Ed Foster has discovered that it is very difficult to sign out from big companies’ websites. Yes, it is true when staying within the website’s rules. But it is dead easy otherwise. The important thing to remember is that your identity is most of the times stored in the browser cookies. So, if you kill cookies, the session will go away and your identity will go away. The easiest (but most destructive way) is to delete all cookies.

As part of doing a PhD in Computational Linguistics, I need to understand both computers and linguistics. I am fine with computers, but linguistics is not my strong point. Unfortunately, many of the linguistics books and resources are quite dry. So, I was really happy to discover an audio course Story of Human Languagefrom The Teaching Company taught by John McWhorter. It is quite long a covers a lot of material, but - apart from some overly long parts on universal language - it is really interesting and Professor McWhorter is a great presenter.

These are new style language-learning websites that are trying to leverage community and/or new capabilities allowed by the internet: SpanishSense - they have podcasts, PDFs, daily emails and a lot more. This site has been done by the same people who have been doing really successful ChinesePod for several years now. It looks very slick. LiveMocha - they are doing social network style language learning. Others have done it before them, but LiveMocha seems to be a bit stronger on multiple modes of learning than other similar sites.

As part of The Rich Web Experience, Fairmont hotel - where the conference is held - offers free WiFi. You have to enter username/password on the first post-connect page and then it unlocks browsing capabilities. I love WiFi. I have an HP PocketPC that has WiFi built in. I was fully prepared to read my mail, do research and upload photos. Alas, that was not to be! The WiFi protection form that collects the username and password uses javascript to submit the form with the submit button being an image with onClick handler.

I am currently at The Rich Web Experience 2007 conference. It is interesting to compare it to JavaOne conferences I have been to in the past. To start, RWE is much smaller. It is about 400 people as compared to 15 thousands at JavaOne. This obviously makes scheduling logistics and eating arrangements simpler, but there is also a very different feel in the air. It feels that it is much harder to walk around without bumping into speakers and/or other moderately famous web people.