Reading »

I am sooo happy one of my favo[u]rite British actors, Alan Rickman has visited Georgia again, after 27 years.

While most of the people may know him from his roles in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Die Hard, Love Actually and Harry Potter movies (where he wonderfully portrays Severus Snape), he has shown number of great performances on stage, including director Robert Sturua’s Hamlet at the Riverside Studio London and Les Liasions Dangereuses back in 80s, and truly is one of the best British actors today.

At Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Theater today he presented the movie he directed, The Winter Guest starring Emma Thompson and answered questions after the screening.

I was happy to hear him mention that any script sent to his agent will surely find its way to him, encouraging even aspiring directors to send in scripts even when they do not have big budgets and major movie studios behind.

When asked about his ‘bad guy’ characters in Die Hard (and perhaps Harry Potter), he answered that he never portrayed the bad guys, but sometimes he did play guys who wanted something very much :)So if you have not seen his performances, make sure you watch his movies and perhaps go to London to see him perform on stage

Well, lots of people have eagerly been waiting for Steve Jobs keynote for WWDC ‘07, which has finished an hour ago. And finally there are some news

• Apple introduces beta of Safari version 3, which besides OS X, is also available Windows XP . Vista (!) Here is the snapshot shown on Apple website of Safari running on Windows:

  

  Apple also published the the comparison chart stating Safari on Windows is the fastest browser among Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox.Well, I know this has been predicted many times many and years ago, but not may people believed Apple would actually decide to release its browser on Windows. Continue Reading »

It started about two years ago, when Participatory Culture Foundation released the first version of Democracy Player, the player that will soon change the way we watch TV and share videos online.PCF is a small foundation, its members being Nicholas Reville, Tiffiniy Cheng, Nick Nassar, John Lilly and other very talented people who believe in what they do — and know what they do will change the world.To put it simply—Democracy Player is not just a player, it is the whole internet TV platform to watch and share videos and interactive channels, as well as broadcast videos and channels on your own. The possibilities are endless. Continue Reading »

So here come the next interesting projects at the conference.

• Zaza Injia from Dachi & Co. and famous language and IT expert Dr. Levan Chkhaidze announced the electronic version of huge Georgian-English dictionary by Prof. Donald Rayfield, the famous English kartvelologist.
• Dr. Levan Chkhaidze discussed the characteristics of Georgian verb stems and preverbs, yet another project with years of development trying to analyze thousands of Georgian verb forms.
• Rati Skhirtladze, one of the founders of Language Modeling Association, and his team headed by Tedo Uturgaidze, presented beta version of Georgian spellchecker. In 2006 the team was funded by Open Society Georgia Foundation to produce working spellchecker for popular office suites. The spellchecker presented was based on incomplete language model, the list of word stems and paradigms. The beta version includes about 114 Million word forms, Continue Reading »

I addressed the Georgian Chikobava Institute of Linguistics on May 29, at the annual Natural Language Processing conference. The conference has become the annual event at the institute, having all the linguists and language experts as well as other scientists and IT experts present.

I will be writing about the issues I raised later, I just wanted to say a few words about this year’s interesting projects that were presented there.

• Jemal Antidze and Sophio Shengelaia from Tbilisi State University presented a Perl script that can automatically extract the root from Georgian verbs, compare it against 9000 existing roots database and add the new root to a custom dictionary if necessary.

  While this may sound simple, you may not know that a single Georgian verb may have about 20 000 (!) word forms and the method of extracting the root from these forms consists of a complex algorithm based on Georgian verb model.

  The algorithm is crucial for Georgian language model based spellcheckers. Since covering the majority of Georgian word forms in a spellchecking word-list would give us the list of words no less than billions, some spell checking projects prefer to concentrate on language model based method rather than using simple word-lists.

  This algorithm is also important for Georgian-foreign language translation tools, as it will need to analyse Georgian verbs and text in general in order to be able to translate it into other language.I have seen something like that used in IREX Georgian Speller, created by Kakha Gabunia, Merab Babukhadia and other scientists. I have not been able to compare the algorithms though.

I will discuss other interesting projects of the conference in next post.

this is the first post