Here’s a list of tips, tricks for the Amazon Kindle. These have been checked on a Global Kindle (software version 2.5) They may work on the original Kindle and Kindle DX and the new version 3 UK Kindles.
Keyboard Shortcuts: For a quick game, press Alt+Shift+M – Start a game of Minesweeper. While in the Kindle Minesweeper game you can press G for a version of “Reversi”

To take a screenshot: Alt-Shift-G – Take a screenshot of the currently displayed screen. A .GIF file will be created in the \documents folder (plug the Kindel into your computer to see them).

Hope this adds even more to the entertainment value of your Kindle.

I’ve recently got involved in assisting a couple of people with their web sites.

However pretty they are, some basic problems seem to be repeating themselves in simple technical aspects of web site construction.

So, here are a few top tips:

1. Make sure that the site can be reached with both www. and non-www urls. e.g. you can get to this site as http://www.dragonthoughts.com/blog or http://dragonthoughts.com/blog. I’ve seen a lot of sites, including some IT contract agencies, who don’t do this and show an error page instead for one form of the URL.

   Why is it important for your web site to work with www and non-www?
   Some people think they need to type in the www, others omit it, but if a customer reaches an error page, saying that the site isn’t there, then they may move onto another web site that does work.

2. When you register alternative domain names, to protect them for the future, they should all take you to the relevant web site, e.g. http://iwoty.com leads to the same site as http://ImWorseOffThanYou.com as well as http://ImWorseOffThanYou.co.uk etc. Many registrars leave them pointing to default page that their host uses for advertising their hosting services, instead.

In my capacity as an invited expert to the world wide web consortium (with specialisation in internationalisation, I had some involvement in the creation of the specifications of, “Requirements for Japanese Text Layout” a technical document amounting to around 174 pages in the English edition and almost 200 pages in Japanese. This is now a definitive guide for Japanese text layout, both on the web and in paper form. It was formally published on 4th June 2009. Unfortunately, I didn’t contribute enough to get editorial credit

As Richard Ishida said,

This document describes requirements for Japanese layout realized with technologies like CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. For non-Japanese speakers it provides access for the first time to a wealth of detailed and authoritative information about Japanese typesetting. The document is mainly based on a standard for Japanese layout, JIS X 4051 and was written by key contributors to that standard. However, it also addresses areas which are not covered by JIS X 4051.

A flaw in the stylesheet at www.islandreefjob.com seems to prevent Firefox from loading the job application videos cleanly.

Although the promoters of “The best job in the world” in Queensland Australia seem to have fixed most of their problems, it appears that the designers of www.islandreefjob.com have failed to get their site fully working with Mozilla Firefox 3, although it does work well with Google’s Chrome browser and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Some of the CSS is broken. The w3C CSS checker shows the following errors:

URI : http://www.islandreefjob.com/stylesheets/container.css
17 html Property overflow-y doesn't exist in CSS level 2.1 but exists in [css3] : scroll
180 #animated_title Value Error : margin only 0 can be a length. You must put an unit after your number : 0 auto 27

These errors may be the cause of the embedded youtube videos failing to fully load or play, although of course it may be some other flaw. I hope that the webmasters for www.islandreefjob.com get this technical fault completely resolved very soon, so that they don’t continue to exclude Firefox users from applying to go to be an Island caretaker in Queensland.

Apparently Japanese telecoms companies are trying to convince the world that written Japanese does not already have enough characters.

These additional characters are used to depict emotions and other symbols in a similar manner to SMS emoticons.

Rather than being combinations of characters, such a , which is entered as a : followed by a ) ,  to represent a smiley in the Latin character sets, there is a movement to create a whole range of  new symbols, into Unicode, which include colour and animation.

At present, they are exchanged in SMS messages by using privately agreed character codes, but there is pressure to add these new emoji ideographs into the Unicode specification.

Some of the key problems that adding Emoji to the Unicode standards would present include:

1. Adding shapes to Unicode, which has carefully remianed indepentant of how glyphs are drawn
2. Adding colour requirements to Unicode, which again has had no logical need to specify colours for characters
3. Adding the concept of animation definitions to characters, which is well outside the range of a character set definition

I’ve recently been testing a new broadband line speed checker called Isposure. The download is free and the speed tester is easy to install on Windows PCs.

It is unobtrusive while running and seems to provide accurate speed results for my ADSL connection. Isposure provides charts of your connection’s behaviour and the ability to compare it with other local providers, presumably based on collated speed statistics of other Isposure users.

This doesn’t suprise me particularly, as one of the authors of the software was a former colleague of mine, who was a particulary skilled developer.

If you’re interested in trying the product it can be downloaded from Isposure.com. When you are installing, you can use the promotional code “Luke Jagger”.

It is so good to see a simple, free broadband speed checker that does what it says and doesn’t try to sell you anything.

At the recent W3C Technical plenary in Cannes, I was discussing issues of literal translation. A Japanese delegate came up with a phrase that was new to me. “緑の黒髪 （みどりのくろいかみ）” The phrase literally means green/black hair, but has an idiomatic meaning that the hair is very dark and lustrous.

Debian release a new version of Linux on 23^rd October 2008.

As I run an Apache testing web server on my Debian box, I installed the most recent updates. Then came the simple question of How can I be sure that I have the most recent version of Debian Linux.

The simplest way is to open the file /etc/debian_version . On a correctly installed Debian System, this has a single line entry showing the version number, as defined by the package base files.

Many thanks to Dragon for overseeing a smooth domain transfer of  www.mrpillow.co.uk   from edirectory’s servers at freecom.net over to united hosting.

This was tricky operation because the IPS tags appeared to be in the ether while both parties were attempting to serve DNS !

No problem for Dragon  who also created a new index file for mr pillow and  ensured that the www does not need to be typed in to find the website.

Thank you – Peter (Mr Pillow)

In the article Enabling “Send To” from Microsoft Office to Mozilla Thunderbird I wrote about restoring the Send To email recipient link from within applications.

Microsoft Windows Vista also seems to lose the right click on a file for “Send To mail recipient”. This is another MAPI problem, and appears to be a problem for many mail applications including Outlook, as well as Thunderbird, so conspiracy theorists won’t be able to blame this on Micro$oft protectionism for their own email programs.

I looked at several solutions for restoring the missing link. The best solution that I found was in the article “Restore missing Mail Recipient entry to the Send To menu in Windows Vista“, where Ramesh Srinivasan suggests 3 approaches.

The simplest approach restored the send to link for me on Windows Vista, and used his simple automated tool at: //www.winhelponline.com/fixes/

I still haven’t worked out why I lost my send to link from my file manager in the first place – I assume it’s just a vagary of Vista following one of the many updates.

Having again hosted a pair of Japanese students, who are learning English, it still amazes me how they cope with the vagaries of English spelling.
Just when they were leaving, I remembered a few verses that were designed to try the patience of anyone learning our language.
The verses below have be variously attributed to NATO, in an attempt to get translators to discard an array of accents, to George Bernard Shaw and to a poem written in 1922 entitled “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité a.k.a. “Charivarius” 1870 – 1946. I suspect that the version presented here, is an updated edition of “Charivarius” as the original contains some fairly antiquated wording.
Regardless of their original source, it is an amazing achievement for a non-native speaker of English to read these verses intelligibly.

English is tough

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation — think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough –
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

I recently obtained a copy of a Java IDE that calls itself “J Creator Pro”. Considering that Java has native Unicode support, I was amazed to find that J Creator Pro does not.

It only supports a handful of character sets, such as ASCII, ISO8859-1, ISO8859-2 and a few Mac encodings. Obviously the developers of the product are unaware that there is any non-Latin character set. Since my existing source includes some Japanese, the IDE was completely unable to recognise the characters from UTF-8 files.

This hurdle stopped any possible testing, and has create an impression that the product should be called “JCreator very amateur“.