At Vegeets

On last Saturday, we, the member of OFUG, gathered at Vegeets to work for replacing ofug's web site with wordpress. We had done it which we had been longing for for a few years. Although I had been just looking others work...


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Word counter on Opera browser

To improve reading comprehension in English, Reading paragraphs quickly is important.
According to Wikipedia, the average American adult reads prose text at 250 to 300 words per minute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Reading_and_comprehension

When I read articles in English on web site, I want word counter to know the number of words in the articles.
It will be better if it works on my favorite Opera browser.
I tried to find a way to count words on the browser.

Word counter
http://extendopera.org/userjs/content/word-counter

I installed it and It works fine but it is just for counting words in text area.
I want to count words that are not only in text areas but also in plain text.
So I re-write it so that it works as a javascript URL.

javascript:(function(){
/* %s */
var rx=/\r\n/g,rt=/\+/g,nl='\n',w='Words: ',c=' / Characters: ', reTrim = /^\s+|\s+$/g, reWhiteSpace = /[\s\f\t]+/;
var txt= (document.selection?
document.selection.createRange().text:
window.getSelection?
window.getSelection():
window.selection?
window.selection.createRange().text:
document.getSelection?
document.getSelection():
'')+ '';
txt = txt.replace(rx,nl).replace(rt,nl);
window.status=w+(txt?txt.replace(reTrim, '').split(reWhiteSpace).length:0)+c+txt.length;
})()

Here is how to register this script to Opera browser.

1. Press Ctrl-F12 to show Preference dialog and click "Search" tab.
2. Click "Add" and the dialog to register a search engine.
3. Input "Word counter" into "Name."
4. Input "c" into "Keyword." If you have used "c" at Keyword, change it one which is not used yet.
5. Copy the script above and paste it into "Address".
6. Click "Ok"

If you want to count the number of word, select words with the mouse pointer, move the pointer on the selection and click the right button of the mouse. Then choose "Word counter." in the "Search With" item. The number of words and characters are displayed at the below of the browser.

Map shows future

I was stuck in a traffic jam near the sport park. it might be caused by a junior school's sport meeting.
Student's parents bring their children to the park and the road around the park was jammed.

Since the meeting might be planed since months ago, If information about the event were published on the net, Could I have a chance to expect a jam caused by it?
I mean, if I query time and place to search engines with map, Could they give maps that show locations of the events with accurate time?

Then I tried to search my living city name and the time "October 2010" in Japanese, which was "2010年10月", using google maps.
It showed the list of events and the map having markers pointing the place of the events. These locations had good accurate but some these date time was not expected.
For example, April 2010 ("2010年4月"), July 10th 2010("2010年7月10日") and so on.
And I also tried to search using Bing but the result is not what I expect.

As concerned about Google Maps, There are rooms to improve analyzing date information more accurately.
If search engines with map could understand not only where the events occur but also when they occur, we might get more useful information for our lives.

Steve Jobs's presentation

One of my colleagues introduced us a book about presentation techniques of Steve Jobs.
I watched some his presentations because I had never seen it.

His speech is so clear and slow that audiences who are not native English speaker can catch what he says. He looks he doesn't look any memos.

Cellular phone with GPL

I knew that a cellular phone released recently included some software with GNU Public License, which was printed on paper.
I was a bit surprised because it was upexpected for me although it could be thought as commonplace.

Japanese translation is following.

最近(さいきん) 出(で)た 携帯電話(けいたいでんわ) には GNU バブリック ライセンス の ソフトウェア が 含(ふく)んでいること を 知(し)りました。ライセンス は 紙(かみ) に 印刷(いんさつ) されていました。

当(あ)たり前(まえ)のことと考(かんが)えられますが、私(わたし) に とって 予想外(よそうがい) の ことだったので、少(すこ)し、驚(おどろ)きました。