He did what?!!!

I was lukewarm at best already. Samantha Power got me interested, but her candor and common sense made her a campaign liability. Then there’s Barry’s religious pandering on faith based initiatives and death penalty posturing. And now he’s joined the Beloved Leader’s piss fest on the Constitution. Talk about flip-flops:

I have consistently opposed this Administration’s efforts to use debates about our national security to expand its own power, whether that was in regard to the conduct of the Iraq war or its restrictions on our civil liberties through domestic surveillance programs or suspension of habeas corpus. It is time to restore oversight and accountability in the FISA program, and rejecting this unprecedented grant of retroactive immunity is a good place to start. Giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies is simply wrong. Thankfully, the most recent effort to pass this legislation at the end of the legislative year failed. I unequivocally oppose this grant of immunity and support the filibuster of it. I have cosponsored Senator Dodd’s proposal that would remove it from the current FISA bill and continue to follow this debate closely. In order to prevail, the proponents of retroactive immunity still have to convince 60 or more senators to vote to end a filibuster of this bill. I will not be one of them.

This Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. When I am president, there will be no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens; no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime; no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. Our Constitution works, and so does the FISA court.

–Senator Barack Obama, in a mid-June, 2008 (!!!) campaign email

This vote speaks volumes more about Obama’s integrity, common sense, and the intelligence level of the voting public who seem to blindly accept this, than a thousand monkeys could churn out, writing thousands of blog postings for a hundred years. Well, he was never my candidate to begin with, so I can’t say I’m heartbroken, or even the slightest bit disenchanted.

Just sorry to see my cynicism confirmed so decisively.

What was that George Carlin line? Something like, “I’m proud of the freedoms we used to have in this country…” Yeah, truth to power, George.

I guess it’s gonna be more of the same for some time to come.

More Japanese on Linux: Anthy, uim, and Ubuntu (among others)

I still haven’t gotten around to updating the Ubuntu box running Gutsy Gibbon out in the den here in Sterling. It seems to be running just fine with Gnome 2.20.1 and I’m in no hurry to jump to Hardy Heron and mess with my users’ interface experience. So, I went about checking how a few things work in Gutsy, on the odd chance I might want to type something up while here, without firing up the laptop.

I’ve been running the new release of Opensuse on the Thinkpad (post on that to follow, after I spend a little time with it). For the most part, setting up uim for kanji input is about the same across distros (and BSD’s!). I noticed the Opensuse konqueror binary has uim suport built right in, obviating the need for uim-xim, and the concomitant config file hacks necessary to run a mixed gtk/qt environment. Just right click in a text input area in any QT app and select uim under input methods, if you haven’t already made it your system wide default.

I blogged on setting up Japanese in Gnome and KDE apps in each other’s environments a while back. Since then, I’ve figured out (stumbled upon) some things to make it easier and much less hacky, but haven’t properly documented my discoveries. Plus, I’ve been lax about going into much detail on uim-gtk-pref settings, since preferences do vary so much. I’ll remedy that with some basic screenshots of what works for me. Feel free to experiment to taste. By the way, I wouldn’t expect much difference in these settings for a given Debian release, or other Ubuntu version, but let me know of any gotchas that might come up.

First things first. I’ll assume you’ve got the requisite packages: uim-anthy, uim-applet-gnome, uim-gtk2.0, uim-xim, uim-utils. Installing these via apt-get, synaptic, what-have-you, should pull in all the dependencies you need. Now all that’s left is to add the uim-applet to the Gnome toolbar, right click on it. and select preferences. NOTE: the GTK applet will work exactly the same in a KDE panel, but there is also a KDE uim applet, if you’re into that.

uim-pref-gtk Global Settings

The Global Settings controls the input method framework, which would be uim in this case. The actual input method here is Anthy. So, this handles turning on any special input framework. Then you can choose to either use Anthy to input kanji immediately, or you can toggle between direct, kanji, or different kanas, or set one of those as the default. Confused? Just try my settings, play a little, and see what changes. Make sure to click apply.

My working Anthy settings in uim-gtk-pref

This menu controls how Anthy behaves once activated from the applet. I start with direct Roman character input, and I can toggle to kanji input via romaji transliteration with shift-space.

Advanced Anthy Setting in uim-pref-gtk

A few more preference settings for Anthy. I like predictive input. You may not.

Area in which to activate an input method and various toolbar applet gimmicks

I usually have different applications open using different languages, so I like to just switch one at a time. One can change input for the whole desktop at once if preferred.

Those other programs: make it work with KDE, QT, X, GoogleEarth, etc.

Now how about those KDE apps like konqueror and k3b? And what about other non-GTK applications, such as xterm and GoogleEarth? In Ubuntu you just have to get uim-xim running and tell XIM (the old X input system) to use the uim settings you’ve been so carefully rigging up. I found an excellent how-to on this for Zenwalk Linux, which helped me get me started. I put this script:

if [ "$DISPLAY" ]; then
uim-xim -engine=anthy & > /dev/null 2>&1
export XMODIFIERS=@im=uim > /dev/null 2>&1
fi

in my .profile. In my case, I first backed up the default .profile and then added the uim-xim startup code to the original. We’re not done just yet.

We want to set the default input method for XIM to uim. This is accomplished by adding:

export XMODIFIERS=@im=uim

to .gnomerc in your home directory. If the file doesn’t exist, just create it. That worked for me.

Check it out

Now we just have to log out and log back in to make sure those configs take effect.
Open konqueror, Google Earth, any old program, and activate Japanese input from
the uim Applet and have at it.

Closing thoughts:
There’s a handy keystroke chart here, for those characters that might be less than intuitive to typists
who haven’t studied advanced linguistics. Who knew the katakana dot was called an interpunct? Makes
perfect sense though, doesn’t it?

Coming Soon:
How to do all this in KDE.
ヒント: It’s not that different. A few scripts in different places. Ho hum.

Feedback
Keep those comments coming! Let me know if this helps, or doesn’t.

Opensuse 10.3 Japanese Input KDE Follow-up

I’m writing this post in konqueror, just for fun. If you managed to get uim and anthy working with the uim-applet in Gnome, KDE apps are almost as easy, and you don’t need to run uim-xim or any other p.i.t.a scripts or bridging hacks, as I’ve described in previous posts. The Konqueror binary I got from the Opensuse repository has uim support built right in. What does that mean? In a text input window, right click, select ‘uim:ja,ko,zh:*’ and then fire up uim anthy the same old way you would for a gnome app. (As I’ve said before, the uim-applet set-up options are too diverse to go into here, but I have managed to do it on Debian, Ubuntu, and Opensuse boxen without straying from graphical user interfaces, so don’t panic) And voila, 日本語! I suppose this would work in a straight KDE environment in any given KDE application (that’s compiled with uim support, of course), although I haven’t tried it that way. By the way, there is a KDE taskbar applet to control uim input, and you can use either it or the gnome applet in KDE. And, please, dear readers, let me know how things work out for you. I’m trying to pass on useful information here. Thanks! では、この切りで。