From this piece on John Lennon.  A little shmaltzy but 100 per cent true. I know, rational people don’t get all choked up over asshole millionaire rock stars and baseball players. But I will never forget the shock of hearing the news of Lennon’s death on the radio. Then I saw the bold headlines on the morning paper: LENNON MURDERED, and the accompanying photograph of that now famous scene of the blood soaked ground outside the Dakota. It blew a ten-year old’s mind to read Lennon’s last words to Yoko, through the doorway intercom, “Yoko, I’m shot”.

We had a class trip to Boston that day. Whether it was The Museum of Science, The New England Aquarium, or some old historic building where patriots and Minute Men planned the Revolution, has since faded from my memory. But I remember the bus ride back, sitting in a seat by myself, singing along to all the Beatles and Lennon songs that were playing seemingly non-stop on every radio station.

I sometimes look back on that morning as the end of my childhood, the first time I realized the finality of death. This man had written most of the songs I studied and played over and over on my mother’s scratchy old mono lp’s. I knew trivial details of the sessions where they had composed the White Album, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sergeant Peppers, Magical Mystery Tour and on and on. I knew all the lore around “I buried Paul/Cranberry Sauce” and the controversy over who could be considerd a fifth Beatle: Billy Preston or George Martin. I even vaguely remember the week John hosted the Mike Douglass show with Yoko. It seemed like a joke, but it was real. It happened. They were on all week. And now he was suddenly just gone.

Music hasn’t sucked for the last twenty-eight years. In fact, it seems like all one has to do is poke around the web or look through college buddies’ last.fm lists to find some new, authentic, indy voice, cranking out great music. Most of these groups nowadays are treading along, doing live shows, building their base, hoping to get a snippet of song on the latest iphone ad, or maybe have a tune featured as the wrap-up-loose-plot-ends-rock-video trackat the end of some hot one hour television drama. The music is out there, plenty of it mediocre, much of it great. Some of the up and comers recognize their debt to the Beatles, some don’t. But the influence on all music, particularly pop, is undeniable. The world has only been improved for having John Lennon in it even for his brief forty years.

And there was his activism. He came as close to “the real thing” as I’ve seen someone of his immense fame be. I hear “War is over if you want it. War is over now” , and I believe it. I jumped in the car and headed down to New York City and walked the route of the antiwar protests on a freezing cold day in February of 2003 with several hundred thousand others, believing it.

I watched the goings on that day, the ineffective, marginal ex-hipppies, old socialists, anti-imperialists railing on against corrupt governments and fat-cats, but not so much about Iraq or lying Presidents. Just the same old tired, one dimensional rhetoric I’d heard a thousand times before. It just seemed like these speakers were not capturing the spirit of the day, NO WAR!!! NO BLOOD FOR OIL!!!STOP IT NOW, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!

The demonstrations were joined by people from every walk of life; old ladies, couples with kids in strollers, everyday people who did not want a war. Many of those people were herded by the police away from the demonstration site at the end of the march route, so they never even heard the aforementioned uninspiring speeches.

I lost faith in demonstrations that day. I lost faith in people power. It dawned on me standing there in the crowd, that there would indeed be a war. The only thing about the whole day’s events I heard on the radio were reports about inconvenienced commuters, over-crowded public transportation, closed streets, and the millions of dollars of overtime required by the evil unions to pay the police for maintaining order with all those fascists and anarchists running around. How depressing, My bitterness remains.

However, around this time of year, I look forward to hearing those little children singing along with John and Yoko (yes, Yoko too.) :

War is over if you want it. War is over now! Merry Christmas, everybody!

Gets me every time. Makes me think, “What the hell?! Yeah! Right on!” He believed it then, is it somehow less true now?

Thanks, John.

Just a quick walk-through setting up the Japanese environment on WinXP and friends, for a starting point. I’m using the standard install of WinXP Home that came with my laptop, which I’ve been playing with lately, having just restored the original o.s to a new drive. Nothing special, just a few clicks:

Control Panel >> Regional and Language Options >> Languages

And click the box for “Install files for Asian language support”.

Simple! I leave the various logout/login/reboot cycles up to the reader. To get Japanese input, go back to Languages and click the “details” button under “Text services and input languages”, to add the input methods you want for the various CJK languages. Then some more logout/login/reboot as necessary. It really does use the two-hundred-thirty megabytes of disk space, as promised.

Now I have the MS IME with “EN” (for English) showing in my taskbar. I click it to see my input options. When I need Japanese, I choose “show language bar”. I have my input mode set to hiragana, and I can flip between romaji and kana input with left-alt-shift on my US keyboard.

This setup can be used with firefox 3 and pidgin im, among others.

Now on to some Free and Open Source Software.

Pidgin im works fine with this system, with a few config setting changes. For input, right-click in the message area and select Windows IME under the ‘input methods’ menu. That allows you to write and see kanji. I don’t know if you need to change your default font to a Japanese one like MS Mincho or MS Gothic. It works for me with or without changing the font in Pidgin preferences.

There’s a slight glitch in displaying Japanese from others using legacy operating systems (like Windows 98 Japanese edition) and im clients. The easy way to deal with that is to go to:

Tools >> Preferences >> Conversations

and uncheck ‘show formatting on incoming messages’ to fix displaying kanji on incoming messages. You might need to also change your font for conversations in pidgin preferences. It depends how broken your buddy’s software is (does it use Unicode fonts and proper encoding?), and probably also on the chat protocol. I’ve been chatting on msn this way with friends on Win98 Japanese Edition and an ancient msn client.

This is just a rough run through, of course. Feel free to leave comments here relating your own experience with pidgin. I should mention I found  the ‘disable formating’ tip here and on another guy’s blog post about using Chinese with pidgin and MS IME, which I can’t seem to find at the moment.

Next Time:  Firefox with MS IME (Hint: it will be short, unless, perhaps we get into some mojibake issues with Web 2.0 type annoyances).

It was great to hear the UFO conspiracy crowd going manic explaining to George Noory the implications of having a new president for finally getting the truth out on the government UFO cover up. Hilarious. I can’t wait. As soon as he gets us out of two wars, defeats terrorism while restoring respect for The Constitution and international law, solves the credit crisis, revives the economy…THEN maybe we’ll get to the bottom of this flying saucer business. I hope the kids get to adopt their puppy first.

Next time: My Windows IME explorations with free software.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

I keep the main menus English and a uim applet in the taskbar. That way, I can flip on my anthy input on the fly in most any application I have running. I’m dealing with Gnome and mainly GTK2 applications for now. I’ll write more about KDE and QT later, along with something about dealing with a mixed QT/GTK environment.

Package names? Did I mention I wasn’t expecting to keep that install very long and therefore didn’t pay close attention to package names….Uh Oh. I searched the package manager for uim, anthy, and I think, some combination of gtk and anthy. Also, if you want other languages, like Russian, the m17n-lib package should do the trick. A search of my existing packages gives me these: uim-qt, uim-gtk2, uim, anthy, m17n-lib, kasumi

These are all so far advanced upstream that it is pretty easy to find them in any distro (probably BSD’s too!) without being too nit-picky. Of course, package names and what gets packaged with what may vary between distros.

If you use the uim-applet in Gnome, and want to input Japanese in a QT application, like Konqueror, for instance, it should be as easy as selecting xim for input in the application menu. That is, provided you have uim-xim bridge running. That can be automated with a carefully placed script somewhere in your .kde settings tree. I’ll post again with the script I have on my KDE based desktop, which I’m not in front of at the moment. I got it from a Japanese developer’s blog.

However, just to see if it’s working, use the handy trick of running uim-xim in a terminal with an ampersand, then run Konqueror or whatever QT application from the same terminal and try switching the uim-applet to anthy input. That should allow you to input kanji with anthy in the text areas of Konqueror. Sometimes it’s nice just to see that something can be done first, then it’s easier to get into automating it later.

I won’t bother posting my config files. Just play with the options in the uim-gtk2 config menus; they’re pretty self-explanatory. Once you switch the uim-applet to anthy while a gtk app’s window is active, you can then input hiragana by romaji and then select the proper kanji from the pop-up window. There are too many variations in configuration to go into here. I’ll go into more detail about using anthy, uim, kasumi (a dictionary tool for anthy), and company in Gnome and KDE environments in future posts.