Urmăriţi tag-ul PMAV pentru a descoperi şi celelalte articole din această serie şi citiţi textul iniţial cu explicaţii despre acest demers. Aceasta este ultima temă din serie.

Alice Stoicescu: A scrie corect vs. a scrie astfel  ncat sa s ntzeleaG msjul

Alice a făcut o animaţie care nu se poate spune că nu tratează scriitura digitală (dacă aţi avut această îndoială legată de temele anterioare prezentate). Rezultatul poate fi considerat o lucrare ştiinţifică destul de serioasă, în care autoarea explorează transfigurările prin care trece limba română în era informaţională.

Sunt referiri la calculator şi celebra tastatură cu semne care nu respectă spiritul limbii române, la comunicarea prin mesageria instantanee. Lucrarea insistă pe problematica diacriticelor, aceste semne chinuite în online-ul românesc.

Alice a realizat şi un interesant ghid al limbii “româno-englezo-messengeristică”, ce presupune ignorarea diacriticelor, înlocuirea literelor tradiţionale cu altele, compresia pînă la limita minimă, folosirea excesivă a simbolurilor.

Iată aici fişierul Flash rezultat, dar vă recomand să accesaţi acest link, pentru o rezoluţie mai bună a animaţiei. Nu uitaţi că, din cînd în cînd, trebuie să apăsaţi butonul Play din dreapta sus.

În lucrarea de 45 de pagini, Alice a spus, printre altele:

2.2 De ce sunt importante diacriticele?

Pentru că în limba română se scrie cum se aude. Iar diferența între a și â sau ă, între i si î, între s și ș sau între t și ț îi este evidentă și unui preșcolar.

Pentru că duce la exprimări ambigue.

Pentru că nefolosirea lor denotă lipsă de profesionalism. Citeşte mai departe »

And I’m proud of it. Well, it’s a local Eurovision contest organized by the municipality of the Swedish town of Södertälje and the contestants are school kids. But isn’t it better this way? They wrote the lyrics first and the selected texts were put on music and sung by other students from the same school.

The lyrics are then judged and the ten best are put to music by students from Wendela Hebbe High School music classes and students from the Cultural School. The completed songs are then performed by other students from the afore mentioned schools. Just as happens in the real Eurovision Song Contest we are attempting to acquire an International Jury from as many different Countries as possible…

…said Lars Ahlin, the head of the organizing committee.

My duty was easy and delightful: I had to rate the 10 songs from 1 to 10. You can listen to them below, but by the time you read this my mind would have been made up. Citeşte mai departe »

I noticed a new blog entry by this morning, pulled from the Gmail blog on the Gmail homepage: multiple inboxes in your Gmail account. The post is written by Vivi, software engineer with Google. The feature lets you see more messages in the Inbox view. On your left, you have the original Inbox view and on the right you will see the starred messages. Since they are starred, you considered them as important, hence the feature.

I will use this in conjunction with the sub-labels (aka nested labels) feature and I will have a more personalized Gmail inbox.

You turn this on when you go to Settings - Labs - Multiple Inboxes - Enable. Then you configure the view by going again to Settings - Multiple Inboxes. The panels are pretty easy to configure, you just enter “is:label” or “is:drafts”, for example “is:fosdem” if you want to see messages labeled as “fosdem”. You can have the panels above or below the inbox, if you like.

Thanks, Vivi!

His point is right, but the approach is inappropriate. King Rat found about the CformsII plugin for Wordpress while he was working on a friend’s website. He was not experienced enough to build his own plugin to handle contact forms, but he said to himself: “Hm, why not ruin this one?”

So, he posted this, accusing Oliver Seidel of lying when he claimed that the plugin was open-source. The problem is that Oliver never claimed that Cforms was open-source and he protected his byline all the time in the plugin pages. So, the only problem was that the plugin was promoted through Wordpress Repository, which is a zone reserved for GPL work.

Oliver got mad and he decided to withdraw CformsII from Wordpress.org, stop developping the plugin after version 10.2 and close the support forum.

I am wondering why the guys from Wordpress.org didn’t erased the plugin if they were thinking it violated GPL version 3 and if Mr. Rat is happy now. I would have suggested Rat to contact Oliver first, then write the condemnation letter.

As far as I’m concerned, I was never bothered by the obliggation to keep the credit line, because the plugin was offered for free. I liked the plugin so much that I decided to translate it into Romanian. I would like to see the plugin being developed further and I hope Oliver will reconsider his decision.

UPDATES

• In a recent e-mail I received from Oliver, he says he is dissapointed, not mad and that he made the decisions himself, not forced by Rat or Wordpress.org.
• Elizzza wonders if we can all do something about it. Maybe contact Oliver and ask him to keep a version with no byline on Wordpress.org and a full version on his site.
• Randy believes that removing a plugin from the Wordpress Repository will kill it for the general public. I don’t think so, because there are simple contact forms plugins for the general public. CformsII is very complex and very customizable and you can’t find anything similar on the free net. Plus, there is a comprehensive support section that beats everything I saw in terms of plugins for Wordpress.
• Leandro says he doesn’t like plugins where authors insert their byline. But Leandro can remove that byline if he wants to show users that he doesn’t care about the author’s work and credit. Or he can search for other plugins that don’t do that. Or create his own.

In the latest issue of the e-mail newsletter from Scoop, several journalists express their opinions and concerns about the way the Western media redistributes journalistic work produced by freelance journalists in “smaller” countries.

Ştefan Cândea from the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism comes to a sad conclusion:

Basically, if you want your story published in Western media, in most of the cases you have to accept to give your story for free and not even have your name on the story.

He explains this by revealing the way discussions with the foreign newspaper are led: the talking is often done between journalist and journalist, not between journalist and editor. That’s why the translated or modified article is published without the name of the original author. Citeşte mai departe »

I’ve been waiting for this new version and been following the developments on the Wordpress blog. The new Coltrane versions comes with:

• A new interface for the dashboard (now, you can drag and drop)
• Comment threading (one plugin less)
• Paging (one plugin less)
• Replying to comments right from the dashboard
• Native sticky posts (so, one plugin less)
• Every screen is customizable
• Automatic upgrade of Wordpress with just one click

So, go ahead and download the new version. And if you use the CformsII plugin and speak Romanian, you may need the Romanian translation.

Photo (John Coltrane) credit: Musicartistinterview.com

UPDATE

- More about the new versions and some fears that everything will not work smoothly with the new Wordpress, at Lorelle.

- A working demo with the new version, if you don’t have the possibility to test the 2.7 on your server (user: admin, pass: demo).

Clubcooee is a 3D instant messaging client. I installed it and gave it a try today and I was impressed. It moves very quickly and it has some nice effects and sounds. For the moment, there are only a few rooms created but you can also create your own, although the items for decoration are still limited.

A more technical description from the official blog:

The core of Club Cooee is an innovative and worldwide unique 3D messenger capable of depicting a realtime and live environment on the user’s Windows desktop – without a surrounding programme window.

The lean Club Cooee 3D messenger client simply turns the depiction of avatars, rooms and items into a user-friendly interface in Windows Vista Widget style. But this unique technology also depicts 3D in Windows XP without any problems.

After I entered the International Lounge, I talked to Boris, whose girlfriend lives in Arad. There was another Japanese girl in the room and two other avatars.

If you want to be part of the close beta, comment here or send me an e-mail. I have 10 invitations.