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. I added ctrl+alt+v in addition to ctrl+alt+u to hopefully solve that problem. Both will now create a u. (I have only heard of 2 people having that issue)

(without installing any 3rd party software)

Chinese on Mac

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.

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.

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:

1. Open %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist (Or open C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\Defaults.plist)
2. 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.

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 pīnyīn system is usually the best input system for English beginners anyway.

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. At least not the emails I am getting. They come through garbled. However, when I choose Message > Text Encoding > Unicode (UTF-8) the emails will render fine.

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).

Well, if you think you’re going to be able to use speech recognition to code anytime soon, this video will set you straight.

This guy tries to write a simple perl script using Windows Vista’s new speech recognition. The fact the video is 10 minutes long pretty much sums it up, but you have to check it out. The frustration level and the things it actually types is a crack up. I have a headache from laughing so hard.

I’ve been meaning to write this Eclipse plugin for a while, and yesterday I just pulled an all nighter to get it out. You probably know how it is; sometimes you just have to finish that nagging project. I’ve been wanting to write this post and put it out all day too, but I had to wait till I was done with work.

Finally… so here it is. It’s an Eclipse plugin that lets you post to metaWeblog enabled blogs (I only know for sure it works with WordPress , and while posting does work with BlogCFC, entry listing does not and BlogCFC). It is probably only going to be used by coders as there is no wysiwyg - it can use the Afae editor to do HTML syntax highlighting though (or any HTML editor you assign to edit the *.blog file type).