I was interested in the excellent price for the Vixen VMC110L astronomy starter telescope.
For more information on Vixen, here is their telescope page.
Vixen Telescopes
January 3rd, 2012Google translate not
October 6th, 2010I placed a few stanzas by a Mexican poet in Google translate and requested French. The end of the second stanza was bizarre. Same oddity in German. And in Italian. And in Russian. After several languages had been sampled I noticd a few other oddities but none as striking. Then I finally translated to English: and there they all were – the most glaring and the oddites.
My only explanation is that Google is ‘translating’ to English as a lingua franca and then to the target language. But even Spanish to Portuguese? To Italian?
The kicker is in the translation to the cognate romance language Romanian: Google is stumped by its own English error and throws the preposition “off” from the English error into the Romanian giving
off la război
for
la pena en guerra
from its tortuous
off to war
No doubt a Google sympathizer will correct the English gaffe – but I have some other gems …
[update 2011-01-20 no change at Google translation]
Curl pre element
October 5th, 2010While working on a home.curl homepage for my Ubuntu linux netbook, I happened upon a Curl error which prompts this reminder.
In a Curl homepage, if you add text which includes # or | as characters, just wrap the whole text in |” and “| as ‘raw’ or literal text. Do this even if you are intending to place that text in a
{pre }
element.
An example might be
{pre
|”
# next is from ps -ef | grep sh
“|
}
Whitespace and {pre }
October 4th, 2010If you are editing a “raw” Curl 7.0 text page, such as a local homepage, e.g., home.curl, you may find that when you add a {pre some-text} to your text page, that any leading whitespace in your some-text is lost.
The simplest solution that I know is to just add a backslash in front of one of the leading spaces. With that simple addition, all of the other leading whitespae is respected.
Remember, all that you need for a local Curl page to be a web page is to have
{curl 7.0 applet}
in the text at the top of the page.
Curl as markup
July 16th, 2010Curl shares some features of XML and XHTML as compared to HTML.
Curl is extensible: the user is able to add new tags for markup either as text formats or as text procedures.
Curl does have a root “element” which is an implicit TextFlowBox when no root element is given.
Curl elements must be nested: BOLD this italic is not allowed at all. In that example the bold overlaps the italic as if we had <strong>this <italic>is not </strong> allowed<italic> wherein the elements overlap rather than been nested (allowed in HTML but not in XHTML.)
But in well-formed Curl there is no sense of “closing” empty elements with an end tag as there are none: {br} is the rough equivalent of <br>.
Strictly-speaking XHTML does not allow block elements to appear inside inline elements – which affects Curl when adding information for users in an <object> element when the Curl plugin is not available, as OBJECT is not a block element. The same restriction is not obvious in Curl, where most anything can appear inside an element such as {paragraph} and an element such as {link} but even in Curl 7.0 there are limits: {paragraph} in 7.0 resolves to a ParagraphVisual and not a Visual and {link}, as a text-format, resolves to the ParagraphVisual super-class, TextVisual, and only then are the abstract super-classes Visual and EventForwarder (Curl has multiple inheritance and those abstract classes serve as interface declarations (but abstract classes may implement some methods.)
As an extensible markup language, Curl adds markup elements typically through the pre-defined macros {define-text-format} and {define-text-procedure}. In the former, the “base text format” which was used will determine what the macro result is; in the latter case, the typical return value is the non-specific type any but is permitted to be void.
Examples of Curl as a light-weight markup language for text in the humanities can be seen at poets.aule-browser.com
Regular Expressions with Curl
May 16th, 2010An example of using Regular Expressions with Curl can be found at http://regexp.aule-browser.com
The Curl browser plugin from www.curl.com/download/rte is required.
Aule Browsers
May 10th, 2010Think of an Aule as an entryway to a complex of buildings. If you get lost, you should be able to return to see a trace of your steps – but that trace should be on your computer only. This is very different from a web browser “history” – for along the way you may nave made some notes.
An Aule Browser might be a research browser focussed more on e-texts than web pages.
Or an Aule Browser might permit viewing confidential materials with no facility for copying.
At the moment an Aule Browser uses a Curl wrapper for another browser engine – on Windows, the Trident engine.
In the longer term, we hope to have a wrapper for WebKit.
An Aule Browser is most often a Curl page generated by a web server: think of it as a very special web page that allows you to open a customized browser on your desktop.
For examples, visit http://aule-browser.com