I’ve quickly made a couple of proposals for a uLink logo (login and pwd are the same as for the member section of the icu-web) with the help of my TabletPC. I won’t have the time to follow up that matter and create a professional logo (vector graphics, correct CMYK colors, correct proportions and measurements etc.), but I’ve put all my files under the creative commons attribution 2.0 license. Hence you can use them for whatever you want, including derivative work (e.g. a professional logo as mentioned above), as long as you give me some credit for the graphic(s) you used as a basis.
Sharks, Terrors of the Deep
Prolific Publishing, the producer of my most favorite screensaver, SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, has just released Sharks, Terrors of the Deep 1.0 (so far only for Windows).
As mentioned earlier, I particularly like the story behind these screensavers. It’s proof that even nowadays, a single (though extra-ordinary) programmer can create an excellent, mature software application and earn a living of it (a thing you’d believe isn’t possible anymore in times of software mega-corps and FOSS).
soundz.ch – a swiss open media portal
soundz.ch is supposed to be a new (swiss-focussed) platform for music (or “sounds” in general) released under the creative commons license.
so far, there isn’t much to see apart from an advertisement for a (politically motivated?) oss event..
[thanks to geri]
mozilla thunderbird: check all imap folders for new mail
Update 20100331:
Important note: You shouldn’t adjust this preference by editing prefs.js directly as with current versions of Thunderbird, you either risk losing all your settings or that the setting doesn’t have any effect at all. Instead, you should do the following (as described in Thunderbird Help & Tips):
- Open Thunderbird’s Config Editor
- search for the preference mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new, and change its value to true.
Alternatively, you might want to take a look at the additional hints (e.g. how to configure Courier IMAP accordingly) in Mozillazine’s knowledge base about how to check for new mail in other folders.
add
user_pref(“mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new”, true);
to your profile’s prefs.js file.
it’s strange this isn’t the default setting. and there isn’t a gui for it either. perhaps an indication for a bad implementation causing unnecessary overhead? [source: Hidden Mozilla Prefs]
chinese for tabletpcs (using windows)
finally, with the kind help of the guys at microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc, i made chinese handwriting recognition work on my tabletpc :) it wasn’t difficult at all, i just needed to install a chinese keyboard service in addition to chinese tabletpc services. it’s not an intuitive solution though (as i don’t have a chinese keyboard and i didn’t want anything but chinese handwriting recognition). ms should have mentioned this in the documentation or better, redesigned the user interface to be more intuitive and hence more user-friendly.
how well does it perform? the recognition rate isn’t particularly good – given the fact that my “chinese handwriting” rather resembles “print characters written by hand” than “true” chinese handwriting (i.e. chinese written by a chinese). quite obviously, recognizing “true” chinese handwriting is more difficult than recognizing chinese print characters (even for humans). nevertheless it’s at least better than if i had to type pinyin (ymmv, particularly if you’re chinese).
now i’d wish there were an automatic transcription of simplified (and/or traditional) chinese to pinyin (which was easy to do with “windows for pen computing” according to fritz switzer)
Drawing sketches using a TabletPC
I start to like my TabletPC :)
I just found two great applications for drawing sketches using a TabletPC:
Ambient ArtRage 1.0. Freeware. Nice effects, intuitive GUI. Sometimes somewhat slow in response (there’s a noticeable lag).
Alias Sketchbook Pro 1.0.3. A commercial tool (free trial) with a very intuitive GUI and a very realistic look and feel (nice work, guys! Kudos!). Excellent, like real, but with the advantages of digital imaging :) That’s how I imagined to use my TabletPC! As a bonus feature, Alias offers useful background templates for free download (among them some cool story board templates :). Have a look at the insightful Penny Arcade SketchBookPro tutorial! For artists (painters, designers, ..) the TabletPC concept is really a “must-have-a-look-at”!
Further, I’ve installed the enhanced Wacom TabletPC driver which enables pen pressure level support for legacy applications.
In other news, I’ve posted a couple of messages to microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc.developer
I hope this will help me make Chinese handwriting recognition work.
[new category: TabletPC]
o communities, where are thou?
ok. i installed/enabled the eastern asian language pack on my tabletpc. for some (unknown) reason however, i couldn’t enable chinese handwriting recognition. i was only given a choice of “de” (german), “de_ch” (german for swiss) and “en” (u.s. english). bummer.
so i asked ben who first pointed me to a tabletpc mvp’s blog (which appeared having been abandoned as it only featured a single, out-dated entry), then to microsoft.public.windows.tabletpc. the thing i actually was looking for was some kind of synchronous real-time peer support the way it is common in oss communities (almost every oss project provides irc channels for its devs and users). as it turned out, there doesn’t seem to exist any such thing (a central real-time meeting point for devs and users, like irc.freenode.net) in the ms-sphere.
now here comes my free consulting for microsoft: get synchronous community communication up and running. i know there are efforts in this direction (e.g. www.codezone.ch or www.codezone.de) – but this is not enough. don’t implement community building from top-down. it’s too much services-like, with all the disadvantages i bet you can imagine. instead just provide infrastructure (think of irc.microsoft.com) for user groups to build a sustainable community from “bottom-up” themselves. and heck, if it’s a matter of money, divert some hundred million marketing dollars to initial grass-roots, bottom-up community building efforts. users will thank you (and stockholders as well).
pics of the icu lan party 2 online
fortunately, the pics don’t reveal my disastrous scores in [ ] (insert {q3a|sof|any_fps_game}) ;) older icu pics are here.
talking about disasters: today, the day after tomorrow has been shown in full digital quality for the first time in switzerland! great, a must-see :) drop me a line if you’d like to join in..
asian character handwriting recognition on tabletpcs
in today’s chinese lesson i realized that the only reason for me to actually use the tabletpc’s handwriting recognition feature would be writing in chinese. why? because that’s the only application where the tabletpc’s handwriting recognition could eventually be faster than normal typing on a keyboard (to write chinese characters, you first need to type pinyin, i.e. the latin transcription, then choose the right chinese character from a drop-down menu or similar. usually, there are several choices as pinyin is ambiguous. this procedure takes quite a while for each chinese character). it would eventually also solve the problem (for westeners such as me) of finding the correct pinyin for a certain chinese character.
i wonder whether there are any such applications? some links i found so far:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/using/howto/handwriting.asp
http://www.cmlab.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~jsyeh/ChinesePainting/TabletPC/
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/kzheng/calligraphy.shtml
jugs “java web services” event
today i’ll be at the jugs – java web services event researching for my thesis (eai/g2g/government application integration). cu there.