WeSay

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted but that does not mean we haven’t been active. I’ve added a new task to collect words by semantic domains. There is substantial evidence that we organize words in our minds in a network of relationships. Words tend to cluster in groups that we call semantic domains. People can [...]

A couple weeks ago, a potential user approached us wanting to use WeSay to keep a simple dictionary of words he had encountered while language learning. Right away, he wrote back and said he needed the entries in the dictionary view to be sorted. He also asked us to speed up the ability to find. [...]

One of the goals of WeSay is to support user interfaces in languages with scripts that require complex shaping. Microsoft Windows has the ability to render complex scripts using their shaping engine called Uniscribe. However, some languages, such as Burmese, are not yet supported by Uniscribe. SIL has Graphite technology that deals with this, but [...]

Since it’s been awhile since we’ve blogged, I figured I’d give a little status report. We just finished getting the dashboard task to be functional. The dashboard displays the current task as well as a list of available tasks that the user can select. It also provides a short description of each task and some [...]

Thanks to Cathy, we now have a revamped skin on our wiki. We also have acquired wesay.org so update your bookmarks. I have been working on two areas of WeSay. The first is our data access layer. Db4o provides a read only IList when queried. In the prototype, I had wrapped that result and provided [...]

After two discouraging days of trying to get Mono to work on the OLPC image, I have finally figured out why I was up against such a brick wall. The first problem I had was that the Mono installer for linux only provides bindings for GTK+2.4 and we have been using GTK+2.8. After unsuccessfully trying [...]

Thanks to Martin, I finally was able to get pango to use the graphite engine. I had to install the debs that he gave me (as far as I know they haven’t made it to a universe repository yet). My attempt to download the source, compile and install it led to frustration, first because pango [...]

One of the things that’s been bugging us for the past couple weeks has been performance. Sure it’s fast on our machines but what about our target machine. There is quite a difference there. So I was finally able to get a Linux distribution (Ubuntu 6.06) on an old Dell Latitude CP M233XT (Pentium II [...]

Our prototype is finally starting to shape up. I spent the past few days figuring out how to do lazy loading into a GTK TreeView. Normally, you would pass all the data to the TreeStore which would then be the container that the TreeView would display but we wanted the data to stay in the [...]

Now that I’ve finished with the big tasks related to getting our web presence up, I finally got to code some today. Mainly about getting my process down, I installed NUnit and began creating a class to help John determine how long a process takes only to find that .NET 2.0 introduced a class already [...]