Monotonous.org

A long awaited feature has finally landed in Orca’s beta. We now support grade 2 braille.

If you never heard of contracted braille, or grade 2 braille, just think of the sort of shorthand tricks that teenagers use today when they text message each other, “you are great” turns into “u r gr8″. In contracted braille it would be “y >e grt”.

Unlike text messaging, grade 2 braille did not come about because of text input laziness, it came to be generations ago for reducing space and increasing reading speeds. Of course today, in the age of refreshable braille displays, the space concern is less important. Nonetheless, horizontal scrolling is reduced when using a 40 cell braille display, making the Orca experience that much smoother.

Translating a written language in to grade 2 braille correctly is a challenging problem. There are many rules that go into the process of translating a language in to it’s contracted form. Luckily we had a shared library from John Boyer called liblouis. John has been extremely helpful in helping us roll this release out using his library. And has been accommodating to are nutty release schedule.

A special thanks also to Mike for dealing with my braille ignorance, and to Will, who patiently reviewed my shoddy patch (I promise to do more pylint runs in the future).

And to all you users, abusers, and testers out there. We need your input on this stuff. Thanks in advance for that. If there are a non-English braille readers out there I would especially like to get in touch so we could iron out any localization kinks.

2 Comments »

I was the fortunate winner of two special things in the last local JVP benefit auction: Knitting lessons from Wendy, and monthly music mixes from Mike. Although I am an eager learner, I thought crafty Terah might enjoy knitting lessons a lot. So Wendy is teaching Terah to knit. I am closely watching the progress as the stitches are straightening out.

Mike has put his whole heart in to making personal monthly music mixes for me. The first one, January: Short Days and Long Nights, arrived in the mail a week ago. It has been a joy to listen to, I have it mostly on constant loop. Mike put together a diverse collection of music with subtle hints of the disc’s theme. I put together an internet radio station that plays the mix in a loop for all you out there to enjoy.

You could start listening here.

6 Comments »

לא כל יום מבקשת העיתונות את תגובתה של דמות בכירה באקדמיה ללשון עברית. כשנשאל הפרופ’ משה בר-אשר, נשיא האקדמיה לגבי תגלית של כתב שמי קדום, הגדיר זאת הפרופסור כתגלית “סנסציונית”, נו באמת.

לכתבה בהארץ.

1 Comment »

I am in the middle of a book called The Ecology of Commerce. As the name suggests it is about how a free market could become environmentally restorative. Besides the main theme there are more than a few gems of social justice in there. Here is my favorite:

In reality, we have not one but two welfare systems. The first is meager, consisting of aid to the unemployed, dependent children, the poor and helpless. It is seen as a charity, a hand-out, a grudging acceptance of social responsibility, but it is almost always accompanied by judgement, admonishments of failure, and a high moral tone. The second welfare system is large, expensive, and expansive. It comes in the form of large government grants and programs for building highways, subsidies to the rich in the form of interest payment deductions on their houses, giveaways of timber and mining rights on government lands, government-financed research in universities, revolving door policies between the defense industry and government resulting in expensive, poorly planned procurement policies, and so on.

Hawkins goes on and writes that the top fifth of the population receives three times more housing subsidy then the bottom fifth.

Comments Off

I volunteered my apartment for Brenda’s CD release party. It was wonderfully fun. There were plenty of people that I was waiting for an opportunity to invite them to something, so this helped me too. Brenda’s performance was great. That photo is from Daniel Talsky, he had a front seat.

No Comments »