Posts tagged with “Diction”

May 04

Who Needs Information - May 2010

With a few days spare and bored with killing Greeks and Macedonians in RTW Gold I have been experimenting more with programs that organize information. Thailand is more or less shut, my Philippine validations lapsed, so nowhere to fly.

Zim is one program that I've spent some time getting used to. It lacks some features (automatic index of child pages for each parent) that I'd like but overall it is a useful personal wiki. I'm using the Macports version: reasonably stable. The HTML export works well. I'm mainly using Zim to support my aviation studies (tooling up for my trip to USA).

I have installed a minimal Debian 5 in VMWare. I did the normal install from a debian-504-i386-netinst.iso but then didn't add any groups of programs so that I started with the base system. This means that it only has the programs that I want. So far:

  • xorg
  • xdm
  • fluxbox
  • nedit
  • diction
  • links
  • links2 (first time using this, and I like it)
  • zim
  • rpncalc
  • dc
  • ruby
  • kernel headers
  • make
  • gcc 4.1
  • psmisc
  • plus of course what these depend on.

I installed VMWare Tools so that I could work with a reasonable resolution. Tools compiled and ran without any errors so I have a screen that almost fills my Macbook Pro screen.

I'll need to root around to find some of my old scripts to get it all as I want. I might even try getting xdmshutdown working again. I have another working Linux on my old desktop drive so I might get that up and running again as well.

I have a running BeOS 5, and a Haiku to play with in VMWare so I'll not be bored. But I plan to leave that fun until after I return from the USA.

05:38 PM | Tags: , , , , , ,
October 06

traveling in style

When I write I try to check the readability of my work. I use GNU style for this task. Style analyses a document, including sentence length and other readability measures. It comes with the program diction that identifies wordy and commonly misused phrases.

Install MacPorts by downloading the Mac OS X package and running the installer.

Install diction using the port command.

Use:

/opt/local/bin/style [/path/to/the/file/you/want/check]

If you want to avoid using the full path to style each time then you could add /opt/local/bin: to the path in .bash_login in your home folder.

I use a UNIX filter in TextWrangler to send either the whole document or selected text to style for checking. Put it in the Unix Filter folder of TextWrangler and access it from the #!@ shebang menu. Hold down the [Apple] key when you click on a Unix Filter to view filter options.

#!/bin/sh@<br>
# TextWrangler sends the whole document or selected text to style@<br>
# -p outputs passive sentences@<br>
/opt/local/bin/style -p "$1"@
01:30 PM | Tags: , , ,