While I am trying to decide what my next computer purchase will be, I’ve been using my fall back computer – my ASUS EEEPC netbook running Ubuntu 9.04. Despite some of the hiccups I’ve wrote about, I am finding it quite usable.

I can’t do large amounts of coding on the netbook due to the screen size (7in) and the small keyboard, but it’s just fine for doing some daily news browsing, writing blog entries, or some quick server fixes via SSH.

The Chinese input – using Smart Common Input Method (SCIM) – is quite nice as well; which brings me to the point of this entry.

I am using Emacs 22 (GTK) for blogging, and I discovered that it doesn’t support SCIM. It uses its own internal input method to allow for Chinese input. I did a bit of eye rolling over having to learn and setup another input method. I wanted Chinese input to work well because I try to update my Chinese blog once a week (for learning and practice).

After a bit of digging, I found this wonderful script by IRIE Shinsuke that makes Emacs 22 and Emacs 23 use SCIM for input. The page is in Japanese, but the README file in the download is in English.

The Simplified Chinese version works very well. If you use Emacs and want to use SCIM for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, or Japanese input, I highly recommend it.

Xiao CiDian is a searchable Chinese dictionary with wild card tone support.

The desktop version has been available for a while. There is a Mac OS X dictionary plugin, and an Adobe Air version. You can download either of those on the 小词典 home page.

However, if you don’t use Mac, or you can’t / wont use Air, then it’s likely been difficult to use 小词典. This web version should work on any device with a decent browser.

Here is a movie showing its usage (and showing a few other really nice online Chinese dictionaries)

Chrome has a neat feature that lets you setup other search engines and assign keywords to them. Using this feature, you can have Chrome search the dictionary when you type a keyword into the search bar – I use xcd.

You can set this up by doing the following:

1. Go into Chrome’s preferences screen, and click the Manage button next to the Default search pull down

1. Click the + button to add a new search engine, and then add:

Name: 小词典

Keyword: xcd

URL: http://cn.robrohan.com/search?q=%s

1. At anytime in the URL bar, type xcd, press tab, and then search away!

While passing the HSK Basic would be a big boost for me, in the grand scheme of things passing the basic test means one simply has a solid base to really begin learning Mandarin. For example, to pass the Basic test you only have to know somewhere between 800 to 1000 characters – for perspective you need to know about 3,500 to read a newspaper. So passing the basic tests really means “you are ready to begin learning”.

Since my personal Mandarin focus for this year is going to be on the test, I’ve updated my Mandarin word of the day service to only send out HSK level 1 words. My apologies to any (of the many) subscribers that are past that level, but I don’t currently have the resources to make multiple feeds for separate levels.

I’ve also put together a few PagePacker books for studying on the go. If you are going to take the HSK Basic (Elementary), you might find them useful:

• HSK 1 Book 1.pdf
• HSK 1 Book 2.pdf
• HSK 1 Book 3.pdf
• HSK 1 Book 4.pdf
• HSK 1 Book 5.pdf
• HSK 1 Book 6.pdf
• HSK 1 Book 7.pdf

They are great to keep in your pocket, and then whip out whenever you have some free time to study.

If you’ve never used PagePacker before this is how you fold the printed pages to make them into little books:

iFlash

iFlash is a Flash card program. I’ve been using iFlash for quite a while. I’ve had a long time with it, and it is by far my favorite flash card program of all time ever (sorry to steal some Apple marketing there).

My two favorite features of iFlash are the multi sided flash cards, and the iPhone / iPod syncing ability.

iFlash can export to any iPod with disk access turned on, or it can sync with the free iFlash iPhone / iPod Touch app.

The older iPod syncing format is less than stellar, but the newer iPhone / iPod Touch is fantastic. It is difficult to see, but here is a picture of what the flash cards look like on an iPod nano. It basically looks like one large text file – it will do in a pinch.

However, on the iPhone / iPod Touch it is perfect for studying Chinese. This is what I do most days on the train ride to work:

(That video was filmed with the iPod nano by the way)

The multi side cards are a perfect fit when studying Mandarin / Chinese. When I am studying Mandarin there are at least 3 things I need to know: the simplified characters, the hanyu pinyin, and the meaning. If you are a serious learner, you can have need for 4 or 5 sides if you add in traditional characters and tongyong pinyin. iFlash delivers here by letting you have as many sides as you want:

Additionally, cards can have sounds or pictures on them (I have not tried this so I don’t know if they sync with the iPhone / iPod Touch)

And the last feature of iFlash that I like is the sharing of decks. iFlash has a built in system to share your decks and download other peoples decks. It saves hours of typing and can get you studying a subject in seconds.

iFlash is, in my opinion, priced perfectly. It is priced at USD$14.95 and the iPhone / iPod Touch reader is free of charge (it’s read only and you need to have the desktop application). It is a fair price for a stable, easy to use, well done application.

Cram

At first glance, I thought Cram and iFlash were going to be competitors, and this was going to be an iFlash vs Cram post. However, Cram is filling a different niche than iFlash – Cram helps you prepare for tests.

Cram has the ability to do flash card like studying. While it is limited to only two sides, two sides in general is all most subjects require. This is what the feature looks like while studying:

Additionally, you can attach sound files and images to the cards.

In my opinion, where Cram’s major benefit comes in is with practice tests. Again, when it comes to studying Mandarin it falls down a bit, but for the majority of subjects it seems very useful. For example in the following shot you’ll see a question and choices. Since the question is only one syllable the correct answer can only be B or C.

The possible answers appear to be chosen from all the other correct answers at random, and in the case of Chinese vocabulary that doesn’t quite work. However, it works very well for things like geography, science, or history. For example:

Cram also has access to two deck sharing services – and there are tons of decks. An amazing number of subjects from the SAT to Astronomy to Physics to Social Studies. The only thing I couldn’t find was zoology which would have ended that last sentence nicely.

Cram also gives you a score at the end of your test, and tracks your progress over time.

You can also link Cram with your twitter account to post your test scores. I thought that was an interesting touch that would be fun to use in study groups.

Like iFlash, Cram has an iPhone / iPod Touch application. However it is currently USD$4.99 and I didn’t get free access to that. Judging by the screenshots on the cram website it looks to be a useful mobile application though. On top of the iPhone app, Cram also supports the Blackberry.

For me, not being in school, I don’t find Cram as useful as I see it’s potential. If you are in school and you take a lot of multiple choice tests, or are studying for the SATs or something similar, Cram might be just what you are after. If I had Cram in biology, I might have done quite a bit better than I did.

As a consumer, the only other thing about Cram is I personally think the price is a bit high. It is currently USD$29.99, and to get the iPhone app is another USD$4.99. Price is in the eye of the beholder though, so if you are cramming for the SATs and need something to test yourself with, that might be a reasonable price to you.

(As a developer, I think Cram needs a better icon set, and a bit of UI polish; however functionally it is right on and absolutely usable.)

My estimate for being somewhat decent at Mandarin is 5 to 10 years – from now – at my current study rate.

Anyway, one thing I find very helpful is using Chinese media. I love to watch Mandarin movies and TV shows, but most of all I like listening to Chinese talk shows on the commute to work.

I have a healthy selection of Mandarin podcasts I sometimes sync onto my iPhone. Podcasts include, but are not limited to: iMandarinpod.com and PopupChinese. I used to listen to ChinesePod, but they went to a more aggressive charging model, and it doesn’t suite me; however, they have really good content so I still recommend them.

Podcasts are great, but syncing stuff to my iPhone is bit of a hassle. A hassle compared simply turning on a radio or TV anyway. Additionally, here in Australia, bandwidth is expensive and it’s capped – nothing on the internet from my point of view is “free” (Sorry Rupert).

So I set out to find a way to listen to Mandarin content anytime I wanted, without eating into my precious bandwidth.

Looking though a Chinese newspaper – yeah a real newspaper – I found an ad for the 2CR China Radio Network (澳洲中文⋯⋯什么什么⋯⋯电台). It’s a radio station that broadcasts 24 hours a day all in Mandarin.

The catch is, the station is on a non AM / FM frequency so you have to buy a special radio to listen to the broadcasts. It’s a pretty cool hack and it gets the job done. It operates in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and it’s 24 hour non stop 汉语 (and some Cantonese) on three different channels.

I found these fun little hobby things called CubeeCraft. They make great desk toys, they are relaxing to build, and they are cheap to make – you just need a printer and some time.

I started making a few, then a few more, and then I thought it would be cool to make one of everyone I know. But it dawned on me that I am not artistic in the slightest.

However, at WebDU 2009 I got a cool little animated head that looks similar to the CubeeCraft style so I decided to make a commemorative WebDU 2009 Rob Rohan Action Figure (my narcissism knows no bounds does it). Since I can’t do everyone else, might as well do myself eh?

For reference, here is my WebDU head:

And here is a photo from the iPhone Web App talk:

Here is my Action figure in all its glory:

However, that didn’t occupy enough of my time so I decided to try to film a commercial in order to entice you into buying my Action figure (which, of course, is not really for sale).

Anyway, so here is the commercial.

Man, I am pathetic.

It was interesting trying to get the blue screen to work (I don’t have iMovie 09 so I couldn’t use that feature). In the end it worked ok.

If for some crazy reason you do want the Rob Rohan WebDU 2009 Commemorative Action Figure, you can download it by clicking the image below – some assembly required.

If you still have time to burn, you can watch some clips of the after filming party (which was really me testing out all the parts to see if I could make the commercial).

I should also probably mention that the presentation and sample code can from the talk are available here, and the audio for the talk can be downloaded here. The feed to all the WebDU 2009 sessions is here.

The new version now has a preference screen where you can toggle the following:

• Search by, and display simplified or traditional characters

• The display of the HSK level

• Have the application check for updates every day or every 5 days

• Couple minor search bugs and a progress bar

Here is a shot of the new preference screen:

If you have patience, you should get the update automatically in about five days. Or if you’re excited about getting the new bits now you can upgrade manually by clicking the install badge on the xiaocidian.com web site.

Have fun

I think in the long run this is going to be a boon for designers. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a designer get bummed over the “web safe font” selection. And for the most part, font embeding actually works.

First a word of warning: in case you didn’t know embedding fonts apparently has some legal issues associated with it. I think the laws differ between using a font in a graphic and embedding a font in a web page. Read up on it if you are going to do this, and be sure to respect people’s copyrights.

Basics

The basics couldn’t be easier. Just create a font face rule in your style sheet and reference a true type font that is accessible to the page.

@font-face {
    font-family: my-font;
    src: url(crazy_font.ttf);
}

Then just use the font as you would any font family:

...
div#bar_top {
    font-family: my-font, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    width: 980px; 
    height: 80px;
...

That’s it. However, there is a bit of a problem here. Fonts are often times very large – like megabytes large. In my case, I was doing a Chinese font and the font was 15.3 MB. A web page of 15.9 MB is not going to work very well, neither will a 6.6 MB one. So to use a font in any practical way we need to create a subset of the font.

Creating a font Subset

(Again, make sure you have the rights to the font…)

My investigation with this was to make a subset of a Chinese font, and that test did not work. I had very strange results. I don’t know if current support for non-English languages with the tools I am about to talk about is lacking, or I did it wrong, or what. However, I want to preface with with: this works for English, but I could not get this to work with Chinese. On to it.

What we need to do is find a way to limit the character set to just the letters we need. Perhaps we can have only the headings be in a special font, or maybe just the first capital letter of a paragraph. At the worst, you’ll probably want to limit the set to A-Z, maybe both cases. Whatever you do, you’ll want the smallest number of letters and characters possible.

Once you’ve got that sorted, you’ll need a tool to take a font and make a new true type font with a limited set of characters. The simplest tool I found was font-optimizer.

Font optimizer is written in Perl, and should run on Mac and Linux pretty easily. I personally do not like Perl, but I got it working without much trouble on my Mac. I had to use “cpan” to install “Digest::SHA”… yeah, I know. Google it. You can get it to work.

The end result of font-optimzer is an application that gives you the following command:

Using the –chars= parameter, you can limit the characters in the outputfile.ttf. Awesome tool. If you want to try font-optimzer without messing with setting it up, here is a web version that is limited to known open source fonts (via webfont.info). Might not be too useful, but you can get the idea.

Need a ttf for a ttf

I had no idea there were so many types of font files. It’s quite a mess out there, and if you start playing with fonts one tool you’ll find invaluable is Font Forge. It runs on all OSs, and can open almost any type of font. It may not look very polished, but it’s got it where it counts. To save something to a ttf, select “Generate Font”.

If you are just in the Mac world, dfont was the other major font I ran into aside from ttf. There is a nice, simple dfont to ttf application called DfontSplitter that worked well for me.

Putting it all together

Like I said, I was going for a smaller set of Chinese characters in a ttf, but couldn’t pull that off. However, to show you this does work here is a quick step by step on embedding a font subset using English vowels.

(I don’t own the copyright to this font which is why these are all photos and not a live examples)

• Find a font, grab the location to the ttf file

• Run it through font-optimizer

• Be happy with the font size reduction (however, this particular font wasn’t that big to start out with)

• Embed it using CSS, and apply it to the page

• Enjoy your odd looking page with all the vowels in a new font… and sometimes y.

The Air version has the same features as the iPhone version had – the most useful being the “pinyin fuzzy search”.

Pinyin fuzzy search lets you search by pinyin when you are unsure of the tone, or can only hear or remember part of a word.

After you install the application, click the help button in the application for more information.

The Air version also has a few features the iPhone version didn’t. First, the HSK level of the word appears on both the result screen and also on the detail screen (a feature that was going to be added to the iPhone version). Second, since this runs on the desktop, copy and paste work from the word detail page. And lastly, the application works on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

You can download it from the xiaocidian.com web site by clicking on the install badge on the right side of the page, and you can read more about the application here. Have fun!