Its not the most user-friendly piece of software, but if you are interested in making your own flashcard sets, check out this post. It includes Unicode support, so Greek cards should not be a problem, provided you follow my guide to setting up a Unicode Greek Keyboard.
Greek students might also be interested in this post on effective vocabulary memorization, and this one about Greek Flash Card systems.
Google is entering the browser wars.
But true to its “Don’t be evil” slogan, Google is not really waging a war. In fact, just last week Google announced that they would continue their support of Mozilla’s Firefox browser until at least 2011.
So why launch a new web browser?
Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
What, more specifically, does Google think it can contribute?
Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.
On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.
In other words, Google’s browser will apparently focus on web applications, rather than on the comparatively “simple” matter of web browsing. This reflects a more general trend towards “Web 2.0/3.0″ and, to bring in another buzz word, “Cloud Computing.” In short: Google anticipates that more and more of your interaction with the computer will actually be interaction with the web. The software you use, the files you store, and the Operating System you run will increasingly be web-based, not hardware-based (Microsoft agrees, by the way). To put the matter even more succinctly, in 10 years Google expects that your web browser will be your OS. I suspect that their release of this new browser is intended to reflect this prophecy, while at the same time assisting Google (in its real war against Microsoft) to fulfill its own prediction. A self-fulfilling prophecy, in browser form.
Will it work? We will see (I personally would like to see a hybrid system—I hope the “cloud” will be grounded in open-source-supported home-hardware). In the meantime, it is encouraging to again reiterate: Google is still supporting Mozilla, and in addition to this continued Firefox support, which serves Google’s own interest (for the time being), they have committed to an open-source model for their own offering:
We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.
This is a good move (and the only legal one available to them, since Mozilla publishes Firefox ‘s code under an open-source license that requires open-source reciprocation).
So how can you get your hands on this technology?
Check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We’ll post an update here as soon as it’s ready.
The only hurdle I can foresee here is the recent controversy Google has had over privacy issues (regarding ad-targetting in Gmail, the Viacom/YouTube controversy, and, of course, Google street-view concerns). But Google makes such good “products,” it’s hard not to trust them.
Read the whole story here.
MS recently released the Beta 2 of their latest iteration of Internet Explorer, and it’s looking pretty nice. It boasts substantially higher security and a wealth of new features (most of which are already available in other browsers).
The most important advance is IE8′s promised standards compatibility (enabled by default). This is huge. Why? Because the code the powers the internet is supposed to comply with certain standards in order to ensure that different web browsers are able to view the same content with comparable success. However, since IE has dominate the browser market (over 90% market share, until recently), Microsoft has somewhat ignored those standards. This means that web developers have to program for two: for IE, and for everyone else.
Several decades (and international lawsuits) later, we have IE8. And it looks good. Here is a balanced review from the folks at Ars Technica. They are generally enthusiastic, though have this interesting criticism:
More disappointing (although not IE8′s fault as such) is just how broken many of Microsoft’s own websites are when forced to use IE8[compatibility] mode…. It would be nice if Microsoft would take a lead here; it will be difficult to convince third parties to update their sites for IE8 if the company cannot itself be bothered to do the same.
Read the whole review.
If you did not catch the last sale, here’s your chance. Microsoft recently released this press release with the details.
Here’s the run down: anyone with a .edu email address is able to get 90% off Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate addition. That’s $60 for Microsoft’s flagship Office product. This is truly a great deal. Ultimate Edition includes everything; you even get Outlook’s business contact manager (complete with SQL server).
If you don’t have a .edu email address, ask for one. Most college’s offer .edu addresses to alumni. And just to be clear, even though the press release implies that this offer is only for students, Microsoft has agreed that anyone with a .edu address can qualify.
Go to http://www.TheUltimateSteal.com to make your purchase. Check out this post for more information, which includes notices about similar sales occurring early September. A list of what you get is available from Microsoft here, or you can check out the (Full Price) produce page from Tiger Direct here.
Finally, without wanting to take away from the importance of this sale, I would feel a little remiss if I did not mention that OpenOffice.org offers a full office suite for free, and is really excellent software (I have both MS Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org, and prefer the latter for a whole host of reasons). I will post more about OpenOffice.org soon, so stay tuned. In the mean time, don’t feel quilty about Office 2007–it’s an incredible offer.
If you use Openoffice.org or run a Linux operating system, saving any document as a PDF is easy. There is also a plugin for recent versions of Microsoft Office that can do this. But what about exporting web pages, or documents created by other software? For this you will need a “Print to PDF” driver. A “Print to PDF” Driver works exactly like any other printer, only instead of actually printing your document it generates a PDF in a folder of your choosing. This is very easy to set up: here are the details.
Linux provides the same functionality. Most distributions include a driver that does this: just go to your printer settings dialog, “Add” a printer, and look for an entry like “Print to PDF.” I’m sure MAC users have something similar, so perhaps one of our MAC readers could post a comment regarding how to set that up.
For those who found my previous post about Microsoft and business models interesting, here is an article of interest. Microsoft is developing a new non-Windows operating system designed to meet the demands of Cloud Computing. Don’t expect the death of Windows anytime soon, though; it takes a long time to transition to new technology (Microsoft’s NT system was around for a decade before Microsoft merged it with Windows XP).
Several factors have contributed to a recent surge among big-name companies in supporting open-source software. Chief among these is the increasing importance of interoperability in a Web 2.0 world. This is true across the board, from big-business capitalism, to the little-guy blogger, to governments around the globe–the world needs its data in transparent patent-free formats.
Microsoft is slowly responding. From Windows Live
to OOXML, to a partnership with Novell, and now a recent announcement that they will financially fund Apache, its biggest open-source competitor in the server market (this blog runs on an Apache server). Read more here.
This is all welcome news, but it is going to require a corresponding change in business model, one which open-source friendly companies like Novell, Red Hat, Sun, and IBM have been pioneering and perfecting for years. It is the move from a product-based model, where one tries to differentiate their product from its competition in order to sell the most items, to a service-based model, where you are selling your ability to help others.
In any case, the future will be interesting. In my opinion, Microsoft is on the right track. The sooner it moves to a service-based business model the better, for us and them.
This is the third past in a series of posts about typing in Greek. The first post was about the the joys (and necessity) of Unicode character encoding. The second detailed how to set up a Greek keyboard. Now you need a good font. While up to this point we have been dealing with encodings and characters, the way in which an operating system matches the push of a key to a letter in a given language; now we are going to focus our attention on glyphs, the way in which different characters are represented by a particular font.
What do you want in a Greek Font?
Eye Candy: The most immediate qualification for a good font is eye candy. Seriously: this is important. The better looking your font, the easier it is to read, both for you and your audience.
Check out the image to the left. Which do you like better? The top glyph is what we call “sans serif” because it does not have the fancy shaping and decorative formatting that the bottom glyph has. Sans serif fonts are particularly common on the internet because they are the easiest to read, even if not the prettiest over all. Times New Roman, by contrast, is a serif font. If you write your papers using a serif font, your Greek should be a serif font as well (and vice-versa). This is usually just a matter of personal preference, but generally readers prefer serif over sans serif for extended amounts of text, and the opposite for presentations (PowerPoint) and Web pages.
A more specifically Greek decision involves accents, the most important of which is the circumflex. This again is a matter of preference, but I prefer the full semicircle over the tilde. Having said that, the font I am eventually going to recommend uses the tilde. Oh well…
Free: The second (and most important) qualification of a Greek font is that it should be free. There are two types of free: free beer and free speech. The former is probably the most immediate concern, but the latter is really the most important. A “free beer” font will be free to use and will not encumber you with licensing fees should you decide to publish your work using that font. The Microsoft fonts seem like they are free-beer fonts—at least you probably do not remembering paying for them—but in reality they are encumbered by a pretty strict license. They will be fine for basic personal use, but if you are planning to start a Greek-Verse-Greeting-Card business, or am online journal for NT studies, you might want to pick something else. At the very least, you want to use a font that is free for both non-commercial and commercial use.
You may also be interested in a “free speech” font. In addition to being free as in free beer, free speech fonts allow you to redistribute, modify, and have absolute control over all underlying mechanics. You can use them, change them, and distribute them, all without asking permission.
In short, you want a font that is licensed under an a so called “copy left” license. These are “open source” licenses. Applied to fonts, these licenses define the parameters by which you can use and modify the glyphs in question; they will be royalty-free (“free beer”) and also free-to-modify (“free speech”) under certain conditions. .
So what fonts should I use?
The following is a list of the best fonts available. Only Unicode fonts are included:
It includes installers for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as source code. The recent addition of GentiumAlt to the font family eliminates all my previous hesitations about recommending this font. It really is excellent, and its Latin characters are so nice that I have begun using it as my default serif font for all my documents. Gentium is maintained by SIL, which has developed quite a reputation among linguists, and promises robust future development while maintaining an open licensing schema. (By the way, if you are using Ubuntu/Debian Linux, you can install from the command line: “sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium”.)What about Hebrew?
I have given short-shrift to Hebrew, and I apologize. There are reasons, however. There really is only one decent open-standard font that I know about for Biblical Hebrew: Ezra SIL. It’s fully open under SIL’s OFL, it supports every character used in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and it’s easy on the eyes. You will need to download a special keyboard to get it working, though. Instructions for doing so are available on the download page, where you can also find a keyboard map of the layout. Also: you may run into small problems with Macs and in Linux, though nothing catastrophic. If anyone has other Hebrew fonts they would like to recommend, please do so in the comments.
Ros Clarke notes in one of the comments that SBL has a good Hebrew font available here. It is a very well designed font that includes Linux support. The only disadvantage is that it is not licensed under an open standard, though SBL does provide it free of charge for non-commericial use. Thanks Ros.
Conclusion
Don’t forget to check out my previous posts on Unicode and on setting up a Greek keyboard. All this might sound a bit intimidating, but it really will make your life easier in the long run.
Now that you have a full appreciation of Unicode it’s time to setup windows to type in Greek (and Hebrew, for that matter).
Getting Started
First, open up your favorite document editor. I’m using OpenOffice.org, a free, powerful, and interpolatable solution to Microsoft Office. 
For testing purposes we need to use a Unicode font that supports the full set of Greek characters. If you’re using Vista, you can leave it on Times New Roman. Everyone else (and Vista users too, just to be safe), should set their font to either Palatino Linotype or Arial Unicode MS (I prefer the latter). Start typing. Still English. Now the fun begins.
Adding Keyboards
Access your control panel and select “Regional and Language Options.” I am using Vista, so the name’s might be changed for XP or 2000 (and if you’re using ME or 98, it’s time to either upgrade or switch to Linux). 
Click on the “Keyboards and Languages” tab, which will open a new window. Click the “Add…” a keyboard/language button, which opens up yet another window. Browse for “Greek,” and then select the “Greek Polytonic” keyboard. Other keyboards will not work; you need Greek Polytonic. Click Ok, then Apply. Notice the Greek keyboard has been added to your list.
You will need an easy and convenient way to switch between keyboards, so click on the “Language Bar” tab.
Choose any option other than “hidden” (I suggest docking it in the taskbar). In the “Advanced Key Settings” tab you can set special keyboard shortcuts for switching between keyboards, in accordance with your preferences.
There are other keyboards you might be interested in. Notice that I have two keyboards under “English.” The “United States-International” keyboard allows me to type words like “Bëla Fleck,” “Käsemann,” and “vis-à-vis” with particularly pretentious accuracy. I also have a Hebrew keyboard installed, which requires some comment. The Hebrew keyboard included in Windows is terrible; the layout is counter intuitive, and it lacks vowel pointings. You will have to install another keyboard, which can be downloaded here. The download includes instructions for installation and a keyboard layout in PDF.
Now that our keyboards are installed, you should see a new little bar in your already-busy taskbar. 
This is your language bar, which you can use to select the language you want to type in, as well as the keyboard you want to use for that language (if you set up more than one). Select “EL”, which is the Greek setting (remember, the Greek word for Greek is ελληνος).
Typing in Greek
Now go back to your word processor and start typing. You should see some Greek characters now. 
If not, check your language bar again (sometimes switching applications causes the system to revert to your default language).
The Layout of your New Keyboard
Now you need to learn how to use your new keyboard. There will probably be some keyboard-concepts you are not familiar with, the most important of which are called “dead keys.” Dead keys are keys that only function in combination with other keys. The standard English keyboard does not use deadkeys, so if you are used to that keyboard, this might take same getting used to (as will the “US-International”) keyboard. With a little practice, however, you will be a master, and might even consider switching to a dead-key enabled keyboard as your default (as I eventually did).
To get started, press the ” key in your Word Processor. Nothing happened. That’s because Microsoft is waiting for another key. Now type “a”. You should see something like ἁ. Dead keys are used by the Greek keyboard to create all those diacritical marks necessary for typing in ancient Greek. Don’t worry, they’re all there, you just need to find where to find them.
Take a look at the following diagram. 
This is a keyboard map for the Polytonic keyboard. The keys in yellow are all dead-keys and will therefore only work in combination with an appropriate secondary key (and only “legal” Greek characters can be produced–the fabled λ with a smooth-breathing is still only a fantasy).
Now try this one.
Notice that the Right “Alt” key (and ONLY the right one) is greyed-in. This indicates a new keyboard state. When you hold down the right Alt key, the keyboard “shifts” to allow access to different keys, which are shown in the keyboard map. Again, the yellow keys are dead keys, so the key combination “alt-q” followed by an “a” results in the following character: ᾴ.
There are four total keyboard states, two of which you already use: (1) Standard and (2) Shifted. Now you add two more: (3) Alt and (4) Alt-Shift. Remember, it is only the right Alt that does this.
A Full Keyboard Map
Microsoft used to have full documentation of the Polytonic Keyboard layout online, but it no longer appears to be available. Rather than distribute the whole document, which is needlessly long and complicated, I have copied their map images (which I believe are public domain) and placed them in my own PDF cheat sheet. Download it here!
One more note: you may be wondering how to access keys that used to be easy to get to, such as the “;” key, which is now a dead-key. The answer: certain keys can only be accessed by typing a dead-key followed by a space. These are usually keys that are not often used, so it’s not really a problem. A map for these keys is provided on the second page of the above PDF.
Conclusion
All this sounds intimidating, but you will get used to your new keyboard quickly, and you will be proud of your efforts. No more searching that horrible “insert symbol” dialog. No more dependency on software like Bibleworks for Greek characters. Dead keys are your friends!
Next up: the best fonts for Greek and Hebrew.
Many potential readers of this blog may be unfamiliar with the concept of “Open Source” software. There are a variety of possible definitions (depending on your preferred open source licensing schema), but what essentially qualifies software as being Open Source is the availability of its underlying source code for reading and editing. Why is that important? Because if you know how something is built you can always rebuild it, or build something similar that does the same job. Put it another way: ever feel like your information has been hijacked by software companies? What if you stopped using Microsoft Office, or you want to distribute your writing to someone who can’t afford pricey software? Sure there are workarounds, but those workarounds (1) require the use of open formats (that is, they presuppose the existence of Open Source software) and (2) require you to take extra steps to have unrestricted access to your own data.
Practical Advantages of Open Source
I have long preferred using software that supports open standards out of the box, such as the free and multi-platform openoffice.org, for practical reasons. In addition to the points mentioned above, open source code allows for easy third-party modification, which has resulted in the overwhelming success of software such as Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird. Need a feature not included in the original? Just Google, click, restart, and you’re ready to go, and all free of charge.
Ethics and Open Source
But the issue may be more than practical. Westminster professor Vern Poythress has made an ethical case for the superiority of open computing. This is a very interesting read. There are, of course, certain qualifications that must be made, such as for security software and other areas were privacy is necessary for proper program performance, but Poythress’s suggestions provide an interesting perspective on the current debate. As a side note, Dr. Poythress puts the open source mentality into personal practice–he has released almost all his writings for free reading on his website.
Recent Moves by Microsoft
Microsoft has recently come to appreciate the advantages, if not the necessity, of opening up their format standards. Many (including myself) question the company’s commitment, but yesterday’s news is in their favor, as is their recent commitment to begin opening up their API. The fear that open code leads to less revenue has apparently been thoroughly debunked, and Microsoft may have some catching up to do with regards to their business model in order to compete.
At the very least, this saga is an interesting example of the application of Christian ethics. No area of life is neutral; all most submit to God’s Lordship.
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