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How in Windows 7 multiple windows can share in one screen, and multiple screens in one window

2012/05/23 Leave a comment
  1. The windows management improvement I use most in Windows 7, in order to view multiple windows simultaneously (after introduction of preemptive multi-tasking in the late 80s, the operating system was renamed from MS-DOS to MS-Windows, not to “MS-Window”) is the snap-to-edge which you can access
    1. either by “throwing” your window (drag the title bar) to the left or right edge of your screen (top or bottom will maximize or minimize your window);
    2. or if you rather use the keyboard, image + left/right arrow (+ up/down arrow will maximize or minimize your window). Keep pressing the combination and you will cycle the window position. Note that this works also across dual-screens.
  2. Also a welcome relief: In Windows 7 dual screen environments, you can drag and drop maximized windows between screens.
    1. The fact that you could not in Windows XP (where you have to de-maximize the windows first before dragging it) has caused much confusion wherever I introduced multi screen computers for teachers;
    2. in spite of the fact that you could not drag a maximized window away in the single screen environment that our users are more accustomed to.
    3. Guess I can now rather focus on upgrading a 11-year old OS to Windows 7 than on coming up with a more memorable explanation. Actually, people are currently raving about the dual-screen management improvements in Windows 8, but I that will take a bit longer to trickle through. 
Categories: audience-is-teachers, Presenter-Computer Tags: , ,

Java IDE for NLP with DkPro – A running log.

2012/05/19 2 comments
        1. UPDATE: dkPro has been updated, see the comment below by the dkPro Project Lead.
        2. MyLyn Web Connector 3.8 for Eclipse Indigoeclipse-mylyn-webconnector-dkpro
      1. I next got an error (“Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
        Software being installed: Mylyn Incubator SDK (Incubation) 3.8.0.I20120414-0402 (org.eclipse.mylyn.experimental_sdk_feature.feature.group 3.8.0.I20120414-0402)
        Missing requirement: Mylyn Tasks Connector: Web Templates (Advanced) (Incubation) 3.8.0.I20120414-0402 (org.eclipse.mylyn.web.tasks_feature.feature.group 3.8.0.I20120414-0402) requires ‘org.eclipse.mylyn_feature.feature.group [3.8.0,4.0.0)’ but it could not be found
        Cannot satisfy dependency:
        From: Mylyn Incubator SDK (Incubation) 3.8.0.I20120414-0402 (org.eclipse.mylyn.experimental_sdk_feature.feature.group 3.8.0.I20120414-0402)
        To: org.eclipse.mylyn.web.tasks_feature.feature.group [3.8.0,4.0.0)”), but starting over and updating my MyLyn installations form menu: Help / Install Updates fixed that.
      2. Show Task repositories window: image
      3. Error:  “Query Synchronization Failed _______ Q Failed to parse RSS feed: “Invalid XML: Error on line 114: The element type “meta” must be terminated by the matching end-tag “«meta>”,””
      4. . Well, the Google Code integration is anyways only for users that cannot run Maven. Maybe I can
          • [window /]Preferences -> Maven -> Discovery -> Open Catalog
          • search for “subclipse”
          • clip_image002

         

      5. Install Fails also (“Missing requirement”, again: this time it is “org.sonatype.m2e.subclipse.feature.feature.group 0.13.0.201107071330”), and here we are up the creek with no paddle: You do not want to read a thread on the developer site that ends in ”this must be a bad joke”.
      6. Then there are the heroes (as opposed to process) who make it work nevertheless: To bring back back the SVN SCM handler, extract this to your Eclipse dropins folder.
      7. eclipse-m2e-subclipse-dkpro
      8. Unless of course you suffer from extremely bad timing:
      9. Now to the real getting started
          1. Wait: “First Programming Steps with DKPro Core: This page is currently outdated. We are working on a new DKPro Core release which makes several steps of this tutorial obsolete and changes others (Updated May 8, 2012)”. Can referring to the help provided on the mailing list may bridge that gap for you? Or may this “Setting up Maven and Eclipse for DKPro Core development (Updated May 10, 2012)” currently be the best instruction?
          2. “Go to the Package Explorer in Eclipse [Window->Show View->Other…->Java->Package Explorer] and create new a Maven Project”:
          3. imageimage
          4.  imageimage
          5. Other potential sources of confusion:
          6. settings.xml: There are 2, one in your Maven install directory and one in your .m2e directory – it seems the latter which counts
          7. my .m2e recursed (think ~/.m2e/.m2e) – did I cause this when trying to change its location (which supposedly you can)?
          8. file: nexus-maven-repository-index, in various forms of compression: What is this, and what prevents it from getting downloaded?
          9. maven repositories:
          10. the expansion option for the ukp-oss-releases comes and goes. if I right-click / rebuild index, I even get an error “Unable to update index for ukp-oss-releases”, but afterwards, the expansion option reappears.
          11. You are provided a settings.xml for Maven (m2eclipse) that points to the dkPro online Maven repository.
            1. Which looks like it needs an update to include a pluginrepository for snapshots.
            2. Check you are loading it alright by going to Menu: Window / Preferences / Maven / User Settings: image
              1. You are advised “to check if your Maven and Eclipse are configured correctly, try opening the “Maven Repositories” view in Eclipse, open “Global Repositories” and check if there is a “ukp-oss” folder in it with contents”, like so: image, or else fix your /m2e/settings.xml or Eclipse:
              2. Show Maven Repositories View by going to Menu:Windows/ Show View / Maven Repository: image
              3. Like so: image
              4. You get an overview of updating
            3. image
            4. and finally: image
            5. TBA: what causes the central maven repository to not get resolved?
          13. Build your own project, with guidance from a variety of documents (some need updating) and mailing lists
            1. My attempts to “browse” for the parent when creating my own project have remained unsuccessful: image
            2. I could however use as a model an existing POM.xml that loads a parent: image
            3. Which seems to work, at least if you click “open parent pom”,image
            4. it connects you to the dependency: image
            5. Afterwards, the search feature started working when selecting dependencies: image
            6. For the DkPro version updated 05-28, I also could not browse for parents or dependencies from m2eclipse, but needed to first manually add to my pom.xml (the syntax of which is explained here and here)
              1. the <parent> entry
                image
              2. Managing dependencies from within m2eclipse started to work for me only once I had added manually the <dependencyManagement> entries. This allows for autodiscovery of the snapshot-version (1.4.0 currently) version, whether you add a <dependency> into the pom.xml without <version>, like here: image, or browse for and select the latest released version (1.3.0 – I cannot browse for snapshots). like here:
            7. While I still can only browse for release versions (1.3 currently), the <dependencymanagement> updates
            8. Reminder: Given the current transitional status of DkPro, you need to first enable snapshots like in my settings.xml.
            9. HINTS
              1. You cannot “remove” through the gui-button a dependency that you erroneously added as empty. image Open the pom.xml with a text/xml editor and remove it there, then have the GUI reload the pom. image
              2. See here for some tools that helped me debug my project setup in Eclipse.
            10.   If you cannot use the built-in javadoc help for stanford-corenlp, and/or, when trying to set  up, get “Can’t download JavaDoc for edu.stanford.nlp:stanford-corenlp:1.3.2:javadoc”, this is a known issue, seems to have no resolution currently, but may have one in the future. imageWorkaround: browse the source elsewhere…
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Setting up European Union translation memories and document corpora for SDL-Trados

2012/05/10 Leave a comment
  1. SDL-Trados installation allows the translation program to teach this industry-standard computer-aided translation application . So far, however, we had no actually translation memory loaded into this translation software.
  2. The European Union is a powerhouse for translation and interpreting – at least for the wide range of their member languages many of which are world languages – , and makes some of their resources – which have been set up for translation and interpreting study use here before – available to the community free of charge as reported during a variety of LREC’s.
    1. This spring, the Language Technology Group at the Joint Research Centre  of the European Union this spring updated their translation memory  offer DTG-TM can fill that void at least for the European Languages  that have a translation component at UNC-Charlotte.
      1. We download on demand (too big to store: http://langtech.jrc.ec.europa.eu/DGT-TM.html#Download)
        1. Is the DGT-TM 2011 truly a superset of the 2007, or should both be merged? probably too much work?
      2. and extract only the language pairs with English and the language only the languages “1”ed here : “G:\myfiles\doc\education\humanities\computer_linguistics\corpus\texts\multi\DGT-tm\DGT-tm_statistics.xlsx” (using “G:\myfiles\doc\education\humanities\computer_linguistics\corpus\texts\multi\DGT-tm\TMXtract.exe”)
      3. and convert
        1. English is the source language by default, but should be the target language in our programs,
        2. The TMX format this translation memory is distributed provided in, should be “upgradeable ” to the SDL Trados Studio 2011/2011 SP1 format in the Upgrade Translation Memories wizard”.,
          1. TBA:where is this component?
      4. configure the Trados to load the translation memory
        1. how much computing resources does this use up?
        2. how do you load a tm?
        3. can you load in demand instead of preload all?
      5. Here are the statistics for the translation memories for “our” languages
      6. uncc Language Language code Number of units in DGT – release 2007 Number of units in DGT – release 2011
        1 English EN 2187504 2286514
        1 German DE 532668 1922568
        1 Greek EL 371039 1901490
        1 Spanish ES 509054 1907649
        1 French FR 1106442 1853773
        1 Italian IT 542873 1926532
        1 Polish PL 1052136 1879469
        1 Portuguese PT 945203 1922585
        Total 8 8 7246919 15600580
    2. Would it be of interest to have the document-focused jrc-acquis distribution of the materials underlying the translation materials available on student/teachers TRADOS computers so that sample texts can be loaded  for which reliable translation suggestions will be available – this is not certain for texts from all domains – and the use of a translation memory can be trained in under realistic conditions?
      1. “The DGT Translation Memory is a collection of translation units, from which the full text cannot be reproduced. The JRC-Acquis is mostly a collection of full texts with additional information on which sentences are aligned with each other.”
      2. It remains to be seen how easily one can transfer documents from this distribution into Trados to work with the translation memory
      3.   Here is where to download:

      4. uncc

        lang

        inc

        1

        de

        jrc-de.tgz

        1

        en

        jrc-en.tgz

        1

        es

        jrc-es.tgz

        1

        fr

        jrc-fr.tgz

        1

        it

        jrc-it.tgz

        1

        pl

        jrc-pl.tgz

        1

        pt

        jrc-pt.tgz

      5. The JRC-Acquis comes with these statistics:

    3. uncc

      Language ISO code

      Number of texts

      Total No words

      Total No characters

      Average No words

      1

      de

      23541

      32059892

      232748675

      1361.87

      1

      en

      23545

      34588383

      210692059

      1469.03

      1

      es

      23573

      38926161

      238016756

      1651.3

      1

      fr

      23627

      39100499

      234758290

      1654.91

      1

      it

      23472

      35764670

      230677013

      1523.72

      1

      pl

      23478

      29713003

      214464026

      1265.57

      1

      pt

      23505

      37221668

      227499418

      1583.56

      Total

      7

      164741

      247374276

      1588856237

      10509.96

  3. What other multi corpora are there (for other domains and other non-European languages)?
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, Corpus-linguistics, documentation, English, French, German, Greek (modern), Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Translation, translation-software Tags: , ,

Does Respondus-lockdown–browser block when a user attempts to load a Moodle quiz on 2 different computers?

2012/05/08 Leave a comment
  1. We experienced slowness of Moodle during an exam where about 12 students
    1. load a Moodle quiz into the Respondus lockdown browser (lockdown browser hangs with message "page loading"),
    2. but also already when logging into Moodle with a regular browser (hangs on login page).
  2. Turns out large classes used the Moodle quiz function elsewhere on campus which put lots of load on the Moodle servers.
  3. What can we do on our end to work around this as smoothly as possible?
    1. First, be patient while Respondus-lockdown–browser displays “Page loading”
    2. “Refresh” or “Back/forward” are the next resort once “Page loading” attempt has stopped and the page
      1. states it cannot be loaded
      2. displays an error about missing CSS component (likely due to incomplete load before timeout)
      3. says it “can be loaded only in Respondus-lockdown–browser” while you are in Respondus-lockdown–browser (Huh?).
    3. Keep calm and carry on, i.e. on your current computer.
      1. In general, trying on additional “fallback” computers is likely to make matters only worse, since even more load is put on the Moodle server system.
      2. Specifically, however, does Respondus-lockdown–browser block when a user attempts to load a Moodle quiz in Respondus-lockdown–browser on 2 different computers simultaneously? One student kept getting “can be loaded only in Respondus-lockdown–browser” consistently, until closing Respondus-lockdown–browser on this computer. Then the quiz would finally load in Respondus-lockdown–browser where she was logged in on another computer (can this being tracked by the Respondus-lockdown–browser security layer that checks whether a page is loaded within Respondus-lockdown–browser? Why then no more helpful error message, or is this “Security by obscurity”? Data seems inconclusive).
  4. Additional tips for takers (and authors) of Moodle exams are available.
Categories: assessments, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Glitches&Errors, lms Tags: ,

How you can view the computer screens of your class using Sanako Study 1200

2012/05/04 Leave a comment
  1. Here is a 2.5 minute screencast showing off the different ways how you can view your students’ screens using the Sanako Study 1200, .
  2. from smallest to biggest, all accessible form the button:”screensharing”
    1. first thumbnails
    2. then thumbnails in extra window
    3. finally autoscan 
  3. There will always be tradeoff on the teacher computer between size of individual student screen and overview over class.
    1. for as long as the teacher screen resolution is nowhere near the combined sizes of the student screen resolution;
    2. having the same screen resolution is also desirable, for projecting the teacher screen to the students; multi-monitor teacher stations are a nice compromise.
  4. However, as you can see in the screencast, there a number of nice options that make switching between large size and overview (drilling in and moving back out) easy.
    1. The newer versions of the Sanako (here 5.2) allow you to choose many different student screen sizes.
    2. The newest version of the Sanako (5.4) also allows to fit many students screens on a teacher screen by implementing by letting the teacher scroll through the classroom layout).
Categories: audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, Screencasts Tags: ,

Loading the right classroom file for an exam that uses Sanako

2012/05/04 Leave a comment

exam2 Currently the preferred layout is Exam 2: Choose this when the Sanako starts

Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab Tags: ,

Sanako Study 1200 Version 5 now allows for larger student screen thumbnails, but still limits the classroom layout size

2012/05/04 Leave a comment
  1. The capability of increasing the size of the student thumbnails, to be able to easily read the MS-Word writing student exercises template that I had programmed for Sanako Lab 300 was sorely missed in version 1 and 2 of the Sanako Study 1200 software.
  2. In version 5, the capability to adjust the size has been added.  In Tutor.exe, Go to Menu: tools / preferences / thumbnail-size.tutor-tools-preferences-thumbnail-size
  3. Now, however, the 20 licensed student seats we have, already fill up the entire Teacher software’s screen estate since the software window cannot be spanned across our multi-monitor setup (The Sanako software seems to have this single-screen limitation built-in. Our unusual asymmetric (1280 and 1024) dual-monitor system may have something to do with it).
  4. Fortunately, in the newest version 5.42 for of Sanako Study, scrollbars appear and allow for panning the classroom layout window if there are more student icons/thumbnails than will fit on the screen.
  5. Upgrading to a screen with a larger screen resolution on the teacher computer would be even better.
  6. We  hope to teach up to 30 students (class sizes seem to be constantly increasing, but the LRC also caters to visits of merged class sections which may be even larger than 30 students) in this large classroom setup:
  7. IMAG0113 Stitch (7000x1468)
Categories: audience-is-teachers, classroom-management-system, e-learning Tags: ,

How to play a DVD from the LRC teacher podium

2012/05/04 Leave a comment

dvd av control panel

  1. On the Control panel, click on “DVD”
  2. This makes the DVD controls appear, which include play and FF.
  3. By clicking on “Advanced Controls”, you can access another screen with more controls.
  4. Or you can play your DVDs from the teacher podium computer which is more integrated with the rest of the computer use, and you do not have to walk over to the AV cabinet to insert the DVD. Read in…
Categories: audience-is-teachers, Presenter-Computer Tags: ,