Bringing Up an EC2 Instance (Movie)

     

I use Amazon’s S3 quite a bit and I really like it. I’ve also been very curious about using Amazon’s EC2 - their cloud computing product. If you’ve never heard of it, what EC2 allows you to do is bring up images of computers into a big network of processing power and bandwidth. It’s like you have a whole box under your control, but … there is no box. It’s like VMWare for servers.

Hidden Keys on the iPhone

     

You may already know when you are filling in a URL with the iPhone if you hold down the .com button for a few seconds you are offered selections of .net and .org, but you might not know other keys do the extra-bit-on-hold too. I was just testing out the next version of my XiaoCiDian iPhone application and found that other keys offer other options when you hold them down. Mostly vowels and and a few punctuation key.

Frequently Asked Question about Chinese on the iPhone

     

I’ve been lucky enough to get quite a few emails asking about how Chinese input works on the iPhone 2.0 software. I have received several emails from people with jailbroken 1.4 phones that want to upgrade to 2.0, but want to know how Chinese input works before going to the trouble of upgrading. Most of the emails were referring to the post with the movie showing Chinese input on the iPhone, but some parts in the movie were a bit unclear.

Mac OS X Regex Widget Update 1.7

     

(RegexWidget is a Mac OS X dashboard regular expression testing widget) Another small update to the Regex Widget. A bug reported by Niels Castle led to a new feature and an, arguable, bug fix. The new feature is Multiline support. When you tick the multiline check box it allows the “beginning of line” (^) and “end of line” ($) parts of a regex to work. See the screen shot for an example:

XBox Controller as a SNES Controller

     

If you are into playing emulated Super Nintendo games on your Mac OS X laptop, but find the keyboard awkward to use, and have a spare Xbox controller, and a spare USB cord laying around … have I got a deal for you. (I should preface this with using game emulators and and game ROMS is, sadly, of questionable legality) Short and sweet: it seems XBox controllers (non 360) use USB to do their magic, so modifying an XBox controller to use with your computer is very simple.

Printing Labels on Mac

     

How to print address labels on Mac from Address book, and any other kind of consumer Avery stock. View on YouTube

Chinese Learner Social Network, Pinyin Sound Board, and Flex

     

My Chinese teacher’s semester is coming up, and a request he often gets in class is to have a way for people to practice correctly. It’s difficult to know if you are pronouncing something correctly, and if you practice the wrong way too much it tends to be hard to undo. Depending on how you go about learning Chinese (Mandarin), you’ll probably start with how to pronounce pÄ«nyÄ«n (the romanization of Mandarin.

Lookup Chinese Characters by Character

     

One hard part about learning Chinese is looking up new characters in a dictionary. If you find the character online, it’s not that hard. You just copy and paste it into a dictionary like dict.cn, and you have your answer. If you come across a new character in printed form, however, it’s not quite as easy. You have to know (or be able to deuced) the main radical, stroke, and count and then look it up in a paper dictionary (which is often a three step process).

Testing Browser Resolutions in Safari (Scriptlets)

     

I needed to test a couple different sites in different resolutions, and I couldn’t find a simple way to get Safari to resize to “standard” formats (1024x768, 800x600, etc). I found this post on MacOSX Hints about how to use scriptlets to make Safari go full screen, and decided to expanded upon it to solve my problem. Here are the scriptlets: 640x480 800x600 1024x768 Full Screen Custom To install them just drag them to the Safari bookmark bar (as seen in the shot below).

Trying to Video Chat between Mac and Windows?

     

Amazingly, everyone in my family now uses Macintoshes. Doing video chats with them is obviously simple - just fire up iChat and off we go. In general, I only video chat with my family. One of my Chinese teachers, however, had the idea that we should try video chatting in Chinese to help me get some practice. (For the curious, I am having trouble understanding Chinese. I can hear the sounds, I know I know the sounds, but they are not forming any meaning in my brain.