Tag: work

Hell, world!

Posted by sam – September 3, 2009

I am supposed to learn enough libtool and autotools to package our current library and utilities in a “do it right” way. Some of my favourite things about this task so far:

  • From the libtool manual:

    But of course, that would be too simple, so many systems require that you run the ranlib command on the resulting library (to give it better karma, or something)

  • There’s a libtool demo of a trivial Hello World program & library packaged with autotools. configure.ac and Makefile.am are about 250 lines put together.
  • The program part of the demo is called “hello”, but the library is called “hell”

find-file-other-frames

Posted by sam – August 6, 2009

This post is for emacs users.

Every day I start work by opening a bunch of files in emacs frames. Sometimes they’re all .java, sometimes .cc and .h. Sometimes they’re all the files in some directory. C-x 5 f this.cc, C-x 5 f that.cc, C-x 5 f the-other.cc etc. I could use wildcards, but then all the files would be loaded into the same frame. There must be a better way! The following remaps the bindings for find-file-other frame to a function called find-file-other-frames, which loads one file into the current frame and the rest (found by using wildcards) into new frames of their own. If you only want to find one file, it’s opened into a new frame as usual.

;; a find-file-other-frame that for multiple files opens a new frame for each
;; one except the first
(defun find-file-other-frames (filename &optional wildcards)
  "Edit file FILENAME, in another frame.
  Like `find-file-other-frame', but in the case of multiple files loads the
  first one into the current frame and creates new frames to each of
  the remaining ones."
  (interactive (find-file-read-args "Find file(s) in other frame(s): " nil))
  (let ((value (find-file-noselect filename nil nil wildcards)))
    (if (listp value)
      (progn
        (setq value (nreverse value))
        (cons (switch-to-buffer (car value))
          (mapcar 'switch-to-buffer-other-frame (cdr value))))
      (switch-to-buffer-other-frame value))))
 
(define-key ;; replace the keybindings
  (current-global-map) [remap find-file-other-frame] 'find-file-other-frames)

edit: a perhaps better way to do the last two lines:

(substitute-key-definition
  'find-file-other-frame 'find-file-other-frames (current-global-map))

Flag diacritics

Posted by sam – May 11, 2009

As some readers will be aware, I’ve been “implementing flag diacritics” at my new job. This post is all about what that means.

We have a reader program which reads in morphological transducers and uses them to analyse words. A morphological transducer is a (representation of a) collection of rules about a language’s inflection. For example, if you give the French morphology transducer we have the word déclare it will output:

déclarer+verb+singular+imperative+present+secondPerson
déclarer+verb+singular+indicative+present+firstPerson
déclarer+verb+singular+indicative+present+thirdPerson
déclarer+verb+singular+subjunctive+present+firstPerson
déclarer+verb+singular+subjunctive+present+thirdPerson

From morphology alone we don’t know which of those is right (that’s a matter for another blog post), but those are the only possibilities. For example “déclarer+verb+singular+indicative+present+secondPerson” doesn’t appear because that would be (tu) declares.

Flag diacritics are a way to express long-distance morphological rules. For example, let’s say you have a language with productive compounding (one in which lots of words can form compounds with each other, like Finnish) and in which grammatical suffixes vary according to whether another word is going to be compounded onto them. A simple way to express this is to add a marker to one class of suffixes saying “another noun must be compounded onto this” and not to have it in the other class. In the Sámi morphology there’s something like this going on (but with noun-verb-compounding) and it’s controlled with the following flag diacritics:

@P.NeedNoun.ON@
@D.NeedNoun.ON@
@C.NeedNoun@

As you might have guessed, flag diacritics are always delimited by @-signs. @P.NeedNoun.ON@ means “set the NeedNoun feature to have the value ON”, @D.NeedNoun.ON@ means “if the NeedNoun feature has the value ON, this combination is disallowed” and @C.NeedNoun@ means “clear the value of the NeedNoun feature”. Before support for this was added, the Sámi transducer gave ten analyses for the word láhkaásahus, two of which were:

láhkka+N+SgGenCmp#@P.NeedNoun.ON@ásahit+V+TV+Imprt+Prs+Sg3@D.NeedNoun.ON@#
láhkka+N+SgGenCmp#ásahus@C.NeedNoun@+N+Sg+Nom@D.NeedNoun.ON@#
(# means “word boundary”)

The first one shouldn’t appear at all because first we set NeedNoun to ON (because we’re trying to interpret the ásahus part as a compounding verb which should be followed by a noun) and then disallow it (because we’ve reached the end of the word so we’re not going be compounding any more nouns). The second, however, is ok: first we clear NeedNoun (which changes nothing since it hadn’t been set in the first place), then @D.NeedNoun.ON@ says “NeedNoun must not be set to ON”, which it isn’t. Also we of course shouldn’t be outputting the flag diacritics themselves. The desired output out of those two is therefore

láhkka+N+SgGenCmp#ásahus+N+Sg+Nom#

Out of the ten possible analyses of láhkaásahus six are disallowed by the flag diacritics, so in this case it’s a pretty important rule. For any Sámi enthusiasts out there, the four currently produced analyses are

láhkka+N+SgGenCmp#ásahus+N+Sg+Nom#
láhka#ásahus+N+Sg+Nom#
láhka+N+SgCmp#ásahus+N+Sg+Nom#
láhka+N+SgNomCmp#ásahus+N+Sg+Nom#

Just carrying out my activities

Posted by sam – December 4, 2007

My dad once wrote a column about how sometimes a concept is difficult to translate not because you can’t think of the right expression but because there is none. Even if you somehow find a good way to describe what the original text says, anyone reading it in the target language will still have no idea what’s going on. These situations often indicate hard-to-pin-down differences in the way languages and cultures are.

I’ve started to run into this myself in my budding working life. I’m trying to “fix” the English in a presentation about a tourist resort and struggling with “programme services”. What is that? In Finnish it’s obviously been “ohjelmapalvelut”, but I suspected that in English “programme services” doesn’t mean anything. I googled the term and sure enough all the hits are either Finnish tourism brochure-type things (the top hit was Espoon Matkailu) or something to do with tv companies. Evidently, translators from Finnish have conspired to decide that this concept which apparently doesn’t exist in other languages is to be “programme services” no matter how little sense it makes. But I can’t possibly live with that, it’s just… wrong. So now I’ve agonised over it for maybe half an hour and come up with reworking the sentence completely to use “activity”, a wonderful word that turns up rather a lot in any commercial translation from Finnish to English.

I just hope there aren’t too many more ohjelmapalvelus coming up.