Danny's Weblog

2009 May 04 [ Mon ]

How to say the Cambodian (Khmer) word for "go"

The "tl;dr" version is: You say the Cambodian word for "go" kinda like the English word "dove" (meaning "bird", not the American past tense of "dive").

(For the purposes of this article I decided to implement Khmer text and phonetics as a graphic, in case the user's PC does not properly support the Unicode used in the text. Numbers in the graphic below correspond to the any references in the text.)

1. Khmer script: ទៅ 2. IPA transcription: tɨʋ̒̚

The word for "go" is obviously important in any language and should be learned very early on, but it happens to be particularly hard for the foreign learner of Cambodian. I remember my first arrival on my own in Cambodia, when I ran to escape overpriced taxi touts and jumped on the back seat of a motorbike, telling the driver (I hoped) to "go! go!". He had no idea what I was saying until I said "go market!" The word "market" is much easier for the Westerner to pronounce understandably. This allowed the driver to guess that I did not mean "even if, scrub, polish, rub, exchange, barter, change, grow, spring up, bud, breasts, take off, remove, solve, attempt to solve, lion, bent over, unit of dry measure equivalent to about two pecks... market".

I had some idea of how bad my pronunciation was, because I had found the explanations of the elements of this word to be particularly vague. I am writing this posting to record my current understanding of the issue. I would have posted it much earlier, except I was trying to fix representation of Khmer in text on this site; but I've decided not to wait. Maybe people will find this and improve the pronunciation guides in textbooks.

It took me nearly two years of actually living in Cambodia to get fairly confident of my grasp of this word, and my pronunciation of it is still rather labored. I think the writers of the textbooks I relied on managed to write those books with only a partial grasp of the problems.

The basic problem is that every one of the three phonemes of this word does not exist in English. This makes it impossible to use a simple transcription like you might find in a travel guide. In the description below I have had to use a number of fairly specialized phonetics terms, which few Westerners are familiar with. You will need to Google them. Additionally, the final phoneme is pronounced "unreleased" (marked by that unusual diacritic), which changes the sound drastically for the Western ear, and that feature is poorly explained in most available texts on phonetics. Incidentally, I did not find a single hit for the IPA transcription I am using here on Google: to put it another way, this transcription of the word is my own. Being still rather hesitant about it, I have not marked it as either a broad or narrow transcription.

The wikipedia entry on the IPA phonetic system is worth looking at as a reference, although not very helpful to start learning from if you know nothing about phonetics:

en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet]

An additional problem is that Cambodians do not have any phonological training, much less the ability to communicate such information to the hapless foreign learner.

We have to go through each of those difficult phonemes in turn.

The first phoneme is an unvoiced, unaspirated dental, represented by Huffman as a simple "t". Perhaps I should say explicitly that although English and American speakers utter this sound on occasion, they do not know how to create it in an arbitrary location in an utterance. In English, the "d" sound is always voiced, and both the "d" and the"t" are sometimes aspirated and sometimes not, depending on one's regional accent as well as the surrounding sounds. But these variations correspond to *different words* in Cambodian.

Although the phoneme is not very hard to pronounce adequately (at least to the Western ear), it is not trivial to clearly maintain the differences between this and the voiced and aspirated versions of the dental phonemes, especially while you have many other things to think about – either when you are listening or speaking. Additionally, the best position of articulation of this sound (with the tongue curled up against the palate) is unnatural for the Westerner, so he is not used to incidental sounds which are routinely produced in different environments (see below).

The second phoneme is described by Huffman like this: "High central unrounded vowel made by raising the center of the tongue toward the soft palate while keeping the lips flat or spread". (Also, I hear the sound as nasal, and other sources agree.) Now you can see this is going to be hard to make compatible with the articulation of the preceding consonant. The result is that at the end of that consonant/beginning of the vowel the tip of the tongue has to flick sharply towards the lower front teeth to allow the vowel to be articulated clearly, resulting in a sharp click at the front of the vowel; and this motion is so sharp that there is also a sort of audible slap as the tongue falls to the lower jaw at the end of the vowel. The overall effect, for the Westerner who has not subconsciously learned how Khmer sounds interact, is that the "click" features (reminiscent of African click languages) overwhelm the true phonemes.

But the worst part is the final consonant. This is considered to be part of a single vowel sound in the word as written in the Cambodian spelling system, and perhaps because of this it is often represented as some sort of vowel in phonetic transcriptions, causing endless confusion.

Although it may well sound like a vowel to the Western ear (and even in English, the exact definition of the difference between vowels and consonants is not entirely agreed), Huffman and my favorite dictionary (whose title in Khmer is "Modern Khmer-English Dictionary", and which I believe to be a ripoff version of Headley's "Modern Cambodian-English Dictionary", 1997) agree that the final sound is a consonant. But what is it?

It turns out to be a variant of an English "v" sound, except that instead of the lower lip being clamped between the upper and lower teeth, the two lips are simply placed (loosely) together. (The symbol for this consonant is in the right position in the charts showing phonetic features, but actually I haven't found a good specific description of it and I just ope it's correct.)

Additionally the consonant sound, as usual at the end of Khmer words, is pronounced unreleased, ie very short and without opening the mouth again at the end, so that you can hardly hear what we would think of as the actual consonant sound, but instead the result (including the actual vowel) sounds rather like an "o" sound (as in "hello") to an English person: the articulation of the "v" sounds like the articulation of the English diphthong. (That's indicated in my transcription by the wacky diacritic over the last letter.)

Huffman gives a rather vague description including "with more lip-rounding", but I believe that is quite false.

Headley says that in the final position, this phoneme is pronounced like "w". This is largely true of the *result*, but gives the wrong impression of how the sound is actually articulated, and if you try to utter the sound that way it distorts surrounding phonemes.

Perhaps one day I will meet a Cambodian who has studied phonetics sufficiently to confirm all this. Or laugh at me.

2009 Jan 20 [ Tue ]

New website ladypenh.com with listings of events in Phnom Penh

I got an extremely brief email about this from someone who may be under the impression my blog is less insignificant than it is: ladypenh.com [http://ladypenh.com/]

It seems to be OK, although it uses Javascript for navigation, so I couldn't check it out properly. In my email back to him, I pontificated that HTMLTidy complained that his page does not match the /EN (English) specification in his DOCTYPE (presumably because there is a lot of French on the page), but I just noticed my blog has the same issue – blush.

I'm a little surprised he doesn't use a .co.kh URL, but of course it's much cheaper to register a .com. His physical server is in Canada, although it's administered by a company in Cambodia.

He's hoping to get paid for listings, and I wish him luck on that. Even khmer440 doesn't break even, and it gets lots of traffic.

Another website with event listings: www.sangsalapak.org.kh [http://www.sangsalapak.org.kh/whatson/]

A couple more comments on Wiktionary and Cambodian (Khmer)

In my previous posting on the Wiktionary's features for Khmer: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Khmer-language/wiktionary01.html] I sounded perhaps a little harsh. Evidently the slightly lame features result from basing the system on the existing features of the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia has no features for automatically generating links back and forth so that the information provided in the version set up for English-speaking users is automatically provided to the version for Cambodian users, so the Wiktionary doesn't have them either. Likewise, the fact that X means A and B should automatically allow Wiktionary to display that A can (sometimes) be translated as X, but that won't happen until someone who can program realizes that it's necessary (and implements the user interface and documentation to let people actually enter the data cleanly).

Another point about Khmer and Unicode: I happened to view my previous posting in Opera under Linux, and was surprised to see that Opera did not handle the jerng consonants properly: it displayed the regular consonant with a + sign underneath it, and then the jerng consonant. However, the link worked – and then the Wiktionary page had the same problem. It's very strange; I thought the handling of Unicode was determined by the OS, and it's certainly handled OK by Firefox under Linux and IE6 under Windows (if Office 2003 is installed under XP at least).

Presumably this means that Opera needs some sort of feature to be implemented in the code to work properly with Khmer Unicode. Hmm.

2009 Jan 18 [ Sun ]

Wiktionary now has some Cambodian (Khmer) language entries

Today I saw a link to a Russian word in Wiktionary. I was interested because it had the Russian characters for the word as part of the url. On a whim I tried entering Khmer Unicode characters for a Khmer word as part of the url. The first word I tried ("bdey", husband) didn't work, but the next one I tried, "pnum" or hill (as in Phnom Penh) worked.

Here is a link to that entry. Unless you have your machine set up for Khmer Unicode, it will be displayed badly, but I'm guessing it will still work for you as a link, assuming your machine handles Unicode at all: en.wiktionary.org [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%9E%97%E1%9F%92%E1%9E%93%E1%9F%86]

Disappointingly, the Wiktionary does not seem to be set up to automatically work backwards. For instance, the link shown on that page to the English word "hill" does not display a link back to the Khmer word!

Here is a link to the intro to Khmer: en.wiktionary.org [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Khmer_language]

This page is rather bare but I could not find anything better. The subheadings have a number after them, but I don't know what it means: it does not mean the number of entries under that heading, because several headings noted as "0" had multiple entries.

However, in total there are not many entries. If you go to the main page for the Wiktionary, you will see that Cambodian is in the 100-1000 entry group. Hopefully more entries will be added.

The link I gave above was for the "English dictionary" section: ie, in English, for English people (that is, the vanishingly tiny number who can read and write Khmer, as no way is provided to look up a word by phonetic transcription – to be fair, that's not as easy as it might sound). ...Oops, actually, you can enter *their* phonetic transcription, if you know what it is. But I did not see any explanation of how to *create* a phonetic transcription that is compatible with their database.

If you want to look up an English word and find the Khmer for that word, you can enter the word in the search box, and then pick out the Khmer link in the long list of languages below *if you're lucky*. (I think I may have looked at the Wiktionary a couple of times before, and seeing no entry for the Khmer for the current word concluded Khmer was not supported at all!)

If the word is not in the Wiktionary for even a single language (quite likely), you arrive at the results of a regular Wikipdedia search for that word, with no explanation: suboptimal.

There is a Khmer version of the Wiktionary, ie a version *in* Khmer, for Khmer-speaking people: km.wiktionary.org [http://km.wiktionary.org/wiki/] but as far as I could see it only gives Japanese translations... no, it does have some English. Interestingly, the translation it gives for "welcome" clearly has no connection to the page provided for English users: km.wiktionary.org [http://km.wiktionary.org/wiki/welcome]

I did not see any obvious errors in the few words I checked out. Clearly, far fewer secondary meanings are shown than you would find in a good dictionary. On the other hand, one word "tortuel", whose basic meaning is "receive", was shown to mean "welcome!" (as an interjection), which I was not aware of, but not in its fairly common sense of "eat" in the phrase "tortuel tian" (polite, intransitive). (dordūul is the Wiktionary's phonetic transcription).

All in all, it's quite impressive that it all works with Unicode, including the urls. I get the impression from the way that the data does not link together very well that the site designer does not actually speak any foreign languages himself. On the other hand, I probably won't be making any contributions to the Wiktionary personally, so I should feel guilty about carping criticism.

2008 Nov 15 [ Sat ]

Nice file explaining Khmer Unicode and text entry

I have a vague feeling I found the Cambodian-language version of this a couple of years ago and couldn't find an English-language version. Anyway here it is: www.cambodia.org [http://www.cambodia.org/fonts/KhmerUnicode_Keyboard_Layout.pdf]

I found it via this page: www.cambodia.org [http://www.cambodia.org/fonts/] which is also well worth a shot.

Now that I can actually read it instead of gloomily puzzling out an approximation of the meaning word by word, there is a lot of useful info, for instance the order you need to enter diacritics when they pile up. Maybe next time I will remember this instead of having to go by trial and error.

2008 Jul 02 [ Wed ]

Translation of Khmer text used for khmerconverter test file

On 2008-07-01 I posted some text in Limon and Unicode. I didn't provide any translation or phonetic transcription.

I had not really understood the text at all because it used several words in a string which seemed to contradict each other. It reminded me of a survey question that I noticed back in the seventies which was something like "Are you in favour of, or do you oppose, the Government's intention to stop the European Community's plan to prevent the prohibition of schemes to restrict the denial of non-reportable medications?". I think people design such questions carefully to get the answer *they want*, which bears no relation to what the actual opinion of the respondents might be. In the case of that survey question, for some reason, they wanted the answers to be split 50/50, apparently.

Anyway, here's my shot at a sentence-by-sentence translation, followed by a free translation. (I apologize about the trailing sentence at the end: "baan" often ends a sentence in Cambodian and I took a wrong guess.) There's no phonetic transcription because I had to guess at several words.

Once again the text is in Unicode.

សមាជិកព្រឹទ្ធសភាថៃ	Thai senators
មួយក្រុមដែល មានគ្នា ៧៧នាក់	a group of 22 people
កាលពីថ្ងៃចន្ទបានចាប់ ផ្តើមដំណើរការបញ្ឈប់	on Friday started progress in stopping
ការគាំទ្ររដ្ឋា ភិបាលថៃចំពោះសំណើរបស់រដ្ឋាភិបាល កម្ពុជា	support of the Thai government in relation to the [moment??] of the government of Cambodia
ដែលស្នើដាក់ប្រាសាទព្រះវិហារ	which proposes to put the temple of Preah Vihar
ចូលទៅក្នុងបញ្ជីបេតិកភណ្ឌពិភពលោក ។	to enter the register [?] of belongings of the world [world heritage sites?]
កាសែតឌឹណេស្ហិនរបស់ថៃរាយការណ៍	The newspaper "The Nation" of Thailand announced
ថាសមាជិកព្រឹទ្ធសភាទាំងនោះបាន	that these senators were able to...

On Friday, a group of 22 senators in the Thai parliament began a bid to withdraw Thai government support for the Cambodian government's proposal that the temple of Preah Vihar should be registered as a World Heritage site. "The Nation", a Thai newspaper, reported that these senators were able to...

Incidentally, there are two newspapers called "The Nation" in Thailand. One is published in English; the name of the newspaper in the Khmer text is given in a phonetic form "der neyshun", so I'm assuming it's the English version that's being referred to.

Incidentally, this report seems to reflect the general attempt of the Thai and Cambodian governments and government-controlled media (ie practically all of it) to whip up tension between their citizens.

2008 Jul 01 [ Tue ]

The "khmerconverter" utility to convert eg Limon to Unicode

The description sounded interesting: Limon and similar non-Unicode ("USA International") fonts to Khmer Unicode and vice versa. I've written about the Limon issues before, eg here: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Khmer-language/windowssetup01.html]

I had found khmerconverter while looking around in Ubuntu Synaptic Package Manager. I had installed it a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't see where the installer had put the launcher and didn't bother proceeding. Today I happened to see the launcher (in Applications - Accessories) and tried it, but it appeared to do nothing.

I found the name of the executable in the launcher and was able to do "man khmerconverter", which helped by showing command-line options, but not enough (the spec for the formats is not clear). On the web I found: www.khmeros.info [http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/download/converter] which suggested that the app had a gui wrapper.

After a while it occurred to me that I should try running the app from the console instead of the desktop. This revealed that it was complaining about the absence of the "tix" library for Tk. I found tix in Synaptic and installed it (no DVD necessary): clicking the launcher then brought up the gui. (It seems to me that if an app fails with an error message, the launcher, or the windowing environment, or something, should detect that and wait for you to read the error message instead of immediately closing the window. Oh well.)

Hmm. This is the first time I've seen where a Synaptics app has clearly failed to install a necessary package.

So how can you try it out? You can download Limon and ABC "legacy" fonts here: www.everyday.com.kh [http://www.everyday.com.kh/khmerfont/khmerfont.asp]

This page is also useful: www.cambodia.org [http://www.cambodia.org/fonts/] with eg "How to type Khmer Unicode", a PDF document, unfortunately in Khmer and without any keyboard layout diagram for people trying to use a non-Khmer-Unicode keyboard. (There may be some reference to such a thing, but I was barely able to puzzle out more than a few words here and there.)

After I had installed the fonts (by unzipping them to my /home/dannyw/.fonts folder), Firefox was able to view www.everyday.com.kh properly. When I checked the HTML source, it does indeed handle fonts in css, and the css specifies EOT fonts (ie the special downloadable font format for IE). So although Firefox can't handle those, it apparently knows it can default to the (newly-installed) TTF fonts by name. OTOH, the page layout was still all screwed up: all the text was scrunched into the right column. I was able to set Firefox to View - Page style - No style. This made it possible to select a block of several sentences of text from everyday.com, and I could copy it into OpenOffice.

Then I could save as an OpenOffice .odt file, which is apparently the native format for khmerconverter. The output looked OK as far as I could see, ie the glyphs appeared to match – I'm not claiming to be able to *edit* Khmer text!

So while I've hardly tested khmerconverter exhaustively, it does appear to be useful.

Here are some blocks of test text so you can judge the performance of khmerconverter (and check whether my page and your browser setup work together – in particular check whether your browser is set to override font specs – d'oh!)

Original Limon (only looks right if "Limon S1" font is installed on your system – I'm not bothering to set up an EOT font spec here):

smaCikRBwT§sPaéf mYyRkumEdl manKña 77nak;kalBIéf¶cnÞ)ancab; epþImdMeNIrkarbBaÄb; karKaMRTrdæa Pi)aléfcMeBaHsMeNIrbs;rdæaPi)al km<úCaEdlesñIdak;R)asaTRBHvihar cUleTAkñúgbBa¢IebtikPNÐBiPBelak .kaEstDweNsðinrbs;éfraykarN_ fasmaCikRBwT§sPaTaMgenaH)an

Unicode version (should display OK if *any* Unicode font on your system can handle the Khmer group of Unicode codes): សមាជិកព្រឹទ្ធសភាថៃ មួយក្រុមដែល មានគ្នា ៧៧នាក់កាលពីថ្ងៃចន្ទបានចាប់ ផ្តើមដំណើរការបញ្ឈប់ ការគាំទ្ររដ្ឋា ភិបាលថៃចំពោះសំណើរបស់រដ្ឋាភិបាល កម្ពុជាដែលស្នើដាក់ប្រាសាទព្រះវិហារ ចូលទៅក្នុងបញ្ជីបេតិកភណ្ឌពិភពលោក ។កាសែតឌឹណេស្ហិនរបស់ថៃរាយការណ៍ ថាសមាជិកព្រឹទ្ធសភាទាំងនោះបាន

PKD example (just so you can see if you have PKD installed – I was too lazy to figure out the phonetcs for the whole of the above text): kNom At dIG te

2008 Jun 26 [ Thu ]

Test file for UTF-8 support of Khmer Unicode

I wondered what the result is of providing UTF-8 bytes inside a webpage defined as iso-8859-en. It turns out that the browser, at least Firefox, believes the 8859 and displays the Cambodian as junk. So I've changed my meta charset spec to UTF-8 and it seems to work (even though vi at panix is showing the UTF-8 characters as a bunch of hex escape codes).

Khmer unicode sample

សួស្តី

រីករាយណាស់ដែលបានជួបអ្នកទាំងអស់គ្នា ។

If the above shows as a bunch of junk for you, you presumably don't have a font available which handles those Unicode character codes. I haven't yet set up a font spec to try and let your browser know which font to try.

Phonetics version using IPA Unicode character codes

suə'sdəy

riik 'riɜy nah dail bɑɑn 'juəp 'neək ti'aɳ ɑh kniə

I should probably put in an example of my own PKD font as well, but as nobody has reported using it I feel too lazy.

2007 Jul 06 [ Fri ]

My girlfriend gets her last wisdom tooth removed

For the past couple of years, she's had recurring problems with her wisdom teeth. Really, they had all grown in badly and needed to be removed, but of course it's quite a gruelling procedure at the best of times, and she found that she was in a lot of distress for a week or more after a single one was removed. So she put off handling each one as long as possible.

This week she got the final one done. The price was 15 USD; the procedure was fairly short and she seemed OK afterwards.

I had asked her to get a prescription for a sore on her tongue too; I observed that what she was prescribed was an antibiotic (amoxycillin), although a few days previously when we had asked at a pharmacy, the pharmacist gave her an anti-fungal cream (candida). She had been upset when I questioned the pahrmacist; all I wanted to know was why he thought it was candida when he never examined her mouth. Actually, I also wanted to point out that the preparation did nothing for the pain, which was her main complaint.

She was also prescribed ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory, plus Efferalgan, a big fizzy tablet like an Alka-Seltzer containing paracetamol and codeine, for pain relief. Hmm, isn't ibuprofen the same thing as paracetamol? and isn't paracetamol very close to overdose in normal use?

The total price of the drugs was 7 USD. I bought them at a separate pharmacy (next to Lucky's on Sihanouk – recommended).

She felt well enough the next day to go to university and then to work, but continued to have pain, and when she had to attend a "briefing" (when she needed to sleep after her night shift!) her manager told her to go to the company clinic. They prescribed 5 different sets of pills, with no piece of paper to say who prescribed them, what they were for or how to take them, just a couple of scrawled lines on the plastic bags they came in. They also gave her an injection, but she doesn't know what it was. T said the price of all this was 20 USD, although the company was paying.

The company clinic appears to be some sort of ripoff. I urged her to check what they had prescribed with her dentist, but she was reluctant.

She's still in a lot of discomfort, and has to take the Efferalgan (codeine) several times a day, which is not really good for her (I doubt it improves her balance on a motorbike, for instance).

Overall I think her outcome is about the same here as it might have been in a developed country. There's a chance that the initial removal might be done more skilfully, or with better follow-up (I was surprised that no follow-up appointment is made to check healing), but a western country might well have made it impossible to get codeine, which really works.

2007 Jul 04 [ Wed ]

Fedex shipment to Cambodia

Because regular (hah!) mail service in Cambodia is so poor, I recently arranged for some mail to be sent from the US via FedEx.

To avoid delivery problems (I certainly didn't want someone in the landlord's family to sign for it) I requested that the package should be held at the FedEx office on Monivong for me to pick it up. I also gave my phone number to be on the package so they could call me.

Well, they didn't call me, but I could see via FedEx's web interface that the package had arrived, so I went over to pick it up.

Happily it was there and in good shape (and had not been delivered next door, as had apparently happened last time when they delivered it to 701C instead of 701D Monivong) and I was happy.

The girl however wanted me to fill out the receipt form properly. "Can you write down your phone number please?" I don't have it memorized and started to punch buttons on my cellphone. She smiled and took pity on me. "Look, it's right here on the package."

She didn't ask to see any ID whatsoever. In other words, anyone knowing the waybill number could have picked it up. Hmmm.

2007 May 17 [ Thu ]

Solution to the Cambodian kramaa-pyjamas problem

As soon as I came to Thailand I became aware that the Thais all wear pajamas, or some similar nightwear, to sleep. This seems very strange to the foreigner who is unbearably hot when naked.

I wrote it off to prudery, although when I questioned people about it they said they felt more comfortable with pajamas.

Having slept without AC for a couple of years I have somewhat acclimatized, and believe I now understand the issue. It is basically caused by a shortcoming in the body's sweat control system.

If the skin is in effect enclosed – for instance, when you lie on your back – the local skin does not detect that it is completely saturated already and it might as well *stop* sweating. Instead, it goes into overdrive! Quite rapidly the supply of sweat is largely exhausted and you get the worst of both worlds: a saturated puddle of bedclothes beneath the sleeper, chafing against raw, dried-out skin.

I now realize that pajamas bypass this problem. As soon as the part of the pajama against the bed starts to saturate, the sleeper rolls over, exposing that part to the air and allowing the sweat to dissipate (although the salts and oils may remain, I believe as stated in previous postings on acclimatization that these constituents of sweat are minor in Asians). Thus the sheet *beneath* the sleeper does not saturate.

In the event that the sleeper is not wearing nightwear, he will respond by curling the entire top sheet around himself so that he can use it for the same purpose. I had noticed this peculiar behavior on many occasions (having woken up without any sheet at all around me and wondered why). I don't know what happens when two pajamaless Asians have to share a single sheet! It also occurs when the room is air-conditioned, but of course the observer assumes in that case that the sleeper is simply trying to keep warm.

There is a similar basic problem which the "kramaa", the brightly-patterned scarf so characteristic of Cambodia, can solve. It is this: unless you gaze quite horizontally, the skin tends to fold at the neck. Where the skin folds together, the sweat cannot evaporate. For some reason I never focused on this issue in Thailand, but certainly in Cambodia I have noticed that if I am looking down – reading, for instance, or even watching TV – within a few minutes the skin becomes sweaty and irritated at my neck. Of course, the kramaa can easily be used to disperse this sweat as soon as it accumulates.

A separate issue which affects pajamas is mosquitoes. For some reason mosquitoes seem to prefer to attack the calves, even when one is lying down. Pajamas, like trousers, seem to largely foil mosquitoes. (You would think they wouldn't make much difference but they do.)

2007 Mar 30 [ Fri ]

My PKD font has succumbed to mission creep

I guess I wound up trying to put too much into it – I guess I jumped the shark when I put in the Vietnamese tone marks. My most recent version has added English prosody symbols (rising and falling tone unit symbols), but in order to access them you have to use the US International keyboard – ie the font is no longer by design 7-bit safe. Aargh. Incidentally, another reason for not progressing was that I found out about Microsoft's downloadable keyboard editor software MSKLC: www.microsoft.com [http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx] They demand that you allow them to scan the machine you're downloading it to to establish that the software licence is kosher. This of course requires that you access microsoft.com using Internet Explorer. I did try using a web-cafe machine, but the scanning program just gave a non-committal error msg (who knows – maybe it never comes right out and calls you a pirate).

Also, it needs .NET Framework installed – a large irritating download but not (the last time I tried) as heavily restricted as MSKLC itself.

After a little googling I found MSKLC at another site, but it still wouldn't run on my kosher Windows 2000 machine – again the error message meant nothing to me. I have just started downloading MSKLC from another site: www.zdnet.be [http://www.zdnet.be/downloads.cfm?id=36567] but I have a vague feeling that's where I found it before – the one that doesn't work.

If anyone has actually managed to run MSKLC please contact me. Evidently an easily-installable keyboard config with easy access to non-7-bit codes would make a tremendous difference to the design of a phonetic font. For instance, you could just switch to a PKD keyboard config and use the keypresses I set up for the special PKD font to access the Unicode characters! Also, you could create a new, simplified version of the US International keyboard that would allow you to avoid the nasty bewildering glitches you sometimes get when you're trying to enter Cambodian using a Limon font and hit one of the extended key sequences by mistake.

Oh well. As usual, the best is the enemy of the good.

2007 Jan 26 [ Fri ]

PKD now works automatically in IE

PKD is my phonetics font for Khmer, Thai, English and Vietnamese. I had nearly gotten it reasy a couple of days ago, but the .EOT version of the font did not work.

I took another shot at Microsoft's WEFT utility – the thing that converts a .TTF file into an .EOT file that MS IE can download automatically – and the new .EOT appears to work, at least on this machine.

A few notes from the struggle:

1. When I checked the blog today I was surprised to find that the link to the PKD test file – pkdtst01.html – did not work, and indeed I could not find the file at all. I uploaded it again. I don't know why it vanished.

2. In WEFT, "expert font creation" allows you to create an .EOT without having to point to a dummy .html file. It even allows you to add "offline" fonts which are not yet loaded into Windows. But I could not figure out how to enter multiple "bindings" – the locations which are allowed to host .html files pointing to the .eot. I wound up using the braindead "Wizard" mode. Remember that it insists on writing to the .html file you point it at.

3. When you are checking the behavior of the .eot in IE, sometimes the Dynamic Fonts Usage window doesn't come up, even though there is a binding problem. Other times it brings up a nice list of the allowed bindings. I don't know why it sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

4. If you try adding "off-line" fonts, the oly way to do it is to point to a directory, and then it *also* searches all the *subdirectories* without warning.

5. This might not have been a problem except I had a bunch of old versions of PKD in a subdir, all claiming to be the one and only true "PKD" . WEFT picked one without any error message; it was of course the *wrong* one. Generally the "offline" feature seemed more trouble than it was worth, unless you have dozens of fonts to deal with I suppose.

6. Note that the bindings do not specify the allowed location of the .EOT file. You can put that anywhere. The allowed bindings only set the possible locations for .html.

7. In the .css which specifies the filename and path for the .EOT file, case is significant.

I am now going to get ready to announce PKD on Usenet.

2007 Jan 24 [ Wed ]

Progress on my phonetic font PKD for Khmer, Thai, English and Vietnamese

I am still not ready to release it, but I have made a lot of progress.

I gave in and decided to add most of the additional glyphs needed to provide a phonological trancription of English, similar to major dictionaries: like the dictionaries, I did not trouble to provide the upside-down "r" officially needed to support the English "r" sound; I also did not add the glyphs needed to support the new special representations of eg the final syllables of "little" and "rotten" and "father" because I think they are based on foolish and inconsistent principles. (Also, I have run out of upper-case letters.)

I have also added Vietnamese tone symbols.

Here's a PDF (6 pages) showing examples of how PKD can be used for teaching Cambodian, Thai, English and Vietnamese: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/pkd/pkdsample01.pdf]

Version 0.99 can be downloaded from here: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/fonts/]

The .TTF version can be installed like any other .TTF file. If you get the message "...is currently being used and cannot be replaced" it probably means that your machine has been locked down so that you cannot write to the needed directory. Try unclicking the option "copy to fonts folder".

Currently the .eot version (which provides autoloading for Internet Explorer users) does not work across the internet, although it does work when the .html and .ttf are stored locally (on the C: drive). I need to fix it and upload a new version. When I've done that I'll add some more info and publicize it. Another issue is that Windows WordPad does not correctly handle the character widths, although MS Word does. (Because all the characters are actually ASCII, you can edit PKD in Notepad if you want to.)

Once you have installed the .TTF you can try this test file: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/pkdtest01.html]

The test page optimistically assumes that the .EOT will autoload in MS IE, which as stated above is not yet true.

Young boy squirts enema on Cambodian TV

I've written a couple of reviews of Cambodian movies and seen several more in which little boys' weenies were shown on screen, so I was used to Cambodians' laid-back attitudes on such things.

However I was not prepared for what I saw last night on Channel 11, around 2215 in their regular show "Niatii Pteah Lek Dop Muay". An interviewer was chatting to a crowd of young people in some village, and encouraged one of them to exhibit his party trick.

The young boy – apparently perhaps eight years old, although it's hard for a Westerner to determine the age of Asians (your honor) – proceeded to take off all his clothes (on camera) and squat in a large basin of muddy water, earnestly grimacing for a long time while the interviewer filled in with banter. At length the boy rose from the basin and bent forward, and with some effort squirted long jets of water from his rear.

At this point the camera was somewhat in front of the boy so it did not show his bottom clearly, but there was no sign that the "performance" was faked; after several repetitions the crowd responded with warm applause.

Many sources refer rather vaguely to the Cambodians' "earthy" sense of humor; now I can cite this example.

2007 Jan 06 [ Sat ]

Possible answer to the Cambodian yuon (Vietnamese) issue

When you first learn about Cambodia, it doesn't seem so surprising that many Cambodians hate the Vietnamese. Cambodia has been losing territory and its self-respect to the Vietnamese and Thais for centuries.

But then you figure out that Hun Sen was installed and propped up by the Vietnamese government and continues to take their orders. So it seems pretty odd that the government continually whips up anti-Vietnamese hysteria.

Now it's true that the Vietnamese government does not exactly have the interests of the Vietnamese people as its highest priority – it's kinda like the King of the Roaches in the "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Fat Freddy's Cat" strip who was always sending off more roaches to be eaten by the cat.

On the other hand, what does it actually *want*?

Another thing that slowly sinks in is is that most of South Vietnam, from Siagon to the coast, was Cambodia until recently, when it was grabbed by the Vietnamese under an agreement with the French. So a lot of the Vietnamese one sees in Phnom Penh are not hardline NVA cadres, they're the descendants of families who may have considerable loyalty to the Khmer people. (The area is known as Kampuchea Krom.)

Hmm. What may be the answer is contained in a book I was reading about folk tales of Kampuchea Krom. The editor happened to mention that most people in South Vietnam do not even speak Vietnamese.

This makes everything clear. I had assumed that one meets so many desperate Vietnamese in Phnom Penh because their families had been labelled as bourgeois after the collapse of South Vietnam, but it seemed strange that this would live on for 30 years. But if you accept that the Vietnamese government sees most of the people of South Vietnam as despised, expendable Cambodians instead of fellow Vietnamese, it makes sense.

When you travel in South Vietnam you see prosperity and bustle, and you think "why on earth do so many of them struggle to reach Cambodia?". Well, the ones that do are second-class citizens or worse, living under a colonialist yoke.

The government of Vietnam must enjoy many a hearty chuckle at the success of its plan to make the Khmer people kill each other, while it siphons all the aid that the West sends out of the country to make sure it continues to qualify for more aid...

en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Krom]

2007 Jan 04 [ Thu ]

Still not ready to release new version of my phonetic font PKD

I had previously intended to write one document just explaining how to use PKD, and another document explaining the reasoning behind it. Well, after a while I realized that I couldn't really disentangle those two goals without resulting in a lot of duplication, so I decided to finish some research into phonetics and the International Phonetic Association's alphabet, also called the IPA, which seems to have changed a lot in the 40 years since I first used a phonetic alphabet.

Well it turns out that the IPA's standards are just amazingly arbitrary and inconsistent. I thought I could support most people who would like to use IPA glyphs with a small subset, but it turns out that the "conventional" system for English alone now includes a lot of symbols which I consider worse than useless, especially for the learner, especially the symbols for the unstressed syllables in "rotten" and "little", and the symbol (consisting of two characters) for the diphthong in "fight".

I had been intending to throw in the IPA section of DejaVu plus the tone symbols so that people could use PKD both for my own super-easy stopgap system or for all-singing all-dancing IPA, but now I have reconsidered and feel like stripping PKD back down again. Anyway, I don't feel like I can produce the explanatory document till I've absorbed the IPA scheme and been able to rebut it, and I can't finalize the font till then, so please continue to bate your breath.

2006 Dec 23 [ Sat ]

Google.com now available in Khmer -- and works with Firefox

A couple of weeks ago I saw that Google now worked in Khmer. Indeed, they had done the same irritating thing as they did for Thailand, and make it come up in Khmer automatically if they detect your IP is in Cambodia.

It worked in IE but it didn't seem to work in Firefox: it just displayed the Khmer text as boxes, so I always had to click on the Google in English link. (I don't use non-session cookies.)

Today I noticed that it actually worked. The machine I'm running on right now has a KhmerOS font installed, although the keyboard driver is absent; I'm guessing that's all Google needs. I have to say I was none the wiser after I looked at the source for the page, however. Presumably Google has to detect the browser type and offer downloads of the .EOT version of the font for IE, or just send a call for the font to Firefox.

Conceivably also they only just made this fix for Firefox.

Incidentally when I suggested yesterday that my gf ask the staff in the internet cafe for help in getting Google to work in Khmer they said something like "huh? Google doesn't work in Khmer".

2006 Dec 21 [ Thu ]

Good links for using MS Word, eg setting up normal.dot for Khmer

One of the major pains in setting up Word for Khmer is disabling all the keyboard macros which use ctrl-alt and ctrl-alt-shift combinations which are necessary for Limon fonts (and others). I don't trust the pre-rolled normal.dot files you find, because there's no indication of which version of Word they were created from and mixing the .dot version and your executable version is guaranteed to cause a lifetime of regret, so I have to laboriously go through all the bazillion possible options manually (and every few weeks I find another one I missed).

The following is a great user's guide for using MS Word for legal documents, but the advice is applicable to anyone using Word for long structured documents: addbalance.com [http://addbalance.com/usersguide/index.htm]

That page says it was updated as of 2001 (I guess when Microsoft still struggled to make headway against Word Perfect in legal offices), but the templates page is dated 2005: addbalance.com [http://addbalance.com/usersguide/templates.htm] and is an *excellent, excellent* guide to how normal.dot and the other templates work, far more informative than any other Office/Word docs I have ever seen.

This page includes a link to a "Shortcut Organizer", a bunch of Word Basic routines dated 2003 which apparently makes it easy to organize your keyboard macros between templates: www.chriswoodman.co.uk [http://www.chriswoodman.co.uk/Shortcut%20Organizer.htm]

If you don't trust macros, here's an explanation of the manual procedure: addbalance.com [http://addbalance.com/word/movetotemplate.htm]

Here's the Wikipedia explanation of normal.dot: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal.dot] which links to the following lengthier description: pubs.logicalexpressions.com [http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=151] The latter includes the following tip, which would have saved me some teeth-gnashing:

And when you're attempting to hunt down your Normal.dot template, the fastest way to figure out where it's located is to click Tools/Options/File Locations. There you'll find a path to your default template directory. The path may be long and truncated so you can't view the full path. But you can click Modify to move to another dialog that fully displays the path.

The following view of templates from the "Dummies" range of books may also be helpful: www.dummies.com [http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-333.html]

I didn't know that the behavior of Word has changed in recent versions. It used to automatically re-create normal.dot if you deleted it; it no longer does: wordtips.vitalnews.com [http://wordtips.vitalnews.com/Pages/T1229_How_Word_Treats_Normaldot.html]

You may find these articles illuminating also: word.mvps.org [http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm] word.mvps.org [http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2/FileProperties.htm] word.mvps.org [http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2/PaperSize.htm] word.mvps.org [http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2/Styles.htm] word.mvps.org [http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2/OtherThings.htm]

Note: One of the word.mvps.org documents above describes setting the paper size, but somewhere else I remember seeing the remark that normal.dot does *not* set paper size. Oh well.

My updated PKD font not ready yet

You can still download the 0.90 version: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/pkd/test2/pkd-v0p90.TTF]

but I haven't produced the improved version yet. For one thing, I noticed an error on one of the characters used for English. For another thing, the whole issue of phonetic transcription in English is rather fraught. My original version was, I thought, quite adequate for people to use, but I have gotten caught up in general considerations on phonetic systems. Not only are there umpteen candidate character sets used in different dictionaries, but the "official" IPA system is, to my ear at least, inconsistent and misleading.

My intention was to provide an *easy* way to enter phonetic characters, so I don't want to provide a full set of everything possible; anyway that already exists, in the IPA section of full Unicode fonts. So I need to pick a set, and satisfy myself that that set makes sense relative to other candidates, which is not easy, and makes me understand why dictionary editors each seem to choose a different system.

Incidentally PKD is based on the DejaVu font: dejavu.sourceforge.net [http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

] 2006 Dec 11 [ Mon ]

Progress with my PKD phonetic font for Khmer

I have made various changes and figured out a lot of weird inconsistencies and misleading docs and right now I have made a version of PKD which fixes a lot of the problems with the old version.

1. The "embeddable" flag is correctly set, so Microsoft WEFT and Adobe allow you to embed the font in webpages and pdfs.

If you're using IE, this link to an HTML file should download the .eot version of my font needed for it automagically, perhaps after a prompt if you've set IE not to do automatic font downloads: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/pkd/test2/pkdtest09-01.html]

It won't do anything for Mozilla/Firefox because they don't work with .eot files. There used to be another system for Mozilla, I think using .prf files, but it died and Firefox no longer supports it.

2. I have changed the name of the font to PKD, instead of including the version number in the name. I had done the latter because for testing I wanted to keep multiple versions installed simultaneously, but I think having a single name for multiple versions makes it easier for users to upgrade.

3. Here's an example of a .pdf file with the font in it. It's not a very *good* example; it's just something I was working on. Most of it's ordinary English text; the Pkd is just a few lines right at the end: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/pkd/test2/phonetics01.pdf]

The final sentence actually shows off using PKD to represent English phonetics, which is actually not as easy as you might think as there is no standard to follow.

...Aagh, I've noticed a couple of errors in the Khmer; oh well.

4. Here's the font itself (version 0.90). It's free: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/pkd/test2/pkd-v0p90.TTF]

I haven't posted this info in my special PKD folder yet because I want to do some more tweaks and document stuff better first, and then announce the upgraded version (something like 0.95) on Usenet.

2006 Dec 08 [ Fri ]

Font embedding problem

A while back I created a font which allows you to easily create the phonetic characters used to romanize Khmer text in Huffman (along with other useful stuff like Thai and even English): www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/nolist/pkd/installing02.html]

However, it had a problem: even after I fixed a bug which prevented the font from being embedded in PDFs, Microsoft's WEFT tool still refused to allow the font to be embedded.

I am going to take another shot at this *this week* and even if I can't figure out the WEFT problem I am going to reissue the font with the PDF problem fixed (along with a couple of other slight fixes). (I apologize for the long delay.)

The following is an overview of the embedding issue.

Fonts can be embedded either in a PDF or in a website. In either case software is supposed to check magic bits in the font, presumably set by the font creator, which define whether he wants the font to be embedded or not.

Good intro to the problem, basically a bug in Fontographer: www.politechbot.com [http://www.politechbot.com/p-03506.html]

Tom7 wrote embed.exe to twiddle a bit in your font files to allow embedding: www.andrew.cmu.edu [http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/twm/embed/]

He alaso wrote a very readable intro to font creation in Windows with Fontographer, although funnily enough it makes it sound like there's no embed problem: www.andrew.cmu.edu [http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/twm/makefont/]

A description of the issue on webpages which has a clear definition of the magic bits: members.tripod.com [http://members.tripod.com/~bhaavana/embedded/faq.html]

2006 Oct 13 [ Fri ]

Update on wet bathrooms and flipflops

A year or two back I wrote a little article pointing out that if you buy a few extra pairs of flipflops you can make do with the typical Asian-style wet bathrooms: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Miscellaneous/wetbathrooms01.html]

Since then I've revised my thinking somewhat. I used to suggest four pairs. I've now decided that trying to dry them in the sun is probably a mistake; either that or the bleach I was using also seems to corrode the surfaces of the shoe and create even more unsightly mold in the long run.

Now I basically have just two pairs of flipflops. I wear one pair and keep the other pair just outside the bathroom door. When I go in to shower, I wear the current pair, and when I finish the shower I dry my feet (with a separate small towel) and put on the pair outside the door, leaving the wet pair to get dry, ie alternating the roles.

Showering while wearing the flipflops seems sufficient to avoid the buildup of grime, and the time between showers seems sufficient to allow them to dry. It's really easy and the only problem is getting the maid not to take your spare pair.

It's good to keep another pair for moving around just outside the apartment.

2006 Sep 09 [ Sat ]

Losing your privacy by giving out your business card

In Slashdot today I found a discussion about a company called "Jigsaw" which invites people to enter all the business cards they've collected so that it can build up a big database of business people's contact information: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/08/0049259]

Obviously most posters made the point that although you may give out your card to many people you probably don't know, that does not mean that you wish the information on the card to be truly public.

By coincidence, my girlfriend had a privacy problem with her business card recently. She's started working at a new location in her company, and her new boss decided everybody had to get business cards. When she got hers I noticed they had her *personal* cellphone number: everybody she gave her card to would be able to harrass her.

After stewing about it for a while I took the cards to a design shop on Sihanouk and had them make copies that don't show the phone number.

2006 Jul 21 [ Fri ]

The state of mail delivery in Phnom Penh

For a long time I was under the impression that Phnom Penh had no functioning mail delivery to individual locations at all, but recently I saw someone on the khmer440 board say that he gets stuff delivered to his home all the time.

I still wouldn't advise it. Last year, having heard that delivery to a box at the Phnom Penh Post Office was relatively reliable, I tried it. A package was sent from the USA postmarked 2005-11-16, and I just received it today.

To be fair to the post office, there were three reminders about the package in my box dating back to 2006-03-23. I had given up checking for the package some while before that however; when I complained the guy in the post office only said "well it might have gone to Colombia".

There was a big hole in the package and someone had put the gold foil wrapper from a chocolate coin inside, in fragments. There was an illegible postmark stamped on the back, but no other notification that the package had been opened officially. Far from apologizing for the delay, the post office demanded 2000 R for storing it.

I don't care what anyone else says. The Cambodian postal service is a shambles run by and for crooks.

...On second thoughts, I suppose it's entirely possible these days that the package was opened by the US secret police rather than Cambodian thieves. Still, you might think the guy on the counter would at least apologize when a package shows up months late and obviously tampered with.

2006 Jun 08 [ Thu ]

Now photographs of the funny gun at Central Market, Phnom Penh

A couple of weeks ago I noted that I had seen an unusual submachinegun at the Central Market, apparently a silenced model as used by US Special Forces in the Vietnam era. www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Miscellaneous/funnygun01.html]

Recently I dragged my girlfriend to the location where I had seen the gun. I found it again and she persuaded the person wielding it to let me take some photographs.

He did not want to be photographed himself but he did say what he knew about the gun. He said it had been issued to him by the government (he was wearing an OD uniform with I think a police badge) and that it was one of a batch of guns that the government had recently acquired. I have the impression that I have seen more than one guy at the location with the same sort of gun.

For the purpose of the photographs he considerately took off a sort of bandage that had been wrapped around it. I did not think of asking him about it at the time, but now it occurs to me that it might have been necessary to hold the magazine catch closed because the magazine being used is not really designed for the weapon.

The view below shows the folding stock. A serial number is visible but there is no manufacturer's name that I can see.

Now that I can compare the photos with the references on the web I am much less certain that this is a Carl Gustav M/45. For instance the selective fire control is on the right of this gun with 3 positions, but on the left of the M/45 with two. It may be a Smith & Wesson M76, but I could not find a picture (did you know there was an M76 nebula? I sure know now). Still, any silenced weapon has got to have a few tales to tell.

2006 May 26 [ Fri ]

An interesting gun seen at Central Market

For the benefit of those who live outside Cambodia, I should probably explain that the Central Market area of Phnom Penh has many gold and jewelry stores, and most of them have a guard outside (sometimes more than one) carrying some sort of firearm. Typically this is some variety of AK47 of course, as these are the cheapest available, but you also see K54 and K59 handguns.

As I was sidling along the west side of the market square this afternoon however I saw a weapon that made me do a doubletake. It was a submachinegun with an integral silencer! It had a plain tubular look, with a bright orange plastic handgrip sculpted for the thumb which made it look a bit like an air pistol. It had a folding stock and a curved magazine. I had a vague idea I'd seen it before but couldn't remember where. It had a *telescopic sight*!

I tried to ask the guard if I could take a picture, but he seemed to not understand Cambodian – at least not my variety. I wonder if he knows how much a nostalgia item like this is worth?

Searching on the web makes me think it's probably the Swedish Carl Gustaf K-pist m/45: www.nazarian.no [http://www.nazarian.no/wep.asp?id=382&group_id=4&country_id=67&lang=0&p=5]

Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_M/45]

None of the pages I saw about the m/45 referred to a curved magazine, but if this thing has hung around South-East Asia since 1973 it's probably had several blacksmith repairs. I'd be surprised if the silencer wasn't burnt out by now: it probably has no accuracy.

2006 May 04 [ Thu ]

Using Khmer in Windows: Limon, USA International, Unicode, usp10.dll

I recently upgraded to a new drive on my laptop, and have tried to keep notes of what I needed to do to enable Khmer, both using the Limon-type fonts and Unicode. The following is a list of what I had to do. I have made a lot of postings about related issues, eg creating web pages that use Limon fonts, which are contained in the folder for this article (in reverse chronological order): www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Khmer-language/index.html]

Several of these stages are laborious and tedious, especially setting up the normal.dot template for MS Word, but once that has been done you can copy it to any other machine (with the same version of Word). More significantly, you need some familiarity with Cambodian, so if you know very little Cambodian and need to set up your computer for your girlfriend several steps will be very difficult.

On the other hand I think much of the information in this document will be useful to anyone who needs to set up any language using the "US International" keyboard.

1. I'm assuming you start from a clean copy of Windows 2000 or XP with service packs and whatnot already installed.

2. In order to handle Khmer Unicode, you must have a recent copy of the usp10.dll file installed. My understanding is that this is provided with XP SP2. I use W2000 myself, so I needed to get usp10.dll from somewhere. The easy way is to install MS Office 2003. Another way is to copy it from an existing installation, like an internet cafe. Another way is to join MS Volt. I tried to do so, and it appeared to work, but then some problem happened: I vaguely recall it wanted me to set up a MS Passport account, which is not something I want to do on an internet cafe machine.

3. For Limon-style fonts, you need to install the fonts themselves. They're easy to find in Cambodia of course; somewhat less easy if you're outside the country. There is nothing special about the font installation itself. (The "magic" needed to, for instance, position the vowels above or below the consonant is already built into the standard font system, and does not need the extra features in usp10.dll, which is only for Unicode.)

4. To actually use the Limon fonts, you need to install the "USA-International" keyboard. (As seems to be standard in Windows-speak, a term which normally refers to a piece of hardware is used to refer to a software driver for such hardware. Death to Microsoft!)

Go to Control panel – Regional and language options – Languages – Details – Text services and input languages – Settings. Select Add, and select Input language: English (United States) and keyboard layout/IME: United States-International. Click OK, going back to the Text services... window. Under Preferences – Language bar, I like to make sure that the task bar shows a button for the language type (eg EN for English, CA for Cambodian (Unicode), etc). This appears to be the default when you install a second keyboard, but you may be starting from a different setting.

5. Now click on Key settings. By default, every language you install goes ahead and grabs some key combinations to allow you to flip keyboards without using the mouse. I think this is an absolutely terrible idea. I advise you to check the list carefully and delete any ctrl-alt or ctrl-alt-shift combinations that are needed for Limon. (MS seems to specify only left-alt combinations for this purpose, so if you run into problems entering Khmer, try using the right-alt key.) Internet cafes in Cambodia tend to install keyboard layouts for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, so the machine I am currently typing on has a long list. At a minimum, delete the "switch between languages" function, left alt-shift, which can cause *extreme* confusion if you sometimes hit the keys in different order.

6. Now you need to change the current keyboard layout to US International. Unfortunately Microsoft made the taskbar display *more confusing* in XP. In Windows 2000, you can left-click on the language symbol (EN), and it will show English (United States) – US as one option and English (United States) – US International as another option. In XP, the menu just shows English (United States). To get a different keyboard you need to right-click the EN and select "settings". Even then, I cannot find a way to just change the *current window* to US-International. Instead, you have to change the *default* language to English (United States) – United States-International. Then click Apply, then OK. (Maybe *this* is why they provide the blasted keyboard shortcuts.) Be aware that if you have "US International" selected when typing English text, it will do strange things when you try to use the single and double quote characters, because they are intended to start multikey sequences for European accented characters; to get the ordinary quote characters, type a space immediately afterwards.

7. You should be ready to try entering text in Limon now. I personally use a Limon keyboard at home, but it's not really necessary: the only Limon keyboards I've seen at Internet cafes are ones I donated. However, you do need a "cheat sheet" to check where the characters are. In Cambodia it's easy to get a printout of this from computer and cd stores, eg PTC on Monivong, but I haven't been able to find a downloadable version. I have some blurry photos of an actual physical Limon keyboard on this blog somewhere.

Load Wordpad and try entering some text. If any ctrl-alt combinations produce usable characters – eg ctrl-alt-z produces a jerng thaa – then US International is functional.

8. A huge problem however is that many kinds of software grab the key combinations that you need. Some – like programmer's editors – simply discards ctrl-alt, eg producing the character for "g" instead of ctrl-alt-g. Other software binds many key combinations for other uses. I will describe what to do for MS Word below.

9. Note that when you make these changes to Word, it saves them in its template file: normal.dot. This is stored in a hard-to-find location. On my current machine it's at: c:\Documents and Settings\QW02\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

You can check the location with Tools – Options – File locations.

You need to understand that when you change the template, it affects *new* files – not *old* ones created with a different template! If you want to add Khmer text to existing files, you'll have to create a *new* file and paste the old file into it.

You can find pre-fixed versions of normal.dot included with the khmer fonts in many cases, but these appear to have been created under old versions of Word, and may contain all kinds of undesired settings, and macros. If only because of the version issue – MS Word is notorious for flaky behavior when you mix versions – I think it's worth the effort to create your own clean normal.dot so I describe the process here (as far as I know this info is available nowhere else on the web, and is probably useful for any language using US-International).

Additonally you may have important settings stored in your existing normal.dot file which you want to preserve.

10. You will have to disable *many, many* "keyboard shortcuts". In addition, it has many automation features enabled by default which work *very badly* when you're entering text in Khmer. (The first one you will probably notice is the one that automatically capitalizes words at the start of a sentence!)

-1. First go to Tools – Automation and turn off *all* the autocorrect options

-2. Then Tools – Options – Spelling and Grammar – turn off all options (Some of these sound like the same as the Automation options but apparently they aren't)

-3. Then Tools – Customize – Keyboard. I could not find a quick way to do this: you have to laboriously click through every single blasted function checking for ctrl-alt and ctrl-alt-shift combinations. This took me about 30-60 mins of work. I advise you to quit out of Word after just a couple of minutes and restart it to check that your changes have been saved in normal.dot as expected, before going on to complete the job.

-4. However, this interface does *not* allow you to change every keyboard shortcut! There are still several which need a different trick. This was shown to me by Piseth, seemingly the most clueful guy in this internet cafe. You can use the "symbol" feature to override *any* shortcut (as far as I've checked). Props to Piseth!

– 1. Go to Insert Symbol (the route to this seems to be different on this machine to the route on my laptop, so I'm not sure what the default route is). In the Symbols tab, select a Limon font, eg Limon S1. (Word may display the font name in its own font, which makes it very hard to read at the character size in the dialog).

– 2. *Then* select "(normal text)" as the font. In my tests, this has the (non-obvious) effect of allowing you to select the desired glyph from the Limon S1 font at this time, but subsequently – in use – the system will grab the character with the corresponding *character code* from the current font. So the keyboard shortcuts we set up will work even when we're in the middle of typing text in Limon F3, or whatever.

– 3. Now you have to *eyeball* the font table shown, and compare it with a keyboard layout and the list of undesired shortcuts below to locate which shortcuts need to be reassigned. Regrettably, the font table is very hard to read at the font size MS used – diacritics are particularly bad. I found myself using guesswork sometimes.

– 4. At the moment I have only found two undesired shortcuts in Limon: cltr-alt-shift-hyphen, and ctrl-alt-equals. By contrast, the Unicode keyboard seems to have an assigned function for *every* key combination. I have not yet keyboarded much in Unicode so I don't have a good list. However, certainly ctrl-alt-5 – which produces the "euro" character *and* switches to the Times font – needs to be fixed. (It's not necessary for Limon.)

– 5. Piseth actually created his own normal.dot casually, simply by keying in Khmer text over a period of about a month and fixing each undesired shortcut as he encountered it.

11. The rest of this info is for Unicode only.

12. The files needed can be downloaded here: www.khmeros.info [http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/download]

You probably want:

-1. Khmer Unicode Installer for Windows

-2. Documents

The "installer" includes the following features:

-1. Searches for the usp10.dll file on your system and makes it available to all programs (more difficult than it sounds, because this is a protected system file)

-2. Installs several Unicode Khmer fonts

-3. The Khmer unicode keyboard driver (has to be designated CA, which officially stands for Catalan, not Cambodian)

The documents include a PDF of the keyboard layout and a PDF describing how to use it (distinctly different from the Limon layout).

13. If you are using the Symbol trick to reassign shortcuts while inside Word using the Unicode keyboard, remember to switch back to the "US English" keyboard when you're entering the key combination! If you don't the Unicode keyboard driver will dutifully send not the key combination, but the Unicode character code to Word. Confusion will ensue.

14. The display of characters while you're actually entering them is a little disconcerting. Suppose you enter a consonant, then press the jerng key to get a jerng consonant, then the key for the desired jerng consonant. At that point the jerng consonant *still* displays above the line. Probably if you understand Khmer better than me this makes sense. Anyhow, once you enter *another* consonant the one you wanted to be jerng will be shoved under the line, as desired.

2006 May 02 [ Tue ]

Some ideas about architecture in Phnom Penh

1. My initial impression – when I came here from Thailand – was that the Cambodians were much more sensible about building design than the Thais, who delight in building cramped, stuffy concrete boxes to live in.

After a while however I have realized that buildings looked better than in Thailand because the Cambodians did not have enough money to replace them. New buildings are almost always in the Thai style, with only some bright, cheerful color detailing and opulent stainless-steel balconies to distract from the cellblock design.

2. I have been thinking about how to present my ideas for a long time. A few days ago I built up an illustration in Corel Draw, only to discover that the appearance was much the same as existing buildings. This was actually one of my goals – I didn't want to suggest something that would appear bizarre to the Cambodians – but it makes an illustration that just gives an overview a little pointless.

3. I am considering redoing the illo in some 3D format so that I can more easily point out details. I vaguely remember that several years ago there was a Java applet that allowed any browser client to rotate a 3-D object in three dimensions. Maybe I can find it again.

4. My general goals are: -1. Comfort without having to use AC -2. Dust control -3. Security -4. Noise and smell handling -5. Extendability

5. The last point relates to something the Cambodians are used to in their current buildings: as a building owner becomes more prosperous he adds storeys. In some ways the result is charming, although one wonders if the resulting building is really within spec. In particular, the practice makes it really difficult to install elevators, which causes most apartments in Phnom Penh above the first floor (E1) to be impractical for the middle-aged (ie me).

6. Another aspect of extendability is parking. The Cambodians seem determined to recapitulate all the mistakes of every other society in urban design. Right now, the only practical way to provide parking is to leave much of the ground floor unused during the day so that the family car can be parked there at night (or possibly the car of a neighbor who needs to rent a space). This seems extremely wasteful of dwelling space as well as suboptimal for the driver (most dwellings are so narrow it is possible to get out of the parked car on only one side, and then only by contortion). I have some ideas for designs which will have options both for a "high-GNP" scenario where every middle-class family gets a car, and for "Dutch green" scenarios where ICE vehicles are banned from city centers (guess which I favor).

2006 Apr 08 [ Sat ]

Absolutely horrible hygiene is not actually common in Phnom Penh

A few days ago I was walking down Street 63 about 500 m from Soraya Mall when I noticed a woman stop and examine a puddle in the street. I was wondering why when she squatted down and hitched up her skirt. Corblimey, I thought, she's going to pee right in the street.

To my horror, however, she actually put her fingers in the water and flicked up the water into her crotch, apparently to clean it or cool it – a literal example of "freshening up" I suppose.

She was about 45 years old, tall, wearing bright-colored mismatched clothes suggesting that she was a country person. I thought perhaps puddles in the countryside contain water which is about as clean as the water in the streams, but of course a puddle in the city is a toxic waste dump.

When I mentioned this occurrence to my girlfriend she found it hard to believe. She said she had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. Presumably the woman was demented.

It reminds me of something that happened to me when I was living in Munich thirty years ago. I went to Berlin for a convention, and decided to check out East Berlin one afternoon. Recall that East Berlin was under communist control at the time. I had never gone there before.

It was a Saturday, and I was surprised to find that not only were the shops closed (standard in West Germany too at that time) but also the bars and restaurants. About the only thing I could do was take the subway to look at different places.

At one stop I emerged from the subway entrance to find a young girl, perhaps thirteen years old, squatting *in front of* the bushes, in full view of anyone exiting the subway. I had never seen such a thing anywhere in the world. I did not know what to make of it, but I thought "OK, it means something about East Germany: maybe it means there aren't any public lavatories, or girls don't care about being seen peeing, or something".

Less than a week later I saw *the exact same thing* exiting the subway near my apartment. It could have been the same girl. I was stunned. It was like someone was telling me "don't leap to conclusions!".

2006 Mar 28 [ Tue ]

Continuing power cuts in Phnom Penh; generators and kludges

There was a story in the Cambodia Daily a while back that alleged that a new power station would come on line and relieve the power cuts by the end of February, but here it is the end of March and they continue.

I went to the length of assembling a switch box so that I could easily connect my battery-powered inverter to the entire house wiring, but having completed it it occurred to me that this inverter unit – probably like most such electronic units – produces a dirty output signal that kills fan motors. So each time a power cut occurred, before actually switching to the generator I would need to turn off not only the fridge (because it demands excessive power) but also all the fans. Visualize being in the dark and having to check all that. I day-dreamed about feeding the fans via relay-operated circuits that would trip out as soon as power was lost, but this is completely impractical here. I have only ever seen *one* type of relay on sale in *one* shop – running at 48 V DC!

So now my switch unit is just sitting there. I am considering wiring it up to one of the wall sockets that doesn't have any fans connected to it, but I really wanted to be able to supply the fluorescents in the rest of the apt. Oh well.

Incidentally, the inverter seems to work OK with fluorescents, including the miniaturized bulb-replacement type, my TV, DVD and laptop.

I've looked for a more professional-looking inverter, but I seem to have the spiffiest normally available, even though it lacks an on/off switch and a current meter. I've wondered about fitting the changeover switch (and the off switch) inside the case; if you switch to "charge" from "inverter" (once the city AC is back on) it continues to provide AC from the output socket (indeed so rapidly that the TV and DVD stay on) but it is not clear to me whether in this state the output socket has been switched directly to the AC in or whether the inverter is actually still running. Funnily enough, I have a gizmo I put together here which allows me to check the waveform on my laptop, but I haven't dug it out of my junkpile yet.

One thing the power cuts were good for was allowing me to fix my main AC input box. The knife switch was busted so that it only switched one wire. The other half of the switch had been jumpered over! The wires going into the box came from a kWh meter whose terminals were behind a sealed cover. For a long time I didn't dare touch it: even during a power cut, I didn't look forward to waving around two bare wires, which might suddenly get hot again at any moment. Then it occurred to me that I could use a chocolate block connector to easily terminate one of the wires at a time local to the original termination point, and then at my leisure wire up the chocolate block to the new switch. This worked very well, although I took great pains to map out what I had to do in advance so that nothing went wrong while I had hot wires to deal with. (Also, no power: if I had needed to drill holes to mount the chocolate block it would have been impossible.)

There were no specific fuses on the switch: instead, narrow-gauge stranded wire had been wired across it. I naively assumed some sort of cartridge fuse holder would be compatible, but the girl in the shop looked at me as if I was crazy and then showed me a roll of solder marked "20A"; apparently that's normal here. The human-interface aspect of replacing the fuse seems very poor: in order to access the fuse you have to move the switch handle halfway back to the on position. Also, it was hard to access the terminals to wire the "fuse wire" to them: the screws had to be unscrewed so far they tended to fall off and roll under the furniture. Furthermore, the cover was so hard to remove that I actually cracked it, even though I was only using my fingers, and I am not the Incredible Hulk. This might have been partly because the switch handle was in the way. There's now a hole in the cover, leaving the hot terminal accessible to the fingers. Sheesh.

Now that I can make the house wiring safe, I can easily do things like replace the ballast/starter in the fluorescents with an electronic starter. This worked well, except that the wires provided with the unit were too short to terminate to the fluorescent. I needed to use a lot of wirenuts (TM) and a jumper wire to wire the starter into the existing lamp assembly.

I was boasting to my girlfriend's brother about this, and he pointed out that the electronic inverters are very expensive: about twice the price of a complete lamp unit. On the other hand, a *regular* replacement ballast plus starter costs nearly as much as a new lamp unit.

He also said that the usual system for working on the main switch box for a house is to ask the landlord for the key to the electric company's box in the street, and turn off the power there. I was a little surprised by this as to casual inspection the boxes in the street (on lampposts etc) do not allow this, but maybe there's something I'm missing.

Generally, I'm struck by how much these power cuts must have cost Phnom Penh. I must have spent over a hundred dollars myself, plus a lot of time figuring things out and working on it. I see a lot of shops now, like the internet cafes, have a little petrol-powered generator that probably cost around 500 USD. I also see office buildings that have a car-sized generator that (guessing) must have cost them 10 000 USD.

Also, in my own case I'm probably using *more* power now: during a power cut almost the only thing I'm not using is the fridge, and it probably takes about as much energy to get the fridge back to normal temperature once the power returns as it would have to maintain the temperature. And of course there are losses in recharging the battery.

2006 Mar 12 [ Sun ]

My ghastly ants discovery

A while ago I bought an electric boiler pot to make hot tea. I soon started noticing ants in the water: I figured they were going in the spout to get the remaining drops of water, and got used to simply pouring off the antsy water until it ran clear.

Having been away for several days on a trip to Vietnam, I returned to find I suppose *hundreds* of drowned ants in the pot. As I (shudderingly) started to look at the pot, I realized there were a lot of non-dead ants running out of the hinge area.

I started trying to wash them away, but there were more and more. I decided I had to take a look (this was like that scene in Alien where the egg is lying in the cave and it starts going ga-blobble! ga-blobble! and the guy in the spacesuit bends down for a closer look and you scream DON'T DO IT YOU DOOFUS) and disassembled the top.

In the top of the boiler there's a surprisingly complex mechanism for pressurising the boiling chamber so that water is forced up and out the spout. At the heart is a plastic bellows. Inside were dozens of ants which had been squished by the walls of the bellows. In addition, there were many other miscellaneous corpses, plus I suppose more than a hundred just milling around.

Eventually we got it more or less clean (my girlfriend had been watching me, half commiserating and half laughing) but right now it's sitting in a bag, in pieces. I'm not sure I can put it together again, and I'm not sure I want to. Now I've seen the inside, it's evident that the blasted ants are going to be in there all the time, whether I see the corpses or not.

It's not clear to me how the pump works, but presumably the pump mechanism has to be forcing the air into the pot, so it occasionally sucks an ant into the pot as it does so.

It's also not clear to me why the ants seem so fascinated by the pump mechanism. I can understand why they'd crawl into the spout, and from there into the pot. Ants need a lot of water, and the dry season is started. But the pump mechanism? I can only guess that escaping steam condenses on the mechanism.

Now I wonder about similar units used in hotels and restaurants (even in the USA). I also wonder what happens in simple kettles.

2006 Feb 17 [ Fri ]

Ripoff at Kien Svay

Kien Svay is a lake about half an hour southeast of Phnom Penh. My girlfrend suggested we go there, so I brought her, some of her family, and a buddy, a few days ago. You can eat in nice little huts right on the water.

The web had warned me to look out for a mob of touts at the entrance to this area, so I asked my girlfriend to tell the driver to take care of it. There was only one tout, but unfortunately the driver seemed to know nothing about the area, so he did not give me any advice on which restaurant to choose.

We were also warned that the restaurants would charge exorbitant prices if we did not agree prices beforehand, so my gf was careful.

The dining experience was pleasant enough, although bearing in mind that the dishes are presumably washed in the lake water I ate nothing; neither did my buddy. We were initially brought sidewalk-drag ice, but my gf insisted on "teuk gork anamai".

We were surprised to be presented with a bill for 42 USD – for food for just 3 people, and a fair price would have been less than 14 USD. My girlfriend's checking prices was defeated by telling her a price for chicken and then billing for umpteen chickens (although we only ever saw one plate of chicken...). Similarly, we were charged 2 USD for Kleenex, which I have never been charged for anywhere before. And so on.

Here's a link to someone reporting essentially the same scam, which unfortunately I did not see in time: www-personal.umich.edu [http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ampage/AMPMLS/2-6/CAMBODIA.html] Search for "Traditional Khmei Head-Shaving" partway down the page. He rationalizes it with "well we had a fantastic time". Yeah, like the first 3 seconds after you leap from a rooftop thinking you could fly.

I was very angry but was warned repeatedly by my girlfriend that these people were gangsters and ready for a fight. Eventually she paid them with her own money.

I am surprised this scam is not better publicized. Even if you are aware of it and make efforts to avoid it, you are essentially robbed. My girlfriend says that if the place were busier (we were almost the only customers that day) they might not try it, but I cannot imagine anyone except perhaps Bruce Willis deliberately exposing himself to a robbery attempt.

My girlfriend says it was pointless to approach the police because they would take more money and probably do nothing.

I have the following suggestions that might be helpful:

1. Never go to Kien Svay and tell everyone you meet that they are thieves there. (Later my gf told me other Cambodian friends of hers had been victimized there and had paid up – they don't aim only at foreigners. Apparently you could insist on just paying the 5000R rental for the hut and nothing else, as people arrive on boats trying to sell you food, but then they would probably charge 50 USD for walkway rental.)

2. Take pictures of the restaurant facade and owner *as you enter* – they were not keen on me taking pictures after they unveiled the scam. (You need pictures of the facade to identify it later – none of the establishments have a name or a street address).

3. Check whether your cellphone has a good signal before you enter any such establishment. In theory you could call the tourist police in the event of a disagreement over the bill. I did not think of this while I was there. I do not know how long they would have taken to deal with it. There is a regular police station about 500 m east of the Monivong Bridge, ie about 15 mins drive away.

4. They did present an itemized bill. I did not think to retain it after my gf paid. I think it would be excellent evidence in the event it was actually possible to interest local cops.

2006 Feb 12 [ Sun ]

Some amusing stuff in travel guides to Cambodia

Although I've been living in Phnom Penh for a couple of years now, I haven't been adventurous at all. For instance, I'm thiunking of going to Kien Svay soon for the first time.

So I Googled it. The webpages I found naturally had some info about other places in Cambodia. I was particularly amused by this one: www.aseantravelandtours.com [http://www.aseantravelandtours.com/cambodia/sightseeings/phnompenh_surroundings.htm]

It calls Central Market "surprisingly cool, even in the heat of the hottest day". In my own experience a fairer description would be "surprisingly hot, even in the morning of the coolest days".

The other page: www.leisurecambodia.com [http://www.leisurecambodia.com/Leisure_Cambodia/No.23/placesOf_interest.html] has an absolutely classic line:

A bus ride from Phnom Penh to the "Tiger Beer Street" stop costs about 1500 riel. And the 500-meter walk to the park is free.

It's like advertising a hitchhiking tour of Australia: "No extra charge for handcuffs or burial!"

I apologize if the urls are bad – I can't cut-and-paste on this machine.

2006 Feb 02 [ Thu ]

Power problems in Phnom Penh get worse again

Over the 4-day period of Chinese New Year celebrations, I don't think there was a single power cut. I guess that means that most businesses were closed (although Lucky Supermarket seemed to be open every day).

But yesterday and today there have been several power cuts each day. Yesterday there was a very long one from about 1pm to 5 pm, followed by another from 6 to 7:30 pm, that was long enough to mess up my frozen food. If things get much worse there won't be enough time between power cuts to recharge my 12-V battery.

I was vaguely thinking about this and other AC issues the other day and remembered a trip to Spain I made about 30 years ago. I was installing some equipment in a steel mill so I had a full set of tools with me. One day I noticed a tingle when I was taking a shower in my hotel room and when I checked my trusty multimeter told me there was about 100 V AC between the hot water and the drainpipe! I tried to complain to the management, and they did move me to another room I think, but I couldn't get over to them that they should check it out urgently. (Somewhere I still have a black-and-white print of that meter readout: Pentax S3, Tri-X, handheld, available light – those were the days.)

Anyway the interesting thing (you always assumed something was going to be, right?) is that I suddenly put that together with another memory. When I started installing our equipment there I was surprised to find 120 V on the neutral line. When I checked it out the tech told me that was normal, and said that it was better. I tried to avoid conceding it was better (I couldn't quite follow his explanation because although Spanish is exceptionally easy I had only been studying it for a few weeks) and said something like "on our drawing it's called neutral and you're going to fry the next foreign engineer who comes here and doesn't check that the supply matches the drawing". He grumblingly complied (now I suppose he switched it back as soon as I left the site).

And I put it together with something else I read a few weeks ago: that Spanish *domestic* AC wiring often includes an isolation transformer. Now it all made sense. I had been very surprised that the 100 V I was measuring hadn't killed me, but it was *isolated from ground*. The sensitive meter didn't load it very much, but as soon as my body shorted it out the effective voltage was safe. The Spanish indeed do it for that reason: wiring errors which would be lethal *without* the isolation transformer become harmless.

The trouble was the Spanish had *adapted* to that. Like a hapless tourist in Phnom Penh who imagines that traffic lights mean anything, they had lowered their guard. Situations like *a short from the hot line into the water heater* were ignored and belittled.

I guess now, here in PP, I'm undergoing the *reverse* transformation. I'm building up a protective armor of car batteries, inverters, flash lights reachable in the dark, etc, etc...

2006 Jan 24 [ Tue ]

Power problem in Phnom Penh, continued

The Cambodia Daily recently published a story that said that the power outages are caused by a combination of rising demand and a power station going offline. Apparently two new power stations are going to be put into service soon and the problems will vanish as early as the end of February, if I remember the story rightly. Hm.

On a more optimistic note, the merry men in the shop where I bought my DC-powered fan assured me that it is normal for the buttons not to work: such fans are converted from regular AC operation without providing anything to handle the speed-change feature. Oh well. At least it runs happily overnight.

2006 Jan 20 [ Fri ]

More power problems in Phnom Penh; using an inverter/charger

For the first year or so that I lived in Phnom Penh there were rather few outages: perhaps two or three.

The past few months or so have gotten very bad. There are now one or two per day, lasting two or three hours.

Initially I just used candles, but as things got worse and worse I decided to set up something better. Probably the best solution would be to set up a double-pole switch right at the AC supply box so that I could use an inverter to supply the entire apartment. Unfortunately the knifeswitch on the AC supply box is broken so someone wired up one pole of the AC supply so that it's always connected! So it's hard to reorganize the wiring properly.

Also, my fridge is old and power-hungry: it would probably flatten anything but a fuel-powered generator. I'm too cheap to get anything but a Chinese inverter. So I'd always need to dash into the kitchen and power off the fridge first anyway.

Oh well... so I just bought a cheapo inverter-charger (allegedly 300 W) for 25 USD and a 12V 55Ah battery for 28 USD (don't laugh at my negotiating skills).

There were several problems with the inverter:

1. It has a voltage meter, but no current meter. So you can't tell whether the battery has finished charging or not. It also doesn't have a fuse or an on/off switch.

2. When I connected it to my TV, it died as soon as I turned on the TV. After some grumbling the shop replaced it. They swore it ought to work with a TV, although they did say the 55Ah battery was perhaps on the low side. I haven't tried it on the TV again yet because I was tired of complaining.

3. When I connected my pedestal fan, it made a nasty humming sound. After a while, I realized the fan was running much slower, even on regular AC. When I checked Google, it turned out that "modified sinewave" inverters are well known for killing fan motors. Oddly enough, complicated stuff like a laptop probably has a switching power supply itself and is not worried by non-sinewave AC, but cheapo fan motors overheat and screw up their permanent magnets. (TVs are probably OK, but they do take a large gulp at powerup which may well flatten the supply – or fry it if the cheap and cheerful designers provided no fault tolerance.)

So today I gave in and bought a fan that runs off 12V DC. I paid 13 USD. It seems to work fine, except the speed-selection buttons don't work – it's always one speed! Aargh! Now I have to return it too.

The incessant outages are particularly annoying because I think the government particularly aims them at foreign residents. The intention is to provide another sob story for foreign aid. I don't think the donors are quite as naive as they used to be, though: I will probably wind up rewiring my AC supply box before the outages stop.

2006 Jan 19 [ Thu ]

Google has links to Khmer usenet groups *and* forums

I haven't used Google Groups all that much (although I intend to post a msg on the Thai newsgroup about my Thai tone chart soon). So I was surprised to find, when I did a search for "khmer", that it leads not only to Usenet newsgroups but *also* to forum websites: groups.google.com [http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?q=khmer]

For instance, it included a link to a group at Google which is working on Khmer searching in Google. I wasn't able to check out this link because the workstation I'm on doesn't do Unicode, but maybe yours does: www.google.com [http://www.google.com/intl/km/]

2006 Jan 15 [ Sun ]

Unicode Khmer keyboard now available in Phnom Penh

I had been wondering when these keyboards would show up. I spotted one today at Pacific Data Systems on Street 63 (a good place – it also has the Limon-layout keyboards). They said they arrived in the last couple of weeks.

It was just 7 USD. I happily bought it. It seems low quality (vague key action and low case rigidity) but the keycap printing seems adequate.

I haven't played with it yet. The shop provided a free setup disk for it. A few weeks ago I found what appeared to be a very easy-to-use setup program downloadable from the "Khmer Software Initiative": prdownloads.sourceforge.net [http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/khmer/KhmerUnicode1.2.FindUsp.exe?download]

From the description, it sounds like it does *not* include the all-important updated "usp10.dll" file, which is only really available as part of MS Office 2003. *However*, it claims that it can *transfer* this file from MS Office into the system32 folder to make it available for all applications, which is essential and *not easy* to do manually.

I tried running that update on my laptop and it did not barf, although since I had *already* gotten unicode working the fact that it *still* works is not a strong recommendation.

I tried to show the keyboard off to my local internet cafe but they didn't seem very interested. They do have Unicode installed – on *one* machine.

Incidentally, I could not see an announcement of the availability of the new keyboard on khmeros.info. However, they do have an announcement of locale files for khmer. I was all excited because I thought it might provide Perl locale features, but seemingly not. However, they are interesting.

This one: www.khmeros.info [http://www.khmeros.info/download/km.xml] has the names of various *other* languages *in Khmer*, as well as date formats, the "riel" symbol etc. *Very* interestingly, the Khmer displayed correctly! When I checked, another Khmer page at khmeros.info displayed fine! It looks like this machine (the one I am now using at the internet cafe) *can* use Unicode! It appears to accept the laguage designation "km", at least in Firefox. Woo! have to try a few other machines.

The other locale file was a broken link, but the correct link is here (my advanced hacking skills tee-hee): www.khmeros.info [http://www.khmeros.info/download/km_KH.xml] It just shows number formats, including currency.

Incidentally, they have a help file *in Khmer* for how to do email. I'm sure it's aimed at people trying to use Unicode. It's probably beyond me, but I may get my girlfriend to check it out: prdownloads.sourceforge.net [http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/khmer/Moyura1.0.7-km-KH.exe?download]

Later: I tried this other website: www.forum.org.kh [http://www.forum.org.kh/en/index.shtml]

It provides versions in "Khmer" and "Khmer Unicode". The "Khmer Unicode" version worked and the "Khmer" didn't. The "Khmer" was set up in .css I supose – anyhow, I'm not sure why it failed. But certainly this machine (PC11) seems happy with Khmer Unicode.

Here's another Khmer Unicode install procedure. It needs a lot more manual steps: www.khmer.ws [http://www.khmer.ws/unicode/windows.asp]

Also, interestingly, it seems to set up Khmer with the designation "ca", which is officially Catalan. I don't think Firefox is working that way.

2005 Nov 29 [ Tue ]

The Cambodian land system, and the attitudes it creates

For hundreds of years, land was not held privately, but was administered by the commune chief. For various reasons, the population was mostly way below the limit of what the land could support. (I think dietary problems are at the root of this: apparently the staple fish of Cambodia contains a hormone which actively interferes with vitamin processing; also, Cambodia has always had poor or non-existent iodine sources.)

The result was that most people could just ask for land to build a hut, and enough land to get food for your family: the commune chief had no objection (more families, more slaves).

So I think the unspoke ethic of Cambodians was: if you just *claim* it first, it's yours. It seems to me this explains what I observed before: people will arrange their motorbike and possessions in a line across the sidewalk *specifically* to block it. They stare at you if you attempt to weave through it (not daring to step out into the road with the utterly incompetent drivers). Maybe it's just that generations of arrests for "obstruction" have ingrained the idea in Westerners that travellers have the right of way.

Unfortunately, communal land ownership just does not work at all in a free-enterprise society. Inevitably, those in charge of the land accept (massive) bribes to transfer ownership to the rich. This is happening every day in Thailand and Cambodia: the government just does it to a different small group every time, and the rest of the sheep think it won't happen to *them*. It's like abattoirs where they thoughtfully slaughter each animal separately so as not to frighten the others.

I think I've stated before that I actually do not see *any* just way to transition from a communal-ownership system to a private-ownership system. (It reminds me of the 50s, when "agrarian reformers" was a codeword for Communists.) Even if it were somehow possible to divide the unowned land equally among all its citizens, the poor – who have never even seen a file folder – would be pitifully unable to administer it, and would wind up selling it to anyone who offered them a motorbike or a mobile phone. And anyway, it's probably true that the minimum efficient size for land cultivation is way higher than the kind of single-family plot which is enshrined in the culture of SE Asia.

Communist apologists used to say that the reason for all the horrible massacres and torture of the Soviet empire was because Marxist-Leninism had assumed that Communism would sieze power first in the most advanced countries, but instead was imposed like an ordinary coup in a reltively backward one. While I believe the current leadership of Cambodia and Thailand would probably best be fried in oil, I have to say they could make the case that their citizens are too poorly educated, and indeed just too poor, to handle land ownership. "The real estate? You can't handle the real estate!!" (Jack Nicholson)

Certainly the example of France, which managed to extract billions of dollars of subsidies every year in order merely to maintain the idyllic lifestyle of its provincial small farmers, does not fill one with hope about the ability of even advanced nations to administer land rationally. On the other hand, the USA and England mindlessly poured subsidies into farming which have caused huge areas of land to be polluted with fertilizers, weedkillers and hormones, and which caused farming to monopolize water resources – I couldn't find an overall number comparing agricultural and domestic water use, but I believe it's about 75% and 10% respectively (plus industrial, lossage, etc). Whoohoo, cheap bread. Toilet doesn't work, shower meager – hmmm, why is that?

There is a sort of summary here, but it seems to me that it has been written to obscure, not elucidate, who is really consuming available water in the US: pubs.usgs.gov [http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/]

For instance, its definition of "domestic" water use means "water epeople extracted from their own wells for their own house" and "public" means water that "may be delivered to users for domestic, commercial, industrial, or thermoelectric-power purposes" – which ensures that *personal* water use – that the government *lectures* you about – can't be compared to any other types of consumption.

Opps, off topic.

2005 Nov 10 [ Thu ]

My new font for Khmer phonetics: "PKD"

I have created a new font, based on a public-domain font, which contains the phonetic characters you need to represent Khmer as used in Huffman's books. I've named it "PKD" – phonetic Khmer Danny.

I had tried to use existing phonetic fonts, but they were very hard to use. My font is easy, because you access the funky characters with nothing more than the shift key – it's not like Limon, where you also need to install a special keyboard handler, and the non-ASCII characters get mangled by most programs: with PKD, programs just see the phonetic characters as upper-case ASCII characters, so any existing editor can be used. (Limon has to use umpteen characters to represent the enormous Khmer character set; my font only needs to identify the *sounds*, which are far fewer.)

If you don't have my font enabled, a sample of text will look something like this:

kNOm jOG tIv bAntup tIk

which will not be mangled by anything – unlike the "1/2" signs, degree signs and whatnot that you get from Limon. (Can anyone guess what the above sentence means?)

When you do install my font and set that string of characters to use it, it'll show the right phonetics (assuming I gave the correct pronunciation myself).

It's a free download, about 35 kB. I hope a lot of people start using it.

www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/nolist/pkd/]

Incidentally, it also contains English phonetics and Thai tone marks.

2005 Nov 06 [ Sun ]

I'm working on a new phonetic font for discussing Khmer

I've naturally been considering setting up this site to display Khmer characters ever since I started learning Khmer. I was put off by several things:

1. The Unicode system for Khmer which has never quite taken off

2. Possible lossage for users who do not have Khmer fonts installed already

3. No suitable phonetic font without copyright restrictions

I think I now have a way around at least the last issue.

Recently it occurred to me that I could just hack a public-domain font for the few characters I need. Also, since my intention is just to use the font for phonetics, I don't need upper-case characters – which means I can use the shift key as an ultra-simple way to access the funky characters needed (which also means that the character set will pass through any system designed for standard ASCII).

I roughed up a font last night which can (I think) handle all the characters needed for Khmer *and* English – I wanted the latter because many questions of Khmer pronunciation have to consider dialects such as American English.

I want to play with it for a while to minimize obvious blunders (for instance I want to make sure random browsers can download it automagically), and then I'll make it available here – and start using it.

2005 Oct 25 [ Tue ]

Photo print sizes available and their prices

The Fuji lab at 130 Sihanouk (just east of the corner with 63) lists the following prices:

10x15 cm (4x6 in): 350 R

13x18 cm (5x7 in): 500 R

20x25 cm (8x10 in): 4000 R

25x30 cm (10x12 in): 6000 R

I list the inch sizes not only for convenience: the "10x15 cm" size is actually 4x6 inches, ie slightly larger. I just noticed it today, because I was printing out some small images intended to fit in a key tag, and they were just *slightly* too large. Presumably the others are likewise.

I had been aware that this was frequently the case in metric countries, but the last time I checked was ten years ago or more, and Fuji is based in a metric country fpetesake.

Incidentally Corel Draw for some reason wanted to make a 4x6-in image at 300 dpi have a pixel size of 1201 by 1801. Huh?? And a 10x12-in image that I tried was even more off, but I think I may have gummed up that one myself.

I suppose what I should have done was methodically craft calibration target files first and checked everything, but I guess I wanted to charge ahead. Oh well.

2005 Oct 16 [ Sun ]

Elizabeth Briel's blog has a great story on a Phnom Penh rail trip

She recently took the rail 'service' from Phnom Penh to Battambang and has a very enlightening article including many pictures: elizabethbriel.blogspot.com [http://elizabethbriel.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_elizabethbriel_archive.html#112884400236145992]

She sounds a lot more adventurous than I ever have been, except when getting paid.

Her story sounds entirely believable, although I wish she had been able to use some Khmer with her fellow passengers to clear up some points.

2005 Oct 13 [ Thu ]

Tried out the "ppmglobe" program to create a globe layout

This seems to work, as shown below:

pngtopnm MillerCylindrical.png | ppmglobe 12 > gores01.ppm
pnmtopng gores01.ppm > gores01.png
pnmtopng: 18 colors found
ls -l
total 512
 23176 Jan 25 2004 MillerCylindrical.png
 22516 Oct 13 08:46 gores01.png
470511 Oct 13 08:45 gores01.ppm

Original version: www.3dsoftware.com [http://www.3dsoftware.com/Cartography/USGS/MapProjections/Cylindrical/MillerCylindrical/]

Output version:

It's rather difficult to see the effect, but certainly the United Kingdom is a little cut up.

...Hmmm... why are there twelve *and a bit* gores?? Hmmm...

2005 Oct 12 [ Wed ]

How to make a globe showing Cambodian place names

For a while I was vaguely looking for a globe showing the Cambodian names for countries, etc. I had assumed one would just show up, but when I eventually asked in the shops, they said they had never heard of one.

Today I thought about trying to make one myself as a little project. Just how does *anybody* make globes? It turns out that they glue strips of paper on a sphere. This strikes me as prone to many, many errors: what if the sphere is a slightly different size than you planned? The paper has to be stretchy to conform latitudinally... but how stretchy? It probably needs to be saturated with glue to get stretchy, but what does that do to the paper and the printed design? Etc.

I don't know exactly how you would go about adding country names, longitude and latitude lines, etc to the map. I would guess that Photoshop would be quite usable, but ideally you would want to be able to reuse your overlay with other maps, and I'm guessing that would involve some stretching and stitching which Photoshop would be clumsy for. Presumably netpbm could be used (see below).

Likewise you would probably want to add some sort of guides around the actual map image to aid in cutting it out.

Suffice it to say I have not tried it yet, much less figured it out. But maybe one of you NGO types might like to check out the following links.

1. The public-domain program "ppmglobe" instantly generates an image which can be used to print out the strips needed to form the globe, based on any "cylindrical projection" source image of the globe. It's part of the "netpbm" package of hundreds of little command-line utilities, so you need to be a little bit of a propellerhead to play with it. On the good side, it's already installed at Panix.

netpbm.sourceforge.net [http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppmglobe.html]

A list of all the netpbm utilities: netpbm.sourceforge.net [http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/directory.html]

2. If you don't understand terms like "cylindrical projection" (indeed I am still not sure if that is identical with the term "Miller cylindrical projection") probably the best place to get started is probably Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection]

3. Some more stuff you will want to look at...

Another intro to map projections: www.physicalgeography.net [http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/2a.html]

Make your own globe (a manual process involving geometry as well as glue): octopus.gma.org [http://octopus.gma.org/surfing/imaging/globe.html]

Downloadable Earth map from NASA (seems to be cylindrical projection, but not sure): maps.jpl.nasa.gov [http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/earth.html]

Cylindrical projection, unfortunately very small scale, part of a large section on cartography at 3dsoftware.com: www.3dsoftware.com [http://www.3dsoftware.com/Cartography/USGS/MapProjections/Cylindrical/MillerCylindrical/]

ilstu.edu has a very good section on map projections: www.ilstu.edu [http://www.ilstu.edu/microcam/map_projections/]

For instance, ilstu.edu has a PDF of a cylindrical projection: www.ilstu.edu [http://www.ilstu.edu/microcam/map_projections/Cylindrical/Equirectangular_Cyl.pdf]

The USGS info on map projections. Clear but of course aimed aat maps of the US: erg.usgs.gov [http://erg.usgs.gov/isb/pubs/MapProjections/projections.html]

4. Google Earth

Google has a free application available for mapping. The basic idea: earth.google.com [http://earth.google.com/]

Downloads... It appears to be a 12 MB download. More worryingly, they specify a 128 kbit network speed and 200 MB of disk space. Hmmm. However, it may have some nice features, eg annotation. Somebody with more bandwidth than me may want to try the download: kh.google.com [http://kh.google.com/download/earth/index.html]

This site says Google Earth uses cylindrical projection, so maybe you can get it to spit out a world map suitable for the "ppmglobe' program: www.keyhole.com [http://www.keyhole.com/GoogleEarthHelp/Importing/Projections.htm]

2005 Oct 04 [ Tue ]

My girlfriend gets a sunburn -- so they give her Cipro

In case you didn't know, a huge, worldwide health problem is that various infectious diseases have become resistant to common antibiotic drugs like penicillin. Newer drugs tend to be less reliable than penicillin used to be, with a higher chance of side effects. And nowadays some infections turn out to be resistant to anything we have.

People argue about the root cause of this, but a lot of people blame overuse and bad compliance. What do these terms mean?

1. Overuse – drugs are used when they are unnecessary, for instance in animal feed, or when the patient probably has a virus infection, not a bacterial one.

2. Bad compliance – neither the dispenser nor the recipient understands that antibiotics *must* be taken until the full prescribed course (which may differ for different conditions) is completed. If the recipient ceases taking the drug prior to that point, the infection may well still be present, even if the patient no longer experiences symptoms. And the strain of the infection in the patient, having withstood some period of the antibiotic, has evolved to greater resistance.

I encountered a good example of this yesterday. My girlfriend had gone off on a moto to meet her family at a temple for the Bon Pchhum Ben. She had protected her head from the sun, but her arms and shoulders got a little sunburn, and she was miserable. So her sister took her to a nearby pharmacy. When she returned and I checked what she had received, she had this:

1. 6 "UPRO" (ibuprofene?) pills "200" (UPRO 200)

2. 6 Cipromed Ciprofloxacine 500 mg

3. 6 Paracetamol 500 mg

4. 12 "BC/CWP" (yellow pills)

Some of the descriptions above may be wrong – she had no written prescription slip, so I had to read the tiny writing off the cut-up foil packs that the pills were handed out in. There were no use-by dates. On the other hand, the total price was 7000 riel – less than 2 USD!

Ciprofloxacine appears to be the French for Ciprofloxacin (purely, if I know the French, to cause confusion). In other words, Cipro: the last line of defense against anthrax, among other things.

I have no idea what the yellow pills with "BC" on one side and "CWP" on the other are.

Incidentally, even Western medics here do not routinely hand out the info sheets available in the West (eg, do not take Cipro with milk/dairy/calcium).

Additionally, someone had applied talcum powder to the affected area – *drying* the skin.

I hit the roof and called a doctor: the doctor said go to Lucky's and get "After Sun" (basically aloe). I did; my girlfriend seems happy.

Multiply that by a thousand million across Asia – without the happy ending.

2005 Sep 03 [ Sat ]

My girlfriend finally gets a new ID card -- and gets copies made

My girlfriend lost her ID card some time before I met her, and I've been pushing her to clear this up for about a year. This posting is not really about the long delay: she also needed to correct the birth date (off by a month) and is actually registered still at her home town outside Phnom Penh, and I can imagine a similar situation in the West taking a similar amount of time and trouble to resolve (although I would be surprised if I were baldly solicited for a bribe as frequently as she reported).

Anyhow, I was grimly determined that she should not lose the card again, so I rapidly dragged her to a copy shop to get color copies made.

The place I went to was Pon Leu Digital Photo Express. They're on the south side of St 182, close to the intersection with Monivong. House number 28-E0. I've used them several times before and was quite happy.

They make color copies using a color scanner and Photoshop. They are quite clueful: I have had no difficulty explaining that I wanted certain output sizes, etc. Also, they evidently take care to balance the color and density curves for the printer. About the only problem I've had is that one day I found a virus on my USB stick after I downloaded some files from them, but I had gone to another photo shop that day and I don't know which was guilty. (It was a real virus, not just one of those "Windows is randomly crashing, must be a virus" things.)

This time I just said "make four color copies and ten black/white copies". I didn't check the price because they've always been OK. I was surprised to find that they output the scan four-up on a single sheet of *photo* paper. They have a full photo lab system as well, so it might have actually saved them money, but I thought it was pretty neat, and probably means improved color fastness compared with inkjet inks. They also scanned the *rear* of the card, output that on another 4x6, and then cut them out, glued them back-to-back, trimmed them, then laminated them, producing a very impressive copy which most people would accept as the original.

I want to point out that while this may seem straightforward, it was a lot of work beyond the bare bones of what I asked for; also, it relied on significant experience: for instance, making sure that the card dimensions were scaled exactly 1:1 after the various stages of conversion.

One strange thing I noticed was that when the operator did the second scan (of the rear of the card), and Photoshop called the HP driver again, it had to warm up the bulb again for a minute or two before executing the scan, even though the previous scan had been less than a minute before. I think either something is wrong with the setup or that driver really doesn't play well with Photoshop. (Fully powering-off and rewarming the bulb on every scan can't be good for bulb life – or color consistency – either.)

I was a little disappointed in the BW copies: they apparently used an ordinary copier, so the resolution and contrast were not very good – I had been hoping they would output to BW laser from the color scan. Still, they managed to line up the front and rear copies almost exactly on a single sheet of paper, and I'm quite happy with the result.

I've noticed before that Cambodians seem really good at this kind of computer operation. It may be that under the current conditions the kind of people who would be manning the Cambodian equivalent of Bell Labs have to eke out a living tinkering with Photoshop, but it certainly is one of the most encouraging features of living here.

2005 Aug 11 [ Thu ]

Interesting comparison of English-language and Khmer-language articles

In a previous posting I reported that Hun Sen tolerates English-language dissent, but not Khmer-language.

I saw an interesting example of that this week. The Cambodia Daily provides a Khmer-language center section, in which some of the English-language articles are translated into Khmer. Yesterday there was an article about the sentencing of opposition lawmaker Cheam Channy on Tuesday on the front page, several paragraphs long, mentioning much condemnation of the verdict by foreign and NGO groups.

What appeared in the *Khmer*-language section was a single paragraph which baldly detailed the charges and the sentencing.

Hmmm. If that reflects the sense of caution of the Cambodia Daily, imagine how much more cautious the autochthonous media must be.

2005-08-13 CORRECTION

I just saw that issue again and there appears to be a "continued on p." line after the last line of the Khmer version that I read. Aargh! Oops.

Now they don't give change in dollars in Phnom Penh

I wrote a posting before about the peculiar situations you get into because Cambodia uses dollars for large transactions and riel as change: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/cambodia/Miscellaneous/countingchange01.html]

When I wrote that, the exchange rate was around 4100 R to the dollar. Now it's maybe 4250 R, and there's been a very noticeable change in the behavior of Cambodians making change.

Previously, most places that made change would return only fractions of a dollar in riel. For instance, if you paid with a 20-USD bill for a 2.50-USD item, you would get 17 dollars and 2000 R.

Now, most places – without apology – are converting the 17.50 change into R at the 4000 R rate, and returning 70,000 R. You have just lost 17.50 x 250 R, ie 4375 R – more than a dollar. My internet cafe that I have used almost every day is casually stealing from me, and when I insist on dollar change they grumble.

I guess I'm going to have to start going to the money-changers at Central.

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