gottahavacuppamocha

Not for you though. Free Rice is an online game where you test your vocabulary. It’s multiple choice, and for every correct answer you give, the sponsors donate money to buy 10 grains of rice. Now this doesn’t seem like much, but it’s pretty easy to rapidly earn much more. In less than 30 minutes, you can probably earn 1000 grains of rice. I’m guessing that maybe 1000 grains of rice is equivalent to a good (though not substantial) meal for someone.

The program is run by the United Nations and gets money from sponsors who place ads on each page of the game. The game started in October and only a few hundred grains were earned the first day (probably somebody testing it out). Over the past couple of days, it’s pretty well exploded in popularity. It’s a good deed and good for the karma. Normally I don’t like ads or endorsing things, but this is very worthwhile.

Play the game, expand your vocabulary, and feed the hungry. Whoever thought it up must be a genius.

I’ve been reading a bit about rich internet applications, which are net oriented applications that can be run on the desktop, as opposed to a browser. The information I have been looking at is mainly dealing with Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and Mozilla’s XULrunner. Both of these are runtime environments that allow code to be written once then run on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). This is actually what Java was originally intended to do.

Adobe AIR was released as a beta earlier this year and there are already some apps made with it. I downloaded one called Bee, which is supposed to be a place where people can update their Flikr or WordPress blogs. I wasn’t able to get it to work with my site however. I have XML-RPC turned off (it’s a security thing) so that may be why Bee isn’t working, but I am not sure.

XULRunner should be differentiated from Webrunner, which is also a Mozilla project. Webrunner was recently renamed Prism and from what I understand, it is simply a very lightweight browser that is set to only open one page, which might be handy for a bank or an email setup. XULRunner, however, is a runtime environment so people can create actual programs to run on the desktop. The best example I’ve found so far is Songbird. Songbird is a music player that can play local files, but it can also play songs over the net and display web pages. It’s also skinnable, though they call them feathers instead of skins.

I’m not sure how different they are from Java (well, JVM), but my experience with Java applications in the past was that they were slow and didn’t look that great. however, that might have been more of a problem with the application developers rather than Java itself.

Even though I’ve let Giraf/Lingo/whatever languish, I still hope to do something with it, though I am not sure what yet. At first it was going to be a website I developed to be accessible from a mobile, then it was going to be based on MediaWiki. Now, I wonder about AIR or XULRunner. Of course, it would help if I knew what I wanted Giraf to do.

I would like software that has a multilingual dictionary. If the dictionaries are in a standard format, I would like to be able to download the dictionaries so the software can read them. However, I would also like the software to be able to read dictionaries that are posted online. In this case, it would probably be best if the dictionary format was in a text file. I also like the idea of flashcards. I like the idea of people being able to use the software to create their own dictionaries and their own flashcards. I think writing new words down reinforces them in the vocabulary. I like the idea of using the software to display conjugations. It’s hard to decide which aspect is most important. I’ve seen lots of multilingual dictionaries, and even some flashcard type software, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything that displays conjugations, so that’s something else to consider.