I found an interesting piece of news in my inbox today: OpenOffice.org is going to release yet another set of African locales, namely Sango, Lingala, Luganda, and English (Ghana). I was not aware this open office project in the first place so now that I read more about it I feel obliged to spread the word around. OpenOffice.org is free software that anyone can download and it is compatible with other major office suites. The interesting thing is that the project is taking into account locales in African languages and their impressive list of available locales is only growing. Here’s what it means in practise - the quote is from a mailing list:

[...] in the long term it means that they can now create documents correctly tagged as having being written in that language. For most Africans who do not have locale support for their language they will traditionally write the document in their language while the computer assumes it is written in American English. While this works it is causing inestimable long term damage; search engines cannot find Lingala documents, we cannot draw text from Sango documents to help build spell checkers or do language research. But now for these languages and for users using OpenOffice.org they can create documents correctly labeled and in the future help researchers and users of their content access it correctly.

If you know anyone who might not be able to afford a MS Office Suite or other rather expensive available software, let them hear about OpenOffice.org!

I had to use my old - unprotected - laptop for some time and the unthinkable happened: my computer was attacked by Worm.VBS.Solow.a.

These things always happen to someone else, not you. For some painful hours I though I had lost all  the work of the past few days, not to mention all the old precious data that I have only in that laptop and from which I cannot remove it. After the first cold sweat, here it was again, that feeling of catharsis lurking! After all, when you lose data you lose data and life goes on… Is it not good from time to time to inventory all that irreplaceable data and properly clean the house? 

As a remedy I downloaded a free trial of a security programme and let it scan my computer, with the following results: 9 viruses and 39 spyware. It’s no news that we are deprived of privacy with the internet but what is more alarming is that this anti-virus programme ”took over” my laptop memory and slowed it down really badly.    

With the kind and patient help of my friend *T* I finally have my Amharic keyboard up and running. I had actually installed the software (Tavultesoft Keyman 6.0) a long time ago  and it worked very well from day one - it was the letter stickers that were the the real challenge. The stickers that I had ordered from the US did not match with the Keyman mapping and I had to cut all those tiny letters out and relocate them on my keyboard. In the end we had around 15 letters in the sticker mat that were not needed at all because the Keyman software functions with a relatively uncomplicated input method of key combinations, i.e. there is no need to have such a large number of letters glued to the shift location on the keys.

Now my laptop keyboard really looks like a script salad with green Arabic and golden Amharic letters. If I ever decide to learn yet another non-Roman script I’ll need a keyboard with extra large keys! It’s time to put this keyboard facility now into practise and send surprise e-mails to my Amharic-speaking friends… they still have to cope with my very elementary written material though. For reference, read Eugene Ionesco’s Lesson and you know what I mean!