Google Chrome and Zygna games

I have this conspiracy theory... Zygna might be aligning with some companies because you can hardly play their games using Google Chrome.... 8-O lol

Testing out "Monetize"

Testing out the Adsense stuffs on this blog... regardless whether there is anyone reading my blog... 8-O lol

I never knew what the URL of this blog's feed was... apparently, now... http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechnologiesInRatology

Verification method

Tried to create another gmail account to test some and got stuck at the following page...

The lament of a ludite who insists on not getting a cellphone... 8-O

So I went to yahoo instead. 8-O lol

At the same time, wow... Google is going big brother... now it reminding me of... Microsoft. 8-O

Chrome on Ubuntu with Cafe world

It's been about 4 days since I started to get back to this linux machine.

Firefox has been crashing... especially ever since I tried to get back to my facebook game such as Cafe World by Zynga.

Amazingly, with the help of Cafe World, I was able to crash Chrome in less than 1 minute...

 

My accomplishment of the day, I guess... 8-O lol

Ubuntu as a Microsoft product 8-O

Came across this following piece of news from Linuxologist....

Was gonna show you the pix here except for the person did not allow for external linking to his contents.

Apparently it was some kind of a typo on Dell website.  But, for a moment and before I read the contents... I went...

8-O

Learning to use Ubuntu

I came back to use this Ubuntu machines these past two days.

So I thought there is no need to be learning anything new... I was wrong...

One problem I have been encountering is that, when you press the enter key, sometimes the cursor would appear to locate at the beginning of the sentence you were typing rather than at the beginning of a new paragraph.  Other times, it would stay at the end of the sentence and does not move at all.  It is not until when you start typing again would you know where the true location of the cursor is.  In addition, sometimes the cursor would move to the beginning of some other random paragraphs as if it really has its mind.

Although I have no solution to this program, I suspect this might be mainly an issue associated with either the blogger interface or blogger-like design.

Another issue that was really bugging the hell out of me is that I was having such grieve switching between English and the ibus Chinese input methods (e.g., Chinese chewing input method).

I had better luck switching to the Chinese input methods when in OpenOffice; however, I kept on having problem getting the Chinese input to work when inside of a browser.

Finally, by exploring the preferences window... I found out...

Dumb dumb...  all that I needed was to press down control+space to switch among these different input method.  Of course, one can also go on and do whatever customization one's heart desires.  For me, control+space is good enough for now.

Read the manual next time.

On learning to type ㄅㄆㄇ

There is something really interesting about learning to type ㄅㄆㄇ.

It is very unnatural... 8-O lol

At least from the perspective of someone who is trained to use the ABC keyboard.

The matter of the fact is that, for years, I only have to worry about moving my fingers around in 3 main rows.  All of a sudden, with the ㄅㄆㄇ keyboard, I have to move my fingers to control 4 rows.

In case you wonder what the Chinese phonetics look like and their matching keys...

At this state, I am still trying really hard to both physically and mentally map the location of my fingers with the associated phonetics. Still really rusty with my skills but I think I can now type much faster when comparing to back a couple days ago if not weeks or months ago.

When doing my everyday walk, I would even stare at them store signs and move my fingers to the relative locations... as practice exercise.

Come to think about it... the process of learning to type is sort of like learning to play guitar or piano... I guess?

I don't know how much longer it will take before I am as good a typist in Chinese as in English. Hopefully... the day will come soon!

Some people, such as my sister, prefer to use the Ping-in input method since she, like me, is already familiar with the ABC keyboard.

Why do I choose to go with ㄅㄆㄇ?

I don't know. Just do it. I guess? Maybe I will come back to try out Ping-in one day. For now, I am experimenting with ㄅㄆㄇ.

My preferred now is the traditional Chinese Phonetic Input method that came with the Windows OS.　The benefit of it is that it will also automatically show you the plausible selection of the next word to save you some typing time.

The problem with the word selection process is that, in Chinese, sometimes you have a whole lot of words with the same pronunciation and you have to scroll down and down till you find what you want.  With the suggestions automatically provided by the program, sometimes the list is so long that it might take longer time for you to find the next words than simply to get it type out.

The scrolling thing is also the reason why I started with the Ping-in input method and decided to go through the process of relearning the ㄅㄆㄇ keyboard.  It is because, with the ㄅㄆㄇ system, you can specify the tone of the word you are typing and the resulting word list would get shorter, which would totally help you cut down the time needed to browse through a world of plausible words.

For instance, if I intent to type "打滾", after I type out the word 打, it will show me a list of words that could follow this word.  In order to get to the second word "滾," I have to click 7 times on that scrolling bar in order to locate the specific word.  In that case, it might be much faster simply type the word out than using the suggestion functions.

An interesting manifestation of this thing called having to stop my thinking because I can not find the word... 8-O

Come to think about it and since I almost type as fast as I can think... and... reminiscing da not so far away past going from 2-3 words...

For one to be able to type out their writing directly, one really need to have a working memory with larger than the 2-3 words capacity.  I suspect, when I was in the state of being able to read 2-3 words, by the time I finish recognizing the first option, I would have already forgotten my own thoughts... Just wondering...

Life is interesting... always something new everyday....

(This is originally posted in Ratology Reloaded)

Oh.. Chinese version... Where Art Thou?

When preparing for a talk on Ed Tech today, I came across this most obscene technical problem I have ever encountered in my entire... what one might call... Ed Tech career...

Essentially...

"Oh.. Chinese version... Where Art Thou?"

I have tested out many a concept mapping software in my life so far... all in English.

Since this talk is to be delivered in Taiwan and since it is the traditional Chinese being used here, of course, yours truly have to test them software out again using traditional Chinese.

After I found out that Inspiration, Kidspiration and Cmap... all three do not support traditional Chinese, I had the feeling that half of my black hair just turned grey...

FreeMind does support traditional Chinese except for... could use some help on the beutification department.

Finally, I landed on XMind... a savor for my tornment... in search of a concept mapping software that takes in traditional Chinese character.

Ended with the following diagram... my mental model about the components involved in processing "消防演習公文" or fire drill related paper work in Taiwan.  8-O lol

Of course, my mental model can always be wrong... lol

Back to the key point, if you are looking for a relatively easy to use concept mapping software or shareware that works with traditional Chinese, my recommendation would be XMind for the time being.

In other words, 如你再找繁體中文版的概念圖軟體... 試試 XMind

Rip audio from a movie file

I know I did it before or maybe blogged this before..

How do you rip audio tracks off a movie file?

Went googling around earlier... with this feeling in the back of my mind...  I did it before... therefore, let me get back to what I already have on this machine.

After playing around with itune, quicktime and windows media player... I finally landed on Real Player SP...

Ended up, what you have to do is to mouseover the movie and you will see "Convert" as one of the edit options.

Once you click on convert, you can play around with the settings and decide what file type to convert to and where to save the file... as I have documented in an earlier post... Strip with Real...

Man... I am surely getting old.... 8-X