Thursday, February 23, 2012

Lively TclTk


Lively-Kernel meets Tcl/Tk?

My latest install of Tcl/Tk 8.5 from Activestate left a link in Windows to Tk demos.  One is named "A Celebration of Rube Goldberg" and should impress Self-as-JavaScript  fans of Sun LivelyKernel or Avocado.

Regardless of the grief in getting Tcl with OO out of 8.6 beta, the demos are a great presentation.  I continue to use Html Viewer 3 (Tcl/Tk's hv3 browser) as a light-weight browser when my laptop's sole-core is over-loaded with a few of today's greedy app's wildly swapping in and out (and no, the worst offender happens not to be from Microsoft.)

Btw, Squeak Smalltalk is working to get their base image down to about 10Mb.  Remember when shared DLL's were to keep us all happy below 640K ?  Gates' Hades, Hades' Gates.

PS: I have added a label/tag for Pharo Smalltalk - now the preferred ST for Seaside?

PPS: here is the Avocado blog: there.



Sunday, February 19, 2012

Gesture Control


What Westerners, Europeans and others may not appreciate is how often native Japanese-speakers use gestures to disambiguate kanji when speaking due to the great number of homonyms in their morae-based language.

Will gesture-control of devices lead to such combined speech+gesture identification?



Monday, February 13, 2012

Katakana Stroke Order & Direction

Animated stroke order and direction at http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/Katakanapro/index.html


Hiragana and Romaji vowels with macrons


Ā ā Ī ī Ū ū Ē ē Ō ō

ん わ や ま は な た さ か あ み ひ に ち し き い
ゆ む ふ ぬ つ す く う
め へ ね て せ け え
お よ も ほ の と そ こ お

ご げ ぐ ぎ が
ぎょ ぎゅ ぎゃ

ぞ ぜ ず じ ざ
じょ じゅ じゃ

ど で づ ぢ だ
ぢょ ぢゅ ぢゃ

ば び ぶ べ ぼ
びょ びゅ びゃ

ぽ ぺ ぷ ぴ ぱ
ぴょ ぴゅ ぴゃ

[vu] ゔ

See:  http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/Hiraganapro/

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Russian Poets wiki

ru.wikipedia.org can be a pain when saving links and when trying to find a poet.

Today, I find Brodsky missing from a list of 20th Century Russian poets (perhaps a Putin fanatic has relegated him to "Soviet" or American or emigré.)

Цвета́ева


http://goo.gl/WBbGA
http://www.stihi-rus.ru/1/Cvetaeva/


Ахма́това

http://goo.gl/CXlKC



Бро́дский

http://goo.gl/QiH6d



Ло́сев

http://goo.gl/jHU0P

Monday, February 6, 2012

sidle, amble


Poets and writers of Fredericton heard a novelist and then a poet describe protagonists who were not equine first "sidle" then "amble" (no, not in dialog.)

Did no one watch "Buck" after "The Horse Whisperer"? Would Robert Redford know the difference?

So long as there are horses on bridle paths in New York's Central Park, writers and poets should know which word is for the gait of a horse before they trot to the podium.

Of course, dialog would be another matter.

Hint: without sideways motion or motion along the side of, say, a bar, there is usually no sideling movement - and then there are horses working under fine horsemanship and moving in cross-steps ... sideways.


HTTPS defeated by Google

More bad news:

https://search.google.com/ is redirecting to http://www.google.ca/ for my own good, naturally ...

But hey,  https://mail.google.com/mail has been over-llooked for now up at the view from the mountain ...

But Google will find a way to defeat your choice to use that HTTPS URL in personal home page links - and it is for your own good, after all.  Google knows best.


HTTPS Google redirects to igoogle as HTTP

One change to tasks on the igoogle page and WHAM! SLAM!

https://www.google.com/ on my home page - MY link - is redirecting to HTTP  google.com igoogle.

From HTTPS ?!?

I go HTTPS to prevent a redirect to google.ca due to my IP being identified through a Canuck router.

Where the hell is the warning such as that GMAIL throws up for content that is not HTTPS in mail ?

BUT: https://google.com/ can flip up a certificate warning in IE as it redirects to www.google.com/ig