Server Backup with Amazon S3 (Howto)

     

I’ve been interested in using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for server backups, but I couldn’t find a simple, straight forward howto. This is a walk though on one way to setup a Unix server to automatically backup data to Amazon S3. I guess I should start out with what Amazon S3 is I suppose… It’s a service that you can use to store reams of data, offsite, online, accessible anytime for a decent price.

tudou.com : Chinese YouTube

     

If you are having trouble finding Chinese content to practice listening with, I found a neat site called tudou.com (土豆 - tÇ”dòu - which, as far as I can tell, means “potato”). It’s basically a Chinese version of youtube, but it looks a lot nicer. When you watch a movie, the layout simulates a theater. I find that a nice touch. And just setting the background to black instead of “youtube white” makes quite a bit of difference in the experience.

Typing Pinyin on Windows Part ]|[ - Capital Letter Tones

     

One of my Chinese teachers is using my windows pinyin keyboard layout, and stumbled upon a problem. It seem that sometimes capital letters need tone marks too. For example, country names. Éguo (俄国, Russia) for example. It is rare in practice, but comes up quite often for teachers doing geography lessons. I did a quick update to the layout to allow tone marks on capital letters. I’ve also heard reports that ctrl+alt+u doesn’t always create a u.

Typing Simplified Chinese on Mac

     

(without installing any 3rd party software) Chinese on Mac

Mac OS X WebArchive Extractor Utility

     

The other day I wanted to use TextEdit to make simple web pages for documentation purposes. I actually didn’t really care what application I used, just one that was more word processor-ish than a coding tool. TextEdit did most of what I needed by saving to HTML, but the kicker was I wanted to have images in the document. TextEdit can save HTML with images in a file format called WebArchive, but in order to put the files on a web server for the world to view, the files need to be extracted from that format into a normal directory structure.

Three Column Layout in Mac Mail

     

If you prefer the Outlook-ish 3 pane layout for mail, you can install this mail plugin to get the three column layout. I’ve never used a 3 column layout before, but some of my friends suggested I give it a shot. This is what mail looks like after you install the plugin: If you have a smaller screen, the layout might not work for you. On my 15" PowerBook, however, it works fine.

Enable Debug Mode on Safari (Windows) + Error

     

If you’ve downloaded the Safari build on Windows, and you want access to the very helpful debug Develop menu (the javascript console, DOM viewer, etc), Do the following: Open %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist (Or open C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\Defaults.plist) Add the key / value: ... <key>IncludeDebugMenu</key> <true/> ... for reference on Mac it’s: $ defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1 From the terminal. In both cases you’ll have to restart Safari if you already have it open.

Create Chinese Keyboard

     

I found some stickers on ebay that let you turn a normal keyboard into a Chinese keyboard. My intention was to learn the Wubi layout, but as it turns out these stickers are for a traditional character input. While they make my laptop look totally pimped out, I don’t think they are useful to someone learning Mandarin / simplified. My teacher says the pÄ«nyÄ«n system is usually the best input system for English beginners anyway.

Setting Mac Mail to UTF-8

     

Unfortunately, what follows is for outgoing messages only. I was incorrect. I haven’t found a way to properly change the reading setting from Automatic to UTF-8 I don’t think this is a bug per se, but it is a bit unintuitive. For practice I’ve started reading / writing emails in Chinese. The text encoding on Mac Mail by default is set to “Automatic”, and it never seems to guess UTF-8 right.

Typing Pinyin on Windows Part ][ (a better way)

     

There was some room for improvement with the last posting I did on how to setup Windows to type pīnyīn. There were four problems with the last keyboard layout installer I found (three if you are in the UK). First, the original keyboard layout was UK based. If you were using a US keyboard, when you switched to the pīnyīn layout you gained the pīnyīn tone marks, but some keys switched and you lost other keys (for example you would lose the dollar sign and gain the British pound sign).