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This month's answers created by:

[ Amit Kumar Saha, Ben Okopnik, Neil Youngman, Suramya Tomar, Thomas Adam ]
...and you, our readers!

Our Mailbag


apertium-en-ca 0.8.99

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]


Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:57:01 +0000

This is a pre-release of apertium-en-ca (because there are some bugs you can't find until after you've released...)

New things:

Vocabulary sync with apertium-en-es 0.7.0
English dialect support (British and American)
Initial support for Valentian forms
Start of Termcat import - Thanks to Termcat for allowing this, and to
Prompsit Language Engineering for facilitating it.
At the moment, only a few items have been important. They have mostly
been limited to terms which include ambiguous nouns (temps, estació,
etc.)
Caveats:

The vocabulary sync is not complete: specifically, I skipped some proverbs, and had to omit the verb 'blog'. The Valentian support is not as complete as apertium-es-ca (on the other hand, the English dialect support is better than en-es)

This release also includes several multiwords harvested from Francis Tyers' initial investigations into lexical selection (and others suggested by it).

-- 
<Leftmost> jimregan, that's because deep inside you, you are evil.
<Leftmost> Also not-so-deep inside you.


apertium-ht-en 0.1.0

Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]


Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:15:58 +0000

Announcing apertium-ht-en 0.1.0

In response to a request from volunteers at Crisis Commons (http://crisiscommons.org), we have put some effort into creating a Haitian Creole to English module for Apertium. We do not usually make releases at such an early stage of development, but because of the circumstances, we think it's better to make available something that at least partly works, despite its numerous flaws, than to hold off until we can meet our usual standards.

The present release is for Haitian Creole to English only; much of the vocabulary was derived from a spell checking dictionary using cognate induction methods, and is most likely incorrect -- CMU have graciously provided Open Source bilingual data, but have deliberately used a GPL-incompatible licence, which we cannot use. We hope that they will see fit to change this.

Many thanks to Kevin Scannell for providing us with spell checking data; to Francis Tyers and Kevin Unhammer for their contributions; and to the Apertium community for their support and indirect help.

I would like to dedicate this releas to the memory of my grandmother, Anne O'Regan, who passed away on Monday the 18th, just after I began working on this.

-- 
<Leftmost> jimregan, that's because deep inside you, you are evil.
<Leftmost> Also not-so-deep inside you.

[ Thread continues here (3 messages/4.68kB) ]


Creating appealing schemas and charts

Peter Hűwe [PeterHuewe at gmx.de]


Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:35:55 +0100

Dear TAG,

unfortunately I have to create a whole bunch of schematas, charts, diagrams, flow charts, state machines (fsm) and so on for my diploma thesis - and I was wondering if you happen to know some good tools to create such graphics.

Of course I know about dia, xfig, (open office draw), gimp, inkscape - but either the diagrams look really really old-fashioned (dia, xfig) or are rather cumbersome to create (gimp, inkscape, draw) - especially if you have to modify them afterwards.

So I'm looking for a handful of neat tools to create some appealing schematas. Unfortunately I can't provide a good example - but thinks, like colors, borders,round edges are definitely a good start :)

I have to admit that it is arguable whether some eye-candy is really necessary in a scientific paper - however adding a bit of it, really helps the reader to get the gist of the topic faster.

Thanks, Peter

[ Thread continues here (5 messages/6.36kB) ]


Find what is created a given directory?

Suramya Tomar [security at suramya.com]


Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:34:19 +0530

Hey,

I know it sounds kind of weird but I want to know if it is possible to identify what process/program is creating this particular directory on my system.

Basically, in my home folder a directory called "Downloads" keeps getting created at random times. The directory doesn't have any content inside it and is just an empty folder.

I thought that it was probably being created by one of the applications I run at the time but when I tried to narrow down the application by using each one separately and waiting for the directory to be created I wasn't able to replicate the issue.

I also tried searching on Google for this but seems like no one else is having this issue or maybe my searches are too generic.

I am running Debian Testing (Squeeze) and the applications I normally have running are:

* Firefox (3.6)
* Thunderbird (3.0.1)
* Dolphin (Default KDE 4.3.4 version)
* Konsole (3-4 instances)
* EditPlus using wine
* Amarok (1.4.10)
* ksensors
* Tomboy Notes
* xchat
* gnome-system-monitor

BTW, I noticed the same behavior when I was using Ubuntu last year (9.10).

Any idea's on how to figure this out? Have any of you noticed something similar on your system?

- Suramya

-- 
-------------------------------------------------
Name : Suramya Tomar
Homepage URL: http://www.suramya.com
-------------------------------------------------
************************************************************

[ Thread continues here (7 messages/8.29kB) ]



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Published in Issue 171 of Linux Gazette, February 2010

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