It sounds glamorous, doesn't it? I'm traveling the world, going to some crazy-awesome places and meeting some really cool people. The whole time I'm doing some web development work to pay for some of my expenses like hiking up a volcano, or getting my groove on at a European disco.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. But not very glamorous.

In order to work on the internet - you need an internet connection. Sounds easy, right? Just go to a coffee shop and get you some free access. If only it were that easy.

I have absolutely no problems finding open WiFi access points around the world. Even the tiny little remote towns of Guatemala are bathed in a plethora of WiFi networks. The problem has been getting internet that works. I guess not all countries put a focus a fast and reliable internet access.

I realized that my mood is often determined by how good the internet access is. If it's slow and keeps disconnecting, I'm a little irritable. If it's fast and stable, I'm as happy as a fat kid at McDonalds.

But fast and stable has only happened to me a few times since I started traveling about 2 months ago. It's particularly frustrating when I have to upload several 70MB video files for our video podcast and it uploads at 5 KB/s and then restarts half-way through. Yeah, that's when I really start getting irritable.

So when you find internet that works, you use it. No mater where it is. The photo of me above was taken last night when I was making some changes to HeartSupport. I was sitting in front of a shop in a little town called Coyhaique in Chile. It was late at night, it was freezing, and as people walked by they looked at me like I was a bum... who was using a brand-new MacBook Pro for some reason.

It takes many hours of development time to make a website, but I only get a small window of internet access everyday. So how do I develop around the world?

Thanks to my new MacBook ProAwesomeness, it's easy. I just set up my computer like a server with all the stuff I need like Apache, MySQL, PHP and ModRewrite. Then I edit my /etc/hosts file to make it so that when I type in "http://somedevsite/" it pulls up the site right on my computer without any internet access. How cool is that?

Google came out with a new web browser last week. It's called Google Chrome. A hoard of web developers just rolled their eyes as there is now yet another browser we have to look at to make sure our sites still looks good. It shouldn't be that bad adjusting for Chrome since it uses Webkit like Safari.

What makes Chrome unique? Basically, all Google web apps like Gmail run better in it. There's other cool features too, but they've just released the PC version of Chrome so far so I can't play around with it too much on my Mac. Get us a Mac version, Google!

What will be the next big thing on this internet within the next decade? Many say semantic search will be bigger than social networking and if implemented correctly, it will be.

As a linguist, this kind of thing really interests me. What is it? Basically a replacement for keyword search. Instead of thinking of your search in primitive keywords, you could ask the search engine direct questions and receive direct answers - a much better search.

One of the major hurtles for semantic search is sentence ambiguity.

There is a famous sentence to illustrate such ambiguities. "I saw the man with binoculars." This could mean either, "I saw the man who had binoculars," or "I saw the man by means of binoculars." If a computer could parse and understand the sentence, it would have more than one meaning to choose from. Which one should it choose?

What if each meaning was weighted? When an ambiguous sentence is presented to a human, the human can pretty easily understand the meaning based on context. "Even though he was far away, I got a good look at him. I saw the man with binoculars."

But when a human is presented with an ambiguous sentence out of context, there is still a default meaning that is derived from the sentence which hints at the idea of "weighted semantics". If the human does not assume the default meaning, most will try to clarify the meaning by asking which meaning the speaker meant.

Asking a human to remove ambiguities is the approach that semantic search engine TrueKnowledge has implemented to cope with this hurdle. Obviously there are a lot of data out there to disambiguate, so we've got quite a while to go using this approach, but how much of what you know was taught by a human?

Welcome to the brand-new Difted blog. I guess since I programmed the back-end CMS for the new Difted blog, that means I get to take the liberty of making the first blog post. ;)

I'm SammyK from Lexington, KY. I am doing an internship here through August '08. I am a web-based programmer who has been sitting behind a computer for the past 13 or 14 years. I'm the guy who did all the behind-the-scenes coding (PHP/MySQL/HTML/CSS) for the XXXChurch.com site and HeartSupport site. I know I'm a nerd and am proud to be one thank you very much. :)

I'm not all nerd though, I graduated from the University of Kentucky with a bachelor's degree in Linguistics. Linguistics is basically the study of languages. We look at all different languages in the world (dead ones included) and compare them looking for language universals, studying how they affect a culture and people's view of a certain dialect. It's much more in-depth than just that, but that's a brief synopsis. I am thinking about going to grad school for computational linguistics (basically combining computers and languages... a perfect match for me). My focus would be on semantic search which is the next big thing in the internet world. Believe me, keyword search will soon be a thing of the past.

But before I go off to grad school, I thought it would be a good idea to travel the world. Me and a friend of mine are going to be backpacking all over the world for a full year starting September 15th. We're going to about 20 different countries. Our website, Two Guys Around the World will have photos, HD video, and a map with a dot on it of exactly where were are at all times. It should be pretty awesome.