Not a lot of texts so far, since I have a lot of stuff on paper (yes, I have to transcribe it), and unfinished poems as well…
It’s all in portuguese, but I plan to publish some english-written material as well.
The application that is being used for making these texts available is something that I have done myself: it’s called “Publia”, and it’s still waiting for some free time (and good will) so that I can release it. It’s Python-based, and it supports plain text, HTML and markdown resources.
It’s probably nothing new for our British folks, but “Eloisa to Abelard” is one of the most amazing poems I’ve ever read. Divine, erotic and tragic: a perfect trinity that is fulfilled by this wonderful work by Alexander Pope.
I come, I come! prepare your roseate bow’rs,
Celestial palms, and ever-blooming flow’rs.
Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go,
Where flames refin’d in breasts seraphic glow:
Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay,
And smooth my passage to the realms of day;
See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll,
Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul!
I’ve put up a code snippet that can be used as a shell script, in order to consult the DLPO (portuguese) dictionary. It’s a simple HTML scraping (html5lib + BeautifulSoup) example, but it’s really useful (at least for me).
Example:
mahound@magrathea ~ $ dlpo português
* adj.,
- relativo a Portugal;
- diz-se de uma variedade de trigo-mole;
* do Lat. portucalense
* s. m.,
- indivíduo natural de Portugal;
- indivíduo que tem nacionalidade portuguesa;
- língua falada pelos Portugueses, Brasileiros e todos os povos africanos de língua oficial portuguesa;
He’s doing something similar, using an IRC bot. At first, it fooled me… it looked like a quite literate human on drugs. Then, I started noticing some patterns, and eventually found out. However, I’m still kind of embarrassed about this… my faith on the Turing test has decreased, not because machines are supposedly getting smarter, but rather because i start to believe that the conditions of a hypothetical “Turing test” should be more constrained than previously thought: i.e. the machine should convince the human that he’s talking with a sane and sober human being.
Just added OpenID support to the weblog. I’ve disabled registration, so that everybody that doesn’t still have an account has to go through OpenID in order to login. I’m sick of phony users and spam bots…
