James Willcox
posted at
Banshee and AWN
I just tried out Avant Window Navigator for the first time, after seeing Neil’s latest blog entry. It’s pretty slick, and worth trying if you have xgl/aiglx/whatever. I also wrote a Banshee plugin which makes the current track cover appear in the dock.
Banshee playing “Stadium Arcadium”
You can get the plugin here. Just drop the dll into ~/.gnome2/banshee/plugins.
Fong Lin
posted at
Text doesn't snap to grid
Contiue to investigate the layout behavior when the text doesn't snap to grid.
For East Asian text, not more than one Asian character is displayed within a signle cell. The space between two Asian characters is (grid width - font height)
For Western text, The space between two Western characters is (grid width - font height)/2.
The following diagram illustrates this algorithm in brief.
Certainly, it just specifies what happens if grid width is greater than font height.
For East Asian text, not more than one Asian character is displayed within a signle cell. The space between two Asian characters is (grid width - font height)
For Western text, The space between two Western characters is (grid width - font height)/2.
The following diagram illustrates this algorithm in brief.
Certainly, it just specifies what happens if grid width is greater than font height.
Robert Schiele
posted at
schiele"Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!" --- This is what a large internet company says about their free mail accounts.
"Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!" --- This is what a large internet company says about their free mail accounts.
But actually what does happen when all space is actually used up? Since I am subscribed to some high volume mailing lists with my mail account from this large internet company it happened to me already sometimes that the account was almost full. To prevent trouble I just deleted some old mails whenever this occurred to happen. Then a colleague told me that what I am doing does not make any sense because he claimed to know that the account can just be filled up further and further, even more than 100%. That sounded strange to me but seemed to be actually an interesting question.
So this is what I did when this happened again for my account last weekend: Nothing. I just waited to see what will happen. Actually he was true in the sense that nothing happened. But not about the results. Actually I suddenly got much less mail to that account. This seemed to be somewhat suspicious to me and I sent a test mail from another mail account to my own mail account from this large internet company. The mail was sent without an error. The mail never reached my mail account from this large internet company. Neither the sender nor the receiver got any error message. The mail was just silently dropped. This is definitely not the error handling you expect from a mail provider.
So, what can we learn from this test:
1. Never trust your colleagues if they tell you some strange and fantastic stories.
2. Never use free mail accounts when you have to rely on receiving your mails.
3. Never expect people to do proper error handling for a case they are proud that it will never be needed. Titanic told this already in history.
But actually what does happen when all space is actually used up? Since I am subscribed to some high volume mailing lists with my mail account from this large internet company it happened to me already sometimes that the account was almost full. To prevent trouble I just deleted some old mails whenever this occurred to happen. Then a colleague told me that what I am doing does not make any sense because he claimed to know that the account can just be filled up further and further, even more than 100%. That sounded strange to me but seemed to be actually an interesting question.
So this is what I did when this happened again for my account last weekend: Nothing. I just waited to see what will happen. Actually he was true in the sense that nothing happened. But not about the results. Actually I suddenly got much less mail to that account. This seemed to be somewhat suspicious to me and I sent a test mail from another mail account to my own mail account from this large internet company. The mail was sent without an error. The mail never reached my mail account from this large internet company. Neither the sender nor the receiver got any error message. The mail was just silently dropped. This is definitely not the error handling you expect from a mail provider.
So, what can we learn from this test:
1. Never trust your colleagues if they tell you some strange and fantastic stories.
2. Never use free mail accounts when you have to rely on receiving your mails.
3. Never expect people to do proper error handling for a case they are proud that it will never be needed. Titanic told this already in history.
Flavio Castelli
posted at
MemberGoing to FOSDEM 2007 edition
This year I’ll go to FOSDEM 2007 edition where I’ll give a presentation regarding Strigi.
FOSDEM stands for “Free Open Source Developers European Meeting”.
This is one of the most important happenings for the open-source scene in Europe. It takes place in Bruxelles, where for two days the university if full of talks, and stands of open-source projects.
Big projects have a DevRoom, a place reserved for talks related with them. And here I came… As Strigi is related with KDE me and Jos van Oever will give two presentations in the KDE DevRoom.
I’ll give a talk with the title: “Strigi desktop integration”. I’ll talk about the different interfaces you can use for playing with Strigi. These interfaces are really easy to use, this makes possible to integrate Strigi in different projects or write some cool front-end without any hassle. Finally I’ll talk about the technologies that reside into Strigi internals. Since they’re really useful, it can be smart to use them in different situations (also when information retrieval isn’t the main goal). Here you can get more detailed informations about my talk.
Flavio Castelli
posted at
Still alive
As usually lot of time passed since my last post on this site. Hundred of things happened in the meantime… Going in order:
- I took my second level degree in Computer Engineering
- I began to work in a IT company
- I’m going to give a presentation of strigi to fosdem It’s really hard (and honestly I don’t have enough time) to give a detailed resume of all these facts. The graduation went really fine, my teacher and the other one in the examining session liked my work and I got a good score. Obviously that gave me a great satisfaction Laughing
The other great thing is that, exactly a month later my graduation, I found a good work in a IT company. In the meantime I got lot of job interviews, and I’ve been really lucky because I had lot of choices. The main office is located in Milan, a great city near Bergamo (where I live). Since I don’t like to live in Milan (for lot of reasons), I became an outlier. So every day I take a train, the subway and a tram in order to reach work. It isn’t so hard as you could thing… I’ve lot of time to spend reading and maybe coding Wink In the end, for the last point regarding strigi and fosdem, I’ll make a dedicated post.
Fong Lin
posted at
Some knowledge about text grid
I just checked the Office OpenXML file format and try to find the difference between the two types of text grid.
It seems that the author of the specification doen't know the essential difference between these two types of text grid. :-)
Currently, I am investigating the Document Grid specified in CSS3 mensioned by Florian.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-text-20030514/#document-grid
- linesAndChars (Line and Character Grid): Specifies that the parent section shall have both the additional line pitch and character pitch added to each line and character within it (as specified on the docGrid element (§2.6.5)) in order to maintain a specific number of lines per page and characters per line. When this value is set, the input specified via the user interface may be allowed in exact number of line/character pitch units.
- snapToChars (Character Grid Only) : Specifies that the parent section shall have both the additional line pitch and character pitch added to each line and character within it (as specified on the docGrid element (§2.6.5)) in order to maintain a specific number of lines per page and characters per line.When this value is set, the input specified via the user interface may be restricted to the number of lines per page and characters per line, with the consumer or producer translating this information based on the current font data to get the resulting line and character pitch values
It seems that the author of the specification doen't know the essential difference between these two types of text grid. :-)
Currently, I am investigating the Document Grid specified in CSS3 mensioned by Florian.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-text-20030514/#document-grid
Robert Schiele
posted at
Sometimes it's a strange thing with academic conferences and the publishing of the proceedings.
Sometimes it's a strange thing with academic conferences and the publishing of the proceedings. First people pay money (the conference fee) to be allowed publishing something there. Then they pay again by ordering the proceedings for their local university libraries. Finally they blame the big conference organizers that everything is so expensive but they still insist on publishing at the most expensive conferences and reading only papers submitted there because they claim that they are on the highest academic level. Aren't they actually supporting these expensive conferences that way? They could just submit their papers to cheaper conferences and thus increase the quality level there.
After all I am not that sure at all that the quality of the most expensive conferences is necessarily the best. Those conferences suffer as well from bad quality assurance during the reviewer process. Currently I have again a paper lying on my desktop where I found two mathematical errors within a very short time. One of those errors is even fundamental for the algorithm thus doing it the way it is described in the paper simply does not give useful results. I wonder why we need a review process if such fundamental errors are not caught there? It seems all the reviewers involved in the process for this papers did not really understand that part of the paper and then just accepted it because they didn't want to confess that they don't understand it.
After all this paper has good contents in general but I would have expected the reviewers either to catch these errors (at least the fundamental one) or to confess that they don't understand the content and opt-out of the review process. --- Ok, I agree that this is another dream of an ideal world...
After all I am not that sure at all that the quality of the most expensive conferences is necessarily the best. Those conferences suffer as well from bad quality assurance during the reviewer process. Currently I have again a paper lying on my desktop where I found two mathematical errors within a very short time. One of those errors is even fundamental for the algorithm thus doing it the way it is described in the paper simply does not give useful results. I wonder why we need a review process if such fundamental errors are not caught there? It seems all the reviewers involved in the process for this papers did not really understand that part of the paper and then just accepted it because they didn't want to confess that they don't understand it.
After all this paper has good contents in general but I would have expected the reviewers either to catch these errors (at least the fundamental one) or to confess that they don't understand the content and opt-out of the review process. --- Ok, I agree that this is another dream of an ideal world...
Fong Lin
posted at
Investigated the behavior of "Text snaps to characters grid".
Investigated the behavior of "Text snaps to characters grid".
* If the grid type is grid(line and characters) and the "snap-to-characters" attribute is ture, the Asian character is centered in the single cell, while the non Asian text is centered within as many cells as required.
* If the grid type is grid(line and characters) and the "snap-to-characters" attribute is false, the Asian character is not centered in the single cell, but what is the behavior for the non Asian text?
Below is the screenshot from MS Word
Figure 1,Text snaps to character grid
Figure 2, Specify line and character grid
It seems that there is a special behavior for non Asian text when the text doesn't snap to the character grid.
Where can I get some clues?
* If the grid type is grid(line and characters) and the "snap-to-characters" attribute is ture, the Asian character is centered in the single cell, while the non Asian text is centered within as many cells as required.
* If the grid type is grid(line and characters) and the "snap-to-characters" attribute is false, the Asian character is not centered in the single cell, but what is the behavior for the non Asian text?
Below is the screenshot from MS Word
Figure 1,Text snaps to character grid
Figure 2, Specify line and character grid
It seems that there is a special behavior for non Asian text when the text doesn't snap to the character grid.
Where can I get some clues?
Fong Lin
posted at
Text Grid Enhancement
It is my pleasure to announce a new enhancement feature (Text Grid) in writer document. Currently I am work on this feature.
* Create a new page in openoffice wiki to ask for input. Here is the link : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Text_grid
* Below is the two kinds of text grid layout.
Figure1, Squared page mode
Figure2, Rectangle page mode
1) "Squared paper mode". It is used by ODF.
For this kind of grid layout, the page is divided in a fixed numbers of lines (lines per page). The lines are divided into squared cells (characters per line). The number of lines per page depends on the line height ( i.e., the sum of grid base and ruby height), and the characters per line also depends on the line height.
In "Squared paper mode", the “Characters per line” setting has the most high priority, it will determine the height of line, then the “Lines per page” setting has the second priority, it will determine the height of type area.
This kind of grid layout "Squared paper mode" is used to simulate “squared paper”, which is a kind of specific paper used 20 years ago(before personal computer is widely used in text processing). But now, “squared paper” is only used in very limited case, and most CJK users won't use it anymore.
2) "Rectangle paper mode". It is used by OpenXML, UOF (Chinese Office File Format) and other CJK office suites (i.e., EIOFFICE, WPS).
For this kind of grid layout, the page is divided in a fixed numbers of lines (lines per page). While the lines are divided into rectangle cells (characters per line). Ruby grid is not specified in this paper mode. So the line height is grid base height and the characters per line depends on the grid base width, not grid base height.
In "Rectangle paper mode", type area has the most high priority, it will determine the height of line; the “Lines per page” setting has the second priority, and “Characters per line” setting can only determine the width of characters, and can't influence line height in anyway.
This kind of grid layout "Rectangle paper mode" is wildly used in CJK users.
* Snap to characters
Figure 3. No grid
Figure 4 . Grid (lines only)
Figure 5. Grid (lines and characters), “snap-to-characters” is false
Figure 6. Grid (lines and characters), “snap-to-characters” is true
As shown in Figure 5, when "snap-to-chars" is false, the Asian characters are not centered in the cell, while the Western character ("OpenOffice.Org) are also centered in the cell. This is not accurate. It is work in progress now.
* Create a new page in openoffice wiki to ask for input. Here is the link : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Text_grid
* Below is the two kinds of text grid layout.
Figure1, Squared page mode
Figure2, Rectangle page mode
1) "Squared paper mode". It is used by ODF.
For this kind of grid layout, the page is divided in a fixed numbers of lines (lines per page). The lines are divided into squared cells (characters per line). The number of lines per page depends on the line height ( i.e., the sum of grid base and ruby height), and the characters per line also depends on the line height.
In "Squared paper mode", the “Characters per line” setting has the most high priority, it will determine the height of line, then the “Lines per page” setting has the second priority, it will determine the height of type area.
This kind of grid layout "Squared paper mode" is used to simulate “squared paper”, which is a kind of specific paper used 20 years ago(before personal computer is widely used in text processing). But now, “squared paper” is only used in very limited case, and most CJK users won't use it anymore.
2) "Rectangle paper mode". It is used by OpenXML, UOF (Chinese Office File Format) and other CJK office suites (i.e., EIOFFICE, WPS).
For this kind of grid layout, the page is divided in a fixed numbers of lines (lines per page). While the lines are divided into rectangle cells (characters per line). Ruby grid is not specified in this paper mode. So the line height is grid base height and the characters per line depends on the grid base width, not grid base height.
In "Rectangle paper mode", type area has the most high priority, it will determine the height of line; the “Lines per page” setting has the second priority, and “Characters per line” setting can only determine the width of characters, and can't influence line height in anyway.
This kind of grid layout "Rectangle paper mode" is wildly used in CJK users.
* Snap to characters
We add a “snap to characters” attributes to specify whether the Asian character is centered in the grid cell or not when the grid type is set as “Grid(lines and characters)”. The default value “snap to characters” is “true”.
This additional attribute also improve the compatibility with MS word. Below is the map of grid type between MS Word 2003 and OpenOffice
Figure 3. No grid
Figure 4 . Grid (lines only)
Figure 5. Grid (lines and characters), “snap-to-characters” is false
Figure 6. Grid (lines and characters), “snap-to-characters” is true
As shown in Figure 5, when "snap-to-chars" is false, the Asian characters are not centered in the cell, while the Western character ("OpenOffice.Org) are also centered in the cell. This is not accurate. It is work in progress now.
Fong Lin
posted at
Valentine's Day Evening
In Valentine's Day evening, other staffs are off work. Only I am in office to create a blog to blog what I am doing everyday, quite interesting.
Florian help me to create it, thank Florian
Florian help me to create it, thank Florian