Monotonous.org

Eitan’s Pitch

I *heart* Translators

June 12th, 2008 Filed under: Software, Technology by Eitan

I know that I am supposed to be all gratuitous and all when it comes to translators who do a thankless job, and improve software by orders of magnitude to make them accessible to many locales. I usually am very thankful.

In the past month I have briefly turned my back Accerciser trunk, and in that time some cuddly translator managed to bugger it not once, but twice.

Once when someone uncommented a comment in the LINGUAS file, which resulted in an unconfigurable tree. Another time when someone changed a *.po file to have executable permissions. This was more annoying, since there is some script there in s.g.o’s guts that rejects any commit if the repo has an executable. Now you know me, I never look at the output message after I commit to SVN, especially now since I am doing it through git. Result: all my commits to Accerciser in the last month have been rejected, and I never realized it.

I know what you all are thinking:

  1. Why don’t you just look into the Subversion history, and see who is messing with you? Well, I prefer to remain ignorant, and make sweeping accusations - I am bored.
  2. How in hell did an executable po file get into the repo in the first place? I don’t know, and searching for the answer might lead me to the answer of the first question, so I won’t bother.

4 Comments »

Twinkle And Twitter

April 30th, 2008 Filed under: Personal, Technology by Eitan

About a week back I downloaded an app for my iPhone called Twinkle. It’s a Twitter client with two catches: It allows you to geotag posts, and it allows you to take attach photo snaphots of whatever it is you are doing. Both of these features make Twinkle a real great toy. It is a lot of fun browsing the twitters within a one mile radius, and trying to make out from the photos where the picture was taken. It really puts a whole new dimension to social networking.

The downside is that there is no way to relay this experience to non-iPhone users. So I made a few Yahoo pipes that mash up the photo with the proper twitters. This is my personal feed.

You could create new feeds from my pipes page.

No Comments »

CSUN Fun

March 14th, 2008 Filed under: Accessibility, Personal, Technology by Eitan

I spent most of this week at CSUN. It’s been fun, I am really happy to finally meet a bunch of people, and to meet new folks. Manning the Mozilla booth is easy: every passerby is a grateful user. A lot of subdued dogs.

A companion dog taking a rest

Update: I Made that sound like past tense. I still am at CSUN, and I will be here till tomorrow.

2 Comments »

Accessibility in Linux Journal

February 19th, 2008 Filed under: Accessibility, Personal, Software, Technology by Eitan

As Will pointed out, the latest issue of Linux Journal is focusing on the desktop, with not one, but two articles devoted to desktop accessibility! If I read the contract that I signed hastily right, I keep the copyright for the article, so I could post it here.

No Comments »

⠠⠒⠞⠗⠁⠉⠞⠫⠀⠠⠃⠗⠇⠀⠠⠔⠀⠠⠕⠗⠉⠁

February 11th, 2008 Filed under: Culture, Technology by Eitan

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 »

  • Photos

  • End Mountain Top Removal

  • Categories

  • Archives