http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam Some things just can't be expressed... Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:00:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Be warned that this is not a thorough evaluation of Open Office. I use it mainly during the initial phases of translating from Chinese or Tibetan. (I still use Emacs for Sanskrit.) I produce all my final documents in LaTeX. So there is a lot of ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/11/10/open-office-30-meh Updated again Nov 1st 9:00pm, Taiwan time. I've upgraded from Hardy to Intrepid and found a slew of problems. First the problems which are not fixed: Gnome does not want to start the gnome-terminal which is saved in the session configuration. After further investigation I found that session saving in gnome ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/10/31/intrepid-growing-pains Last week has been quite eventful. I owe a debt of gratitude to (in chronological order of people who helped me last week) Adeline, Shu-Fun, Li-Ching, Hui-Hwa, Hsin-Hsing, Mr. Lee, Venerable Chang Lang, Bill, Ken Shu, Hsiu-Lan and Mr. Lin. I should also point out that Hsiu-Lan on ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/10/18/the-power-of-the-network I've added a widget in the sidebar in which I'm going to list OSS projects I've given money to. I have two principal goals for doing this. First, I want to promote software I'm sponsoring. The publicity I provide is quite modest but it is better than ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/10/12/sponsored-oss I've tested OOHanzi in Open Office 3 and have good news to report: OOHanzi will work with Open Office 3 without modification. There was a bug in Open Office 2.x which affected only people using compiz. If compiz was running, all dialog boxes which were created by the Java virtual machine ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/10/12/oohanzi-and-open-office-3 Standford has put up an exhibit on cigarette advertisements. It is unbelievable what the tobacco industry fed people. I am particularly amazed at the number of vague claims made. For instance: "from the report of a well-known research organization...", "what distinguished doctors found...". If the institution ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/10/10/stanford-exhibit-on-cigarette-advertisement I'm currently preparing a photo album which I am going to put online shortly. A significant part of the process consists in deleting pictures. It is only recently that I've discovered the importance of deletion. I think before the advent of digital media people would be quite reluctant to ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/10/05/the-art-of-deletion Yesterday, Master Sheng Yen gave a public talk. Master Sheng Yen is the founder of Dharma Drum Buddhist College, where I am now conducting research in Abhidharma. During the talk yesterday, he first presided over the presentation of awards to distinguished students. It was a good occasion ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/10/01/master-sheng-yens-exhortation-to-study-hard For instance, the texts at asianclassics.org are encoded in the TibetanMachineWeb font. This font relies on some arcane encoding to produce the proper stacks of consonants, etc. Because of this, the texts offered by that site cannot be used as-is if any kind of sensible information processing is ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/09/27/how-to-convert-web-pages-from-tibetanmachineweb-to-unicode A few minutes ago, I came across yet another AP news item about the current financial crisis in the US. The article reports that Barack Obama "said the final product must protect U.S. taxpayers and include a commitment to new regulatory reforms." My first thought was "hell, yeah!" ... http://lddubeau.com/avaktavyam/2008/09/21/the-free-market-fallacy