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Starting from scratch, one can reach over 20 words per minute solid copy in a matter of months, with only, say, an hour of regular training every day. 20 wpm isn't considered particularly fast amongst morse code operator: the EHSC for example requires its members to copy 60 wpm for 30 minutes. While this is at the extreme end of the spectrum, 20 wpm is attainable by anybody with a little patience and time.

Go here and try it out yourself, over the internet. You'll see 20 wpm is waaay faster than any SMS messaging.

Ask and ye shall... anyways I believe this be what ye be needing. Sorry about the pirate talk.

The article mentions XUL (XML user-interface language), is that anything like Mozilla's XUL? Mozilla Foundation seems to be quite protective of its acronyms...

it's a URL encoded in a 2D, non-proprietary format. It's also a plus that it's not locked up in some bullshit like the CueCat.

The "Cues" (DigitalConvergence's special barcodes) were just regular CODE128 barcodes with the sync bars removed, so only the CueCat could read them. Other than that, perfectly standard. What's more, the CueCat could read just about any 1D barcode out there, which made it very interesting for a free toy.

The "encryption" used by the CueCat to send codes to the computer's PS/2 port was just XOR and BASE64 encoding. Not much of an encryption really.

The big difference with this is that the Cues were essentially links to entries in Digitalconvergence's database (which itself was just the UPC database + a bunch of special products from companies they partenered with, like RadioShack) so that they could sit between your scans and the information to collect marketting data. This on the other end seems to just be barcode-encoded URLs.

More info on the CueCat here.

Just wait till NYT find out about this , then they'll go real bonker: imagine that, Morse code sub-channels on IRC, probably for 3v1l spies and terrorists or something!

Soon to come: an internet morse code interface for the internet C64 BBS systems, for those of us who really think those 40 columns by 25 lines and 16 colors are a disgraceful novelty item, not worthy of true purists!!

It caters to their specific, specialized desire

I have time to implement or improve things by request, to fit someone's wish almost to a tee (meaning, I don't have to make compromises)

The project is so low-bandwidth and simple that I can make it evolve exactly like I, and the few users, want, at the pace I want

So, while big projects with wide audiences are good, small (and also very small) ones with a very small audience have their place too. That's what makes open-source / free software work, because Microsoft and the likes don't have time or money for smaller projects, and big generic ones often don't do what people want.

73 de F8EJF

An open-source social protocol already exists... not a site, but an XML protocol for marking links as having a social significance. The recently announced Nvu supports links with XFN information. I would love to see if this network supports XFN, so that it could tie into other XFN-compliant networks and sites.

Obviously, morse code operators have had ways of getting around using 'at' signs for almost two hundred years

Yes but you're missing the point : at the pace international Morse code is updated, we'll be able to do decent Morse ASCII art in less than 185 years!

By the way, and more seriously, people who do Morse code didn't wait for the ARRL to okay the use of this or that sign : a full international Morse code set with almost all ASCII signs, as well as regional sets, such as Russian and Japanese, have been around for quite some time now.

Check out CWirc or MorseAll to see what those unofficial extended Morse symbols are. Of course, they exist, but whether they're in use or not is another matter.

boo ya! I knew I made the right choice opening the article instead of going for first post! HA HA I can see all the pretty pictures, I WIN IT!

ps the admin is pcoupard at easyconnect.fr, so send him money to buy a bigger webserver. Or if you just want to mock the french.

And more importantly, the link to download the driver for the monitor is http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/om.the/web/duracell _cpumon/download/duracell_cpumon-0.0.1.tar.gz, which of course will already be slashdotted by the time you click on it.

Hi there; I am Daniel Glazman, the lead engineer on Nvu project. The only reason why the source is not here _today_ is because we are totally overloaded. We got, in the last weeks, a so increasing number of requests for a preview version that we wanted/needed FIRST OF ALL to address that request. Hey, if we release nothing, /.ers say it's a fake project and when we release something, I read complaints ;-)

More seriously, we're only humans and we gave higher priority to the test package, just because much more people care about that... We hope to be able to release the source by the end of this week.

More info about the missing Windows dlls or linux libs is available from my blog. Thanks.

First of all, firebird 0.8 will have a "nice installer".

Secondly, what's so great about chatzilla? I always thought it was woefully underfeatured next to the standalone irc clients.

And finally, the standalone composer is going to be called nvu, it's being developed by composer developer daniel glazman and paid for by lindows (see, lindows can do something good after all). Be patient, it will come, and it will rock (nvu is going to have lots of cool new features: integrated css design and editing, visual table editing, better support for fonts and text sizes, ...).

here's the lead developer. it will have to be a lot more standards compliant than the current html 4 version for me waste time downloading and installing and using.

Nvu *is* Mozilla Composer. See here.

If you want some sort of preview release, try the Mozilla Standalone Composer. It's a couple weeks old, and released by the same person who's now head of the Nvu project.

Hmm, Mozilla (standalone) Composer and Composer++ is nice.

I guess the editing on the server thing might be the thing missing. Don't you have to have a server side component to do it right?

FYI the second screenshot looks just like the standard Mozilla Composer "Publish Settings" screen. Of course Nvu's lead developer Daniel Glazman is the Module owner of Mozilla Composer (see his CV for details. For those who are interested NOW, just download a copy of Mozilla 1.5 and try out the much improved Composer. Hopefully we can see more improvement in Nvu and Composer with Lindows' sponsorship.

Lindows is paying Daniel Glazman to develop composer into a more fully developed HTML authoring tool. You can find prerelease versions of composer++ here.

The 12-digit bar code that's used across the United States was introduced in the 1970s, and the retail industry is close to running out of new combinations.

UPC-A barcodes are 12 digit long. There are many many other types of barcodes, including 2D barcodes that can hold up to 1K of data on them. They just have to pick another type of barcode, like CODE128, for consumer products and declare it the new standard. No need for revolutionary changes here.

Look in the SUPPORTED_BARCODES file in the cuecat driver archive to see how many 1D barcode types already exist.

Here is the link to Tim Tom the winner of the student Animation catagory.

tim tom

(No affiliation, I just stumbled across the link.)

-Jason