Site25 Blog

Here’s how I’ve been keeping myself busy since being bound to crutches after knee surgery a few days ago:

• Updated all websites… twice
• Finished planning and creating materials for all classes that don’t start for another two months
• Learned that Chinese Pera-kun now works on Thunderbird 2.0.0.9
• Discovered the fabulous Firefox plugin, Fireinput
• Tried Firefox 3.0, but uninstalled it and stayed with 2.0.0.14 due to plugin issues and overall bugs
• Customized and installed a new theme for both blogs
• Found that my wife’s chair rolls much better than mine
• Made good progress on a research plan

The bad news is I have almost three weeks to go on crutches. Here’s what I plan to do with that time:

• Finish the research plan, then write the abstract
• Complete an application package for a PhD program
• Order transcripts
• Complete application form
• Polish some of the activities for classes next Fall
• Add questions and activities to some media files and readings
• Print out and study some Chinesepod.com lessons
• Check for bad links on ESLweb.net and add activities
• Perhaps promote Site25.net services, but probably won’t get around to it
• Count the days

Fireinput allows you to input Chinese into online forms in Firefox. On Linux (FC8) it seems to work much better than SCIM. It’s lighter, and does a better job at inputing traditional Chinese. 真的不錯!

Search Add-ons :: Firefox Add-ons: Fireinput

I’m happy to find this GTK2 text editor. My first impressions are that it’s a very light yet robust editor. I’ll be using it a lot.

Geany : Home Page

Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features.

My Chinese is lousy, but I do occasionally use it on-line to fill in forms and post comments. I use the SCIM input method on FC8. I used to use gcin, but it’s quite buggy and has fewer options than SCIM. The problem with SCIM is that its pinyin input method is developed primarily for use with simplified characters, as far as I can tell. For example, it does a very good job at guessing and completing text strings (phrases) in simplified, but not very good at all in traditional. I use traditional characters. Because my Chinese is not very good, I need to carefully check what I’ve written. I guess on many characters, and I need to use a tool like dimsum or a dictionary to check them. That’s time consuming. This is particularly true because with SCIM, I end up inputing in simplified just because it’s so much quicker, than converting that text to traditional. PAIN!

There are two excellent plugins for Firefox that have come to my rescue. The first is ChinesePera-kun. It shows pop-up definitions of words and phrases appearing in your browser. Wonderful stuff! The second is Tong Wen Tang, a Firefox plugin that converts characters in your browser between simplified and traditional.

So here’s my solution. I create a web page and save it to my desktop. On that page I create a form, and add a fairly large textarea field. Now, I can enter everything in simplified using SCIM. I can toggle on my ChinesePera-kun to check vocabulary. When I’m happy with everything, I can block it all, right click, and in the Tong Wen Tang menu, choose Input: To Traditional. Done!

I should point out that my speaking and listening is far better than my reading and writing, which is why I have this problem. Those of you who have learned Chinese from textbooks probably won’t have these problems. But, this is a simple and fast method for web-based (or any format) traditional Chinese input when you don’t have a good traditional Chinese input tool. And there really is no very good traditional Chinese input tool for Linux, as far as I can tell. If you know of one, please send it my way.

EDIT 080706: Now that I’ve found Fireinput, this is all unnecessary.

Course: Essential Software

This site lists a good selection of free software that I’ve used for basic computer courses in the past. It lists just about everything I’ve used for courses. But, if I were to teach a similar computer course again, I would probably just direct me students to portableapps.com and have them put the essential software on a stick. It’s no longer necessary to load these packages on a computer lab! Still, this is a good resource.

Another must have Firefox extension?

Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool

This is a handy little Firefox add-on that lets you convert a web page between simplified and traditional characters. It works quickly. The only thing I’m not thrilled about is that it adds a toolbar to my Firefox window that I can’t seem to opt out of, but it’s worth it. Here’s the link:

新同文堂 — OpenFoundry

EDIT 80706: Actually, the Tongwen toolbar can be easily hidden via the View menu in Firefox.

The following link includes straightforward instructions for converting a variety of audio formats using the command line in Linux.

Music File Processing on Linux

The following command works:

Linux.com :: Putting together PDF files

To use Ghostscript to combine PDF files, type something like the following:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

Unless you’re very familiar with Ghostscript, that string of commands won’t mean much to you. Here’s a quick breakdown:

* gs — starts the Ghostscript program

* -dBATCH — once Ghostscript processes the PDF files, it should exit. If you don’t include this option, Ghostscript will just keep running

* -dNOPAUSE — forces Ghostscript to process each page without pausing for user interaction

* -q — stops Ghostscript from displaying messages while it works

* -sDEVICE=pdfwrite — tells Ghostscript to use its built-in PDF writer to process the files

* -sOutputFile=finished.pdf — tells Ghostscript to save the combined PDF file with the name that you specified

I had a problem while trying to configure wordlook.pl, available from http://www.mandarintools.com/worddict.html. I ran the script from the shell and got an error that it couldn’t find the cgi-lib.pl file. I downloaded that from http://cgi-lib.berkeley.edu/, uploaded it to my cgi directory, and everything works fine. The new dictionary is at http://cailab.net/worddict.html. I’d appreciate hearing from you if it doesn’t work for you. You can email me at dan@site25.net.