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Saturday, June 30, 2007

How to cross-platform compile stardict for Nokia N770

I am still staying in S'pore, where Nokia just begin n800 trial session, and the unknown date to sell. Last week, I booked a N800 from Amazon and my wife will goto US to pick up it for me. Interesting, the second day woot promoted Nokia N770 at $130. Wow, what price! So, canceled the 800 and I booked two 770 for my wife and me. What even more interesting is I found online shop all around the world begin to promote the N770, and expansys even deliver to S'pore with lower price. It's OK. The reason I love Nokia internet tablets is they are using Linux as OS, so that I can compile software I am interested in. Although I can only get the 770 next mth, I can not resist to do sth. for it. Due to my native language (Chinese), I think a good dictionary is a good startpoint. Guoyong has write a brief description of how to compile it. It's a great article, however, for a beginner, more details may be better. So, I add several points here.

  1. install cross-platform environment (scratchbox): please follow the instruction to install scratchbox (here)
  2. adjust auto build tools in scratchbox: please refer to this article to add a exectuable script autogen.sh into scratchbox.
  3. download a proper stardict source deb package: the reason to download a PROPER version of stardict is that the latest version need more dependences unsupported on the tablet. It's OK to use older version, as the new eye candy is not very important for me. We can get 2.4.5 from http://packages.ubuntu.com/.
  4. unpackage the source deb and apply patch: after download [dsc] [stardict_2.4.5.orig.tar.gz] [stardict_2.4.5-1.1.diff.gz], untar orig.tar.gz and zcat ../stardict_2.4.5-1.1.diff.gz | patch -p1
  5. modify configure.in in the source to disable some dependences unsupported on scratchbox
  6. modify debian/rules and debian/control in source to help debian package build system work
  7. dpkg-buildpackage

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Shining flash of wordnets

When I was writing papers, choices of words always cause troubles for me, whose native language is not English. WordNets can help me much.

Of cause, WordNets' use is not limited to this scenario. Many guys love this tool, and if you are one of them, I guess you must like Visuwords

Visuwords presents a flash visual interface to wordnets, which can attract your eyes quickly. Now, we do not need to click the dropdown list many times to see synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, and holonyms of a word.

If I get more free time in near future, I may try to integrate Visuwords with stardict.