Archive for January, 2008

Jian Ghomeshi on Media Literacy at York University

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

I have been thinking about trying “event blogging” for a while, since I have such a portable laptop now, and inspired by the master, Ethan Zuckerman and his tips for conference bloggers. Incidentally, I am going to a conference on international comparative education (CIES) in New York in March, maybe I will try this there. [...]

Learning languages, working abroad in international development

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

This is a hand-out that a friend and I put together for a retreat this weekend together with students that will go on one year placements abroad. I wanted to emphasize the importance of learning languages, and give ideas about methods and resources. Handout on learning languages / bahasa-bahasa / 语言 / भाशाएं / языкoв [...]

Release early, release often: Hindi-English StarDict dictionary

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

I’ve always loved dictionaries, and especially the mouse-over ones – I did a brief screencast of Wenlin, and hacked up my own little Indonesian dictionary when learning Indonesian. Currently I am learning Hindi, so of course I had to go out and investigate the tools available. Turns out that there’s not that much. Shabdkosh is [...]

Ruby: Converting between two types of URL escaping

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

I am playing around with my old scripts for repacking Wikipedia for offline access, and ran it on the Norwegian database to see if they were still working. I realized that they had changed the way they saved filenames on the disk, which broke my program. I thought I’d post the solution (which took me [...]

Providing multilingual services – if the Iranian can do it…

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

It happened two of the three times that I crossed the Niagara/Buffalo border last year, so it cannot be such a rare occurrence. The first time I met him in the line at Toronto Bus Terminal, and elderly Chinese guy. I chatted with him in Chinese, and he told me he’d lived in Canada for [...]

My ideal research/annotation tool

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

I was reading a bit about different innovative text editors on Mac today. Of course, I have known about TextMate for a long time, and although it mainly changes the way programmers do work, some of the plugins are also useful for for example television script writers. Now I came across a bunch of different [...]

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