how to type mandarin on mac

Thomas Kho’s Blog » Learning Mandarin Chinese with Mac OS X

Learning Mandarin Chinese with Mac OS X

April 19, 2008 at 9:09 pm · Filed under Computers, General, OS X

I use a Mac probably 90% of the time, so I wanted to share some tips for OS X I picked up that (I hope) are really helpful to the Mandarin Chinese learner.

As a bit of background, let me tell you where I’m coming from: I went to Chinese school for years as a kid and didn’t really learn much of anything. I was never fluent, never really learned enough characters to sufficiently read (let alone write), and then I just stopped caring for some amount of time. Now, I’m back for more learning.

So, here are the tips:

* ITABC Input Method

I haven’t really used Windows in years, but last time I tried, I don’t think it had the pervasive Unicode support to even display Chinese characters in most apps. That said, I was nicely surprised when I found OS X 10.5 comes with a slew of Traditional and Simplified Chinese Input Methods built in. The one I use, ITABC, is dead simple. You just enter pinyin without tones and choose from candidate matches. There are plenty of places online (here’s one at Yale) that can walk you through setting it up.
* CEDICT for Apple Dictionary

Apple includes a dictionary application in OS X. No big deal, right? Well, it’s actually pretty cool, because you can add your own custom dictionaries that integrate as seamlessly as the built-in dictionaries. CEDICT is a Chinese-English dictionary project (here’s an online dictionary based on CEDICT) that’s available as a user dictionary for Dictionary.app. Even better, it also has pronunciations (little sound bites you can play) embedded in dictionary entries.

Here’s CEDICT for Apple Dictionary at Apple Downloads. Just download it and drop it into your /Library/Dictionaries (or ~/Library/Dictionaries).
* Dictionary.app integration throughout OS X

I mentioned seamless integration in that last bullet point. Well, in the Apple way, the dictionary is integrated throughout the system. Hover over some text, hit a hotkey (defaults to Cmd-Ctrl-D, but might I suggest F1), and a little panel pop up (inline, in your application) with the definition.

This hint at Mac OS X Hints reminds us that we can hold down the dictionary hotkey to continuously get the definition of whatever word is currently under the cursor. Say you’re scanning news.google.cn and there are a handful of words you don’t know. Just hit that hotkey, the dictionary entry panel pops up in Safari, and it moves with you as you move the cursor across the sentence.

If the default popup panel is too small for your tastes, this post has a link to a modified DictionaryPanel.app (drop it in /Applications/Dictionary.app/Contents/SharedSupport) that enlarges the popup panel window. Alternatively, you can open up DictionaryPanel.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/PopupWindow.nib in Interface Builder and just need to change the size of both the popup window and its content. Be sure to make a backup first!
* ChinesePod on iTunes

Alright, so this last one might be a strech, but I found out about ChinesePod, which is a podcast with lessons in spoken Mandarin. It helps that the podcasters are pretty amusing. How does this tie in? Well, iTunes is setup to scrape the newest lessons and syncs them automatically with my iPod, so I can listen on my way to work. Zero effort necessary!

Alright. That’s it for now. If you know of any other tips, please do share!

Note: This might seem like one big rave for OS X, but I tried really hard to keep that to a minimum. Apple’s just too cool :)

jay chou love me don't go!

Chinese Music Forum / [Completed] ~Translation~ Jay Chou- 爱我别走

I just heard one of Jay's song in his 2005 concert..
and it's quite a nice song..Check it out!!

周杰伦- 爱我别走
Jay Chou- Love me, don’t go

我到了这个时候还是一样
Wo dao le zhe ke shi jian hai shi yi yang
Having arrived at this moment, I’m still the same

夜里的寂寞容易叫人悲伤
Ye li de ji mo rong yi jiao ren bei shang
Loneliness of the night easily makes people hurt

我不敢想的太多
Wo bu gan xiang de tai duo
I don’t dare to think too much

因为我一个人
Ying wei wo yi ke ren
Because I’m all by myself

迎面而光的月光拉长身影
Ying mian er guang de ye guang la chang shen ying
Facing moonlight, it draws out the silhouette

走在漫无目的的街
Zou zai man wu mu di de jie
Walking by the boundless and endless street

我没有你的消息
Wo mei you ni de xiao xi
I don’t hear your news

因为我在想你
Yin wei wo zai xiang ni
Because I’m thinking of you

Chorus:

爱我别走
Ai wo bie zou
Love me, don’t go

如果你说你不爱我
Ru guo ni shuo ni bu ai wo
If you say you don’t love me

不要听见你真的说出口
Bu yao ding jian ni zhen de shuo chu kou
I don’t want to hear you really said it

再给我一点温柔
Cai gei wo yi dian wen rou
Give me a bit warmth again

--------------------------------------------------

就在今晚抹去对方的肯定
Jiu zai jin wan mo qu dui fang de ken ding
And at this night, erasing the other is for sure

夜里的寂寞容易叫人悲伤
Ye li de ji mo rong yi jiao ren bei shang
Loneliness of the night easily makes people hurt

我没有你的消息
Wo mei you ni de xiao xi
I don’t hear your news

因为我一个人
Ying wei wo yi ke ren
Because I’m all by myself

迎面而光的月光拉长身影
Ying mian er guang de ye guang la chang shen ying
Facing moonlight, it draws out the silhouette

一个人走在漫无目的的街
Yi ke ren zou zai man wu mu di de jie
A person walking by the boundless and endless street

我没有你的消息
Wo mei you ni de xiao xi
I don’t hear your news

因为我在想你
Yin wei wo zai xiang ni
Because I’m thinking of you

爱我别走
Ai wo bie zou
Love me, don’t go

如果你说你不爱我
Ru guo ni shuo ni bu ai wo
If you say you don’t love me

不要听见你真的说出口
Bu yao ding jian ni zhen de shuo chu kou
I don’t want to hear you really said it

再给我一点温柔
Cai gei wo yi dian wen rou
Give me a bit warmth again

drink some eel!

Eel Drink Goes On Sale For Japan's Hot Summer, `Energy Boosting' Eel Drink Goes On Sale For Japan's Hot Summer - CBS News

A canned drink called "Unagi Nobori," or "Surging Eel," made by Japan Tobacco Inc., hit the nation's stores this month just ahead of Japan's annual eel-eating season, company spokesman Kazunori Hayashi said Monday.

"It's mainly for men who are exhausted by the summer's heat," Hayashi said of the beverage, believed to be the first mass-produced eel drink in Japan.

Many Japanese believe eating eel boosts stamina in hot weather.

The fizzy, yellow-colored drink contains extracts from the head and bones of eel and five vitamins _ A, B1, B2, D and E _ contained in the fish.

how to clean blackberry trackball

How to clean your BlackBerry’s Trackball | BlackBerryInsight

Today it was enough! The problem is, I cannot afford to loose that phone for maybe several weeks while it will be repaired. So I searched forums, googled (even yahooed) and found a lot of stuff which had not really an answer to my question. I remembered an article some months ago which mentioned the coloring the of the Pearl’s trackball by coloring the LED beneath the trackball. Finally I realized that removing the pearl’s cover would the best way to get access to its sensor and clean it. By the way, this should work for all BlackBerry devices that carry a trackball around like BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, 8800 and 8830.

The silver ring which covers the trackball can easily be removed if you use a small screwdriver to lift it at the outer side of the ring. Be careful here! Like you should be during the whole process as all parts have very small plastic nipple which can break very easy. When the silver plastic ring is removed you will see the inner trackball component which can be removed completely. Before doing this you should carefully remove the silver metal ring that holds the trackball component in its position. The trackball component itself can also be carved. For every direction the ball can roll to you’ll find a sensor wheel. Those wheels are mostly carrying some gunk you should clean them from. Once this is done put everything back together to the place the pieces came from and secure the trackball with the silver plastic ring you removed in the first step. Your BlackBerry’s trackball should be back working now.

food that are good for you

The 11 Best Foods You Arent Eating - Well - Tara Parker-Pope - Health - New York Times Blog

# Beets: Think of beets as red spinach, Dr. Bowden said, because they are a rich source of folate as well as natural red pigments that may be cancer fighters.
How to eat: Fresh, raw and grated to make a salad. Heating decreases the antioxidant power.
# Cabbage: Loaded with nutrients like sulforaphane, a chemical said to boost cancer-fighting enzymes.
How to eat: Asian-style slaw or as a crunchy topping on burgers and sandwiches.
# Swiss chard: A leafy green vegetable packed with carotenoids that protect aging eyes.
How to eat it: Chop and saute in olive oil.
# Cinnamon: May help control blood sugar and cholesterol.
How to eat it: Sprinkle on coffee or oatmeal.
# Pomegranate juice: Appears to lower blood pressure and loaded with antioxidants.
How to eat: Just drink it.

serialversionUID generator for intellij

IntelliJ IDEA « Just Five Minutes

Cleaning up code I launched serialver to create serialVersionUIDs for some serializable classes. Wondering why IntelliJ IDEA did not seem to provide a generator for UIDs, I browsed the code inspection settings and it turns out that there actually is one - but it is disabled by default. To use it, go to

Settings -> Errors -> Serialization issues -> Serializable class without ’serialVersionUID’

When editing a Serializable class without a serialVersionUID field set, IDEA now displays a warning and provides a Quickfix (Alt+Enter) to generate one.

props to this guy!

chinese is the new black

China Journal : In South Africa, Chinese is the New Black

In South Africa, Chinese is the New Black

A high court in South Africa ruled on Wednesday that Chinese-South Africans will be reclassified as “black,” a term that includes black Africans, Indians and others who were subject to discrimination under apartheid. As a result of this ruling, ethnically Chinese citizens will be able to benefit from government affirmative action policies aimed at undoing the effects of apartheid.

In 2006, the Chinese Association of South Africa sued the government, claiming that its members were being discriminated against because they were being treated as whites and thus failed to qualify for business contracts and job promotions reserved for victims of apartheid. The association successfully argued that, since Chinese-South Africans had been treated unequally under apartheid, they should be reclassified in order to redress wrongs of the past.

how to control your anger

Soccer Parents: Why They Rage

Jay Goldstein’s tips for not becoming one of those parents

When you feel your anger rising at something you see on the field:

* Controlled deep breathing exercises (inhale for 4 seconds and exhale for 8 seconds)
* Suck on a lollipop (Occupies your mouth and reminds you that you’re there for your child.)
* Visualize a relaxing experience like floating on water.
* Repeat a calm word or phrase.
* Do yoga-like muscle stretches.
* Replace angry thoughts with rational ones, such as “This is my child’s game, not mine,” or “Mistakes are opportunities to learn.”
* Don’t say the first thing that comes into your head. Count to 10 and think about possible responses.
* If you did not see the game, first ask your child “How did you play?” rather than “Did you win?”
* Praise your child’s effort, then, maybe, comment on the results.
* Use humor, but avoid harsh or sarcastic humor. Picture the referee wearing Elton John glasses.

who is the mommy!

Cover Story - When Mom and Dad Share It All - Adventures in Equal Parenting - Lisa Belkin - NYTimes.com

Harlyn Aizley, mother of a 6-year-old daughter, describes the moment that her then-partner, Faith Soloway, first took their newborn in her arms in the delivery room. “Just moments after I gave birth,” Aizley writes in the anthology “Confessions of the Other Mother: Nonbiological Lesbian Moms Tell All,” “Faith scooped up the baby, cooed into her squishy newborn face and said: ‘Hello there. I’m your mommy.’ I wanted to kill her. Faith, that is. I wanted to be Mommy, the only Mommy.”

pick up your pooo

Scoop It Up or Pay - On Patrol With Enforcers of the Dog Law - NYTimes.com

He could see all the telltale signs of negligent intent: the irritated expression, the hurried pace, the absence of a plastic bag in the pocket. “People who pick up have time,” he said earlier. “You can look at some people right away and say, ‘This person is not going to pick up after their dog.’ ”

When upgrading Wordpress from 2.3 to 2.5 make sure you change your permalink.

My Life and Times › Permalink Settings — WordPress

Customize Permalink Structure

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. A number of tags are available, and here are some examples to get you started.

External Drive NTFS for Macs!

How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X - Stepcase Lifehack

How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X

Updated: from MacFuse 0.1.0 Beta 6 to 0.1.7

Users running Mac OS X with Bootcamp Windows may struggle to modify or update your documents and files in the Windows partition - usually it is in NTFS File System format which you can read the drive natively in Mac OS X but not write onto it.

Recently Amit Singh, a Google employee, releases a implementation called MacFUSE which makes it possible to use any FUSE (File-system in USErspace) file systems in Mac. And the most useful FUSE is the NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver, which ables system to load NTFS with read and write capability. This is truly the greatest news for dual booting Mac OS X and Windows XP or Vista.

Without going into great deal of technical details and compilation of the source code, I found out users around Internet already came up with binary version (in DMG) of MacFUSE and ntfs-3g, ready to install (credit to ShadowOfGed at AppleNova). Here are the instructions on how to use MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. It does require a little of administration skills as it involves running commands in the Terminal.

MacFUSE/NTFS-3G works for me, but as this is an experimental software, so back up your data, and try it at your own risk.

* Download and Install MacFuse 0.1.7 DMG

This works great! I use it for my laptop to connect to my image drive!

How to scale twitter

Scaling Twitter redux--the ESB should be your best friend | Negative Approach - CNET News.com

Scaling Twitter redux--the ESB should be your best friend
Posted by Dave Rosenberg 1 comment

As we Twitt-iots sit around bemoaning the fact that we can't send each other useless junk on a flaky service, I thought I would take this chance to address the notion that this message-scaling problem is new.

It's not. It's very common, and it can be solved.

Scaling a messaging platform is why IBM sells a boatload of MQ series, why the AMQP protocol was developed, and why JMS is nearly ubiquitous. Pretty much every large enterprise has similar scale issues related to messaging, especially in financial services. But they don't have downtime, and if they did as frequently as Twitter, the people behind them would all get fired.

This is a topic I actually know something about. (Disclosure: my company develops an open-source enterprise service bus, or ESB, called Mule.) All of our use cases involve some kind of complicated messaging architecture, whether it be Web-service based, publish and subscribe, one to many, direct connection, etc. And most deal with data transformations and a vast array of protocols.

In my view, what Twitter needs is to adopt a bus-type of architecture that separates the transport from the application and uses a middleman to process the transactions. This is a very common enterprise scenario that needs to be applied. This is what an ESB does.

publish and subscribe!

Sars Information

Damn Interesting

The Heroes of SARS
Written by Matt Castle on May 23rd, 2008 at 1:00 am

On 21 February 2003, a physician in Hong Kong was feeling particularly unwell. He must have had an inkling that something serious was amiss, for his symptoms closely matched those of a number of patients he had treated in recent weeks: fever, aching muscles, headache, a dry cough, and shortness of breath. An alarmingly high proportion of these people had become critically ill, with inflamed, fluid-saturated lungs. Breathing was rendered somewhat difficult, and death frequently followed.

hi sir

hi sir this is a test blog! sorry i am testing my software

How many month's is each belly?

Just like when i finished colleged!!

Degree no job guarantee in China - Los Angeles Times

WUHAN, CHINA -- Sun Yuanping skipped her college graduation ceremony for a job interview. It was an all-day affair and the bookish 22-year-old felt good about it. After all, she has degrees in marketing and botany from a well-regarded school in this central Chinese city, and she ranked in the top fifth of her class.

Sun never heard back from that prospective employer nor from dozens of other companies and government agencies where she has applied since she graduated in June. Recently, after tearful self-reflection and long nights tossing in bed, she pared down her expectations and began sending her resume to small businesses offering salaries as low as $140 a month, a third of what she had hoped to make.

As each jobless day passes and Sun lives off a $100 monthly allowance from her parents, she feels more and more guilty.

Free Business Book Online!

Free business book is Web sensation - Yahoo! News

NEW YORK - The Oprah touch doesn't just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman's "Women & Money" were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey's television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, http://www.oprah.com, for a period of 33 hours.
ADVERTISEMENT

"I believe `Women & Money' is the most important book I've ever written," Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. "So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer."

The download offer "has built excitement for Suze's book across all formats," Julie Grau, the book's publisher, said in a statement.

Go Rate Cut!

Stocks Rise on Rate Cut Hopes: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

"Anticipation of another Fed rate cut is the main magnet in the market today," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.

He was skeptical the gains would stick -- anything the Fed decides after its two-day meeting lets out Wednesday could be met with disappointment. If the rate cut is small or nonexistent, the market will likely be unsatisfied; if the cut is wide, the market may worry the economy is worse than it thought.

"If we do rally into a Fed rate cut, we have a lose-lose situation," Goldman said.

And traders who bet on the Fed's next move were pricing in a more than 80 percent chance of a half-point cut.

Living in the great depression

Shesh. reading all these articles sure puts things in perspective!

Money tales from the Great Depression

 

"FDR declared a bank holiday after he first became president. When it was over, the bank that my parents had some savings in failed Ñ it was gone. They lost all their savings Ñ about $1,000. Even as a young kid, I could understand this was a serious thing.

"Then my parents started having trouble paying their mortgage. Congress had passed a law setting up the HOLC (the Home Owners' Loan Corporation). You had to apply to them, and I remember my mother going down every day to the office of the HOLC to try to get them to give us relief Ñ to lower the payments on the mortgage Ñ similar to what they're talking about today, but for different reasons. One day my mother came home and said, 'They approved our application.' She broke down and said, 'We're not going to lose our house.' That was 1934; I'm going on 87. I was a young kid then, but I can still remember it clearly.