Minh’s Notes

Any serious computer user lives by Firefox extensions. My copy of Firefox has around 30 installed, and I wouldn’t part with more than five of them. It’s bad enough that I employ the Nightly Tester Tools extension to shove out-of-date extensions down Firefox’s figurative throat and Menu Editor to keep my sprawling Tools menu (the product of 30 extensions) tidy.

I know most of this blog’s readers don’t write in Vietnamese, but for the few who do, I spent a bit of last weekend writing an extension for Firefox and its companion e-mail program, Thunderbird, that checks your Vietnamese spelling as you type. Unlike the last piece of software I released, this one requires hardly any explanation. You know if you need it.

Continue reading "Vietnamese Dictionary 1.0 for Firefox" »

Entry №1221, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 7:30 AM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Mozilla Firefox, Programming, Vietnamese | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you type primarily in English, you have it easy: all 26 letters are right in front of you, one keystroke away. But if, like me, you do any typing in a language like Vietnamese, you’ll sometimes find it tempting to just use a typewriter, where you don’t have to worry about font support for accent marks or application support for various flavors of Unicode, and you can usually flip the page down a notch to turn a caret into a bone fide circumflex. It’s just easier.

When I absolutely have to use a post-1980s device like the computer (what horror!), my keyboard takes a beating, especially when I edit the Vietnamese Wikipedia. Since computers these days treat accented characters like ễ as distinct from their base letters (in this case, e), Vietnamese contains over 90 such characters, and there’s no way you’d cram that into a keyboard. So various folks have devised input methods for Vietnamese: you strike multiple keys, one letter comes out. Not the best way to avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but you just try talking to someone without any vowels. Isn’t happening, unless you’re a Klingon.

Continue reading "Vietnamese VIQR Keyboard Layout 1.0 for Mac OS X" »

Entry №1160, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 8:10 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Macintosh, Programming, Vietnamese | Comments (21) | TrackBacks (2)

• Python: Myths about Indentation. Python tends to care how you indent your code, but as most any Python programmer could tell you, that fact doesn’t change squat. (Towards the bottom there’s even a handy tidbit or two for those of us taking CS 143.) [1]
• Explaining the Excel Bug. What looks like a comically random error in Excel is caused by a classic problem with storing floating point (non-integer) numbers in binary. To the Office team’s defense, you could write a book on rounding in JavaScript.
• Google Docs puts Google Users at Risk. Interesting – and, if left unpatched, remarkably powerful – security vulnerability in Google Documents.
• In Memory Of The Original MySpace.com. Back in the heyday of GeoCities, Netscape Communicator, and dialup, MySpace was a free file-sharing service. Their business model didn’t quite pan out, and we have Tom to thank for transforming the site into the ubiquitous wasteland (map) it is today.

Entry №1153, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 11:55 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Programming, Python, Summary, Web Archaeology | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)