More Mandarin Resources

Been catching up on my Mandarin homework and trying to get my writing up to scratch. First task – put together some tools to capture short phrases for reading/writing exercises via worksheets. Already having done some work to capture my lecture notes via LaTeX, it seemed appropriate to knock something together with a Python/LaTeX combination.

So – the initial sketch is done and I’ve put it all on my mandarin repo at github. I’ve also copied the TeX and PDF files for anyone without a Linux setup ready to reproduce the whole workflow for themselves.

One itch left to scratch – I had to drop back to Emacs to edit this, since I’ve got the input tools set up nicely to switch via Ctrl+8/Ctrl+9 between English and Pinyin input. Works flawlessly for Emacs. However, getting Vim to play ball with it’s modal editing style is a more interesting challenge. Number of keen Vim users that have English as a native language and want to write in Chinese? Relatively few that I have found so far.

Links

• https://www.purpleculture.net/chinese-practice-sheet/
• https://chanind.github.io/hanzi-writer-data/#25105

Clang Powertools

Context : following episode 103 of Jason Turner on ‘Learning Modern C++’ on a Windows 10 laptop. In theory, having installed MS Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, plus the LLVM tools, plus the Clang Power tools, cppcheck and a couple of other extensions, typing C++ errors should automatically give clang-tidy warnings and fixes. Nope.

Just get a bunch of errors on triggering the clang-tidy in the output window stating that the .ps1 (power shell?) script in the psClang extensions project cannot overwrite variable HOME because it is read-only or constant. Googling doesn’t get me very far. Also – the features that were in existence in the GUI when JT’s video were made have shifted.

Just another day in open source software world where features evolve so fast, but they’re not really easy to make sure they will continue working.

Could be a setup/permissions issue to do with my work laptop, so next task is to try and reproduce on another Windows 10 box, ideally one with a standard installation. Can we do this from Linux with Virtual Box (at least for the purposes of testing? Perhaps – but a task for another day.

First check was to dust off an old Acer laptop with a (albeit very slow) standard Windows 10. Repeated the installs of MS Visual Studio, clang powertools, clang format, cppcheck, plus LLVM. This time get the warnings, but not the fix option, and more significantly, don’t get nearly as many of the warnings as Jason did.

Time to see if I can run the clang tools independently for linting from the command line on linux (I assume the clang powertools and clang format VS code extensions are just wrappers over clang CLI tools).

Fixing up an Acer laptop

I bought my son a laptop a couple of years ago. Bad buy. Cheap Acer with enough preinstalled junk to be too slow to use usefully, and nowhere near enough graphics capability for games. Tried repurposing with a dual boot Linux config (linux-lite) but never really found anything helpful to do with the machine. Rule of thumb, buy top end machines less often and not budget machines to throw away.

Machine specs for reference : ES1-531 model number N15W4. Dual-core N3050 Celeron 1.6GHz CPU with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, 500GB HDD, DVD drive, 1366×768 screen, Gigabit ethernet and WLAN/BT, USB 3.0, HDMI and some kind of unspecified Intel graphics built-in.

Before I try again, I want to preserve the possibility of leveraging the Windows 10 license in future, for which I will need the license key because I’m likely to reinstall from a fresh ISO to avoid the Acer factoryware junk.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-install-windows-10-in-a-vm-on-a-linux-machine/

Linux lite is based on Ubuntu (xenial 16.05) – so “sudo apt-get install acpica-tools” to inspect the contents of the ACPI table (some non-volatile BIOS-like memory) via “acpidump -n MSDM” which works beautifully. So – ready to flash the disk and see if we can get some faster performance from a stripped down fresh Windows ISO install and perhaps Sabayon Linux.