Guess who will be speaking at the Gulliver Forum this Thursday? That's right, it's me! By speaking I mean I'll be doing a short presentation on how I found the Learning 2.0 program. By presentation I mean some powerpoint slides whilst I cower behind the lecturn. (I hope there is a lecturn).
I probably should have written this earlier so you could all organise to come and listen to fantastic me. Ah well, I'd actually prefer there weren't too many people there, my public speaking skills are a tad rusty.
I am probably going to speak about how I enjoyed the program but, as an organiser for my library, found that most of our staff were either slightly under-confident about their skills or found it difficult to get time at work to do the program. In fact, the vast bulk of people who completed it did the majority of work from home.
Anyways, just thought I'd let you all know. The forum will be held at the Rendevouz Hotel in Melbourne on 31 January to 1 February from 9.30 onwards. I will be speaking the afternoon of the 1st (again, by speaking, I mean 5 minutes of me bitching about the negative aspects of the program and then closing on an inspirational statement about how it was all worth it because RSS rocks!)
Look at this laptop? I want one.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Translation tools
I hope everyone is having a lovely summer (or winter for my one non-Australian reader). Some of you have time off (and are gloating to me about it) and others are working through like me.
For those of you working through, this week's topic will be translation tools. ie Babelfish/Worldfish from Altavista, SysTranBox or Google's fancy ooh-la-la Language Tools.
I've always been a big Babelfish person myself. It is powered using the SysTran language tools and was one of the earliest big online translation tools. It uses SysTran software to power it and is rather good in European languages. It also contains the CJK languages.
SysTranBox (being powered by SysTran) has the same functionality as Babelfish but also contains translation in Arabic (but no CJK).
Google Language Tools is perhaps the most interesting tool though. It is fairly new but very comprehensive. It translates in the major European languages in addition to Arabic and the CJK languages. What is interesting though is that it allows you to perform searches in one language and have search results in another. It translates my search term, performs the search and then brings results back translated for me.
iePicture this: I am at the reference desk in my big armchair with a daiquiri in one hand and a Mills & Boon novel in the other when suddenly a young woman comes in wanting recipes in Arabic. Having the l33t cooking skills that I do (I can make porridge and I can sometimes not burn toast) I know that I will have to consult the internet. Onto Google Language Tools, I type in 'recipes' and tada, I have one column for Arabic recipe websites and another column of English translations to them. I can look through my column to see if there is anything that stands out as being useful and, once I have found something that seems good, I click on the Arabic result and my patron has her recipes. She then proceeds to worship me as the god of knowledge that I am.
Ah, I love my dreams. A shame I don't like daiquiris or Mills & Boon.
The worst thing about all of this is that none of the major tools translate Vietnamese. For that I use VDict Translation. It translates. It's quick. You can also roll over words with the mouse and it gives you brief definitions...lovely.
For those of you working through, this week's topic will be translation tools. ie Babelfish/Worldfish from Altavista, SysTranBox or Google's fancy ooh-la-la Language Tools.
I've always been a big Babelfish person myself. It is powered using the SysTran language tools and was one of the earliest big online translation tools. It uses SysTran software to power it and is rather good in European languages. It also contains the CJK languages.
SysTranBox (being powered by SysTran) has the same functionality as Babelfish but also contains translation in Arabic (but no CJK).
Google Language Tools is perhaps the most interesting tool though. It is fairly new but very comprehensive. It translates in the major European languages in addition to Arabic and the CJK languages. What is interesting though is that it allows you to perform searches in one language and have search results in another. It translates my search term, performs the search and then brings results back translated for me.
iePicture this: I am at the reference desk in my big armchair with a daiquiri in one hand and a Mills & Boon novel in the other when suddenly a young woman comes in wanting recipes in Arabic. Having the l33t cooking skills that I do (I can make porridge and I can sometimes not burn toast) I know that I will have to consult the internet. Onto Google Language Tools, I type in 'recipes' and tada, I have one column for Arabic recipe websites and another column of English translations to them. I can look through my column to see if there is anything that stands out as being useful and, once I have found something that seems good, I click on the Arabic result and my patron has her recipes. She then proceeds to worship me as the god of knowledge that I am.
Ah, I love my dreams. A shame I don't like daiquiris or Mills & Boon.
The worst thing about all of this is that none of the major tools translate Vietnamese. For that I use VDict Translation. It translates. It's quick. You can also roll over words with the mouse and it gives you brief definitions...lovely.
Monday, December 24, 2007
MySQL and Unicode (or the lack thereof)
AARGH! I have just spent an entire day reading about how to get my website to go from "Trang chủ" to "Trang chủ". Did you know that the version of MySQL that I'm using is non-Unicode compliant? I did, I discovered it last week. I thought that this wouldn't cause too much grief, a random tag here and there not changing or something. I didn't realise that it meant that I could not translate ANY frigging headings/labels/site names/etc. I've got NCRs all over the place (no, I don't know what NCR means, something character something probably, I just know that the ủ thing is an NCR, &# defines it's an NCR, the number is the actual unicode code for the letter and the ; closes it off).
Anyways, what I have to do is convert the entire database into a new format (a unicode compliant one) which sounds like it'll be a nightmare. I read quite a number of articles on how to do it and usually got stuck after it said "step one". Ah well.
On a lighter note, all of you who are using RSS feeds will have just been re-sent ALL of my blog posts. Why this is I do not know, but har har.
Happy Festivus all! It's the festival for the rest of us!
Anyways, what I have to do is convert the entire database into a new format (a unicode compliant one) which sounds like it'll be a nightmare. I read quite a number of articles on how to do it and usually got stuck after it said "step one". Ah well.
On a lighter note, all of you who are using RSS feeds will have just been re-sent ALL of my blog posts. Why this is I do not know, but har har.
Happy Festivus all! It's the festival for the rest of us!
Monday, December 17, 2007
Joomla! content management system
Everyone lately seems very smitten with OpenSource software. I understand the lure, it's free and your support comes from the people who use and mantain it, not from the most holy of holies, the programmer.
I recently became one half of the Online Community Development Officer and, as such, have been having a bit of a look at OpenSource Content Management Systems (CMS). We are planning to use Joomla!.
Joomla is supposedly great. It does everything from a to z and will even wash the dishes (ha!). In reality I'm finding some quite critical flaws in it. The biggest flaw for me is it's un-Unicodeness. I don't know to what level of compliance it currently has, but it's not 100%. I read somewhere that the next version will be fully compliant but, well, I'm not using that one! It's not even doing some Vietnamese characters correctly. Liên lạc ended up as Li?n lạc. Also, the ạ went odd, in the title bar of the page it displays with the coding instead of the character.
Another bad thing is the difficulty in actually putting content into it. I don't know if it's just because I'm used to a different system that has a tree structure, but it's quite difficult for the novice to just enter the stuff they need...and why do they need different terminology to everyone else???
The good things though are very good. I am very easily able install new components that have been designed by others. I even created my own component by following the steps (so now my webpage searches my library catalogue directly). And there are a LOT of components out there that I can download, sometimes I think a few too many (because I don't really know what is good and what isn't). So now I have a website with Google maps, LibraryThing things and an events calendar. A pity it's still in super-beta (alpha?) so I can't show you all...and I'm pretty proud that it translates three words on the site into Vietnamese (hey, I'm getting there).
Hope this doesn't bore you too much until next week! I'll try and be less technical then.
I recently became one half of the Online Community Development Officer and, as such, have been having a bit of a look at OpenSource Content Management Systems (CMS). We are planning to use Joomla!.
Joomla is supposedly great. It does everything from a to z and will even wash the dishes (ha!). In reality I'm finding some quite critical flaws in it. The biggest flaw for me is it's un-Unicodeness. I don't know to what level of compliance it currently has, but it's not 100%. I read somewhere that the next version will be fully compliant but, well, I'm not using that one! It's not even doing some Vietnamese characters correctly. Liên lạc ended up as Li?n lạc. Also, the ạ went odd, in the title bar of the page it displays with the coding instead of the character.
Another bad thing is the difficulty in actually putting content into it. I don't know if it's just because I'm used to a different system that has a tree structure, but it's quite difficult for the novice to just enter the stuff they need...and why do they need different terminology to everyone else???
The good things though are very good. I am very easily able install new components that have been designed by others. I even created my own component by following the steps (so now my webpage searches my library catalogue directly). And there are a LOT of components out there that I can download, sometimes I think a few too many (because I don't really know what is good and what isn't). So now I have a website with Google maps, LibraryThing things and an events calendar. A pity it's still in super-beta (alpha?) so I can't show you all...and I'm pretty proud that it translates three words on the site into Vietnamese (hey, I'm getting there).
Hope this doesn't bore you too much until next week! I'll try and be less technical then.
