Danny's Weblog

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 Dec 26 [ Wed ]

Vietnamese tissues not so terrible

When I took a trip to Vietnam I was very snooty about the "Tanpe" pocket tissues available, which seemed to be knockoffs of Tempos: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Vietnam/Miscellaneous/tissues01.html]

Well, I'm pretty sure the Tempo tissues I've been buying in England have been made by Mr Tempo himself, not stealthily smuggled in from Taiwan (well, not absolutely sure). Yet they have the same major problem as the Tanpe brand: the blue and yellow inks, or pigments, or whatever you'd call them, are applied to the *inside* of the packaging and inevitably rub off while the packet is in your pocket.

Sheesh. I can't remember this problem when I bought Tempo tissues in Germany. Maybe Mr Tempo has been trying to manufacture them in England and that's not a good idea.

2007 Nov 11 [ Sun ]

Interesting stress issue and "Rosetta Stone" language-learning products

A couple of minutes ago I was randomly searching Slashdot and heard an ad for a language-learning product on TV. I was very interested of course, if only because I've never heard such an ad before.

What really caught my attention was that the gamma presenting the ad pronounced the name of the product – "Rosetta Stone" – with the wrong intonation; with the stress on "Stone", not on the second syllable of "Rosetta" – as if it were a name like "Carmen Sandiego".

I'm too lazy to check out the product's website when it seems to have such a braindead attitude to English. Who knows, perhaps some marketing wizard thought it would be fun to appropriate the name of one of mankind's most important archaeological finds as an animated character to personify the product, like Clippy.

2007 Jul 11 [ Wed ]

Visit to Pattaya

I hadn't been back in years. The English-language newspapers are full of gloom and doom, but it looks much the same to me. This is supposedly the low season, but it seems close to the high seasons I remember.

I have given up trying to pay the 5B Thai price for songtaews and now pay the 10B price, which was the price for farangs when I got here back in 2001. I still don't dare to ask the driver "bpai pattaya tai mai khap?" because he will drive straight there and then demand a full single-user fare, unless you know enough Thai to really argue, which I don't.

I found that a Thai dictionary I had left behind had the quantifiers listed for almost every noun. That's a really good feature which is not in any of my other references. Drat, I can't remember the title and I can't find it on the internet. Maybe later. Amazingly, the hotel I use had kept that dictionary, along with the rest of my luggage, safe for about 3 years!

My impression is that the girlie bars are now *more* daring than they were when I left. But since my gf might be reading this I'll say no more.

They do seem to be cracking down on copied software. But the first person I asked told me where to get it. A software CD is now 150 baht, and a software DVD is now 400 baht. I can't remember what they used to be in Thailand, but I do know those prices are well over twice the prices in Cambodia, and the selection in Pattaya is worse. For some reason they don't seem to worry about copied movies.

Happily there is now an "IT City" in South Pattaya, so I didn't need to take the bus to Sriracha as I have before. All kinds of hardware, including an entire floor with probably a hundred different (but dizzyingly impossible to distinguish) phone stores. I was very tempted by a DVD/CD/MP3 player for 999 B, but in the end contented myself with a mini tripod for 150 B.

Clothes are much more available and better value than Cambodia. Still, the underwear I bought labelled L is a European S. Remember that shoe sizes – even metric sizes – are not standardized (anywhere in the world). (For instance a British size 9 is not the same as a US size 9 – not that you can really rely on two US size 9's really having the same fit, even from the same manufacturer.

I bought a quite nice office shirt for 199 B, and it was labelled wwith both neck and sleeve measurements. I can't remember *ever* seeing that in Thailand before.

I didn't see *any* famous-name watch knockoffs here. They're all over the place in Cambodia. All I see here is junky-looking "fashion" watches for tasteless girls.

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 05 [ Thu ]

French gender issues

This posting is of interest only to French speakers or students of the language.

Here are a few examples of interesting gender choices that I jotted down from recent programs on TV5. I am not much of an expert on French, but I've gotten into it lately.

1. aucun doute c'est elle le chef

My impression is that French usage has been tending towards some sort of politically-correct development: female people's roles are stated using masculine nouns, eg "elle est acteur", not "elle est actrice". I can't find a feminine form of "chef", but I don't think it would have been used.

Actually this example is mostly interesting because of the convoluted word order, plus the omission of "que". Presumably the idea they wanted to stress was the "elle", and the normal way to achieve that in spoken French (since they don't use intonation for that purpose) is to form the sentence such that the stressed item is at the end, thus:

"il n'y a aucun doute que le chef, c'est elle"

I don't know why the speaker chose the word order he did. Maybe I don't understand French stress specification properly. Or maybe they feel that the "que" (even if omitted) needs to introduce a well-formed sentence, and the form "le chef, c'est elle" is poorly-formed.

2. les equipes de joueurs feminines

I'm pretty sure I've noted that down correctly, although it would still be interesting if the actual form had been "les equipes de joueurs feminins".

In other words, the speaker was trying to be PC by referring to these players as "joueurs" not "joueuses". but then got mixed up (it seems to me) in picking the gender of the adjective "feminin". After a moment's thought, it's clear to me that it's sometimes indeed required to use the form "feminin", for instance "joueuse, c'est un mot feminin".

But perhaps there's some other usage in French that I'm not aware of: if the person referred to is female, then the adjective is female, even if the word for that person is male gender.

Or possibly the speaker was trying to apply the adjective to the female-gender word "equipe".

3. quelquechose de plus serieux

"chose" of course is feminine, and the adjective "serieux" is masculine, so what's going on here? I think the "de" is seen as introducing some separate idea from the "quelquechose" and this new idea defaults to masculine gender even though no noun is actually stated.

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 ]

Interesting intonation issue in French

Because the French was so easy to understand, I spent an hour or so watching the inauguration of the new President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, yesterday. (How does a man who looks like he's typecast as the Prince of Darkness ever get elected? Oh well, you can't go by appearances. George Bush looks like Alfred E. Neuman in a suit.)

I was struck by several things. One – as the commentators referred to explicitly several times – was that the security on Sarkozy seemed to be a lot less tight than on Bush. (When I lived in DC, Bush had more security – eg multiple helicopter gunships – than Lord Vader.)

Another was that in referring to the relationship between I think Chirac and Angela Merkel, they said "ils se tutoyaient en anglais". That seemed a funny usage to me, although it wasn't picked up on. That phrase means "In English, they spoke to each other using the French familiar "tu" form for "you"." Presumably, that word "tutoyer" must be intended to mean "use familiar forms" like "Jacques, you dock, how's it hengink??" "Angela, sweet sing, oo's yo daddee?"

Incidentally, in a subsequent programme I heard Merkel speak, and she seemed to speak in a rather colloquial German even in a major public speech: she pronounced "Aufgaben haben" as "Aufgam ham", which is the sort of thing one expects from the inhabitants of Entenhausen.

But the most startling thing – one of the things that remind me that after all French is a different language – was the intonation used on the following sentence (marked with underscores):

Un president _part_, un autre s'in_stalle_.

Of course, French is famous for having very limited use of intonation, but this takes the cake. In English, this phrase would be:

_One_ president _leaves_, the _oth_er moves _in_.

...Hmmm... now that I write this down the preferred intonation in English doesn't seem as clear as it was when I was watching TV. Anyway, the point is that French just puts prominence on the final syllable of various types of word group, and it would seem can therefore not naturally put prominence on the subject of either clause in the example (without adding "lui" two times which would sound pretty lame).

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 May 01 [ Tue ]

Word-final consonant pronunciation in French, English, Cambodian...

About 50 years ago I started learning French. Despite being one of the best in the class, I never really was able to follow conversation in French. I could read it, write it and speak it OK, but my comprehension was very poor.

After a while I realized that most of the problem was probably the very frequent elisions and liasons: ie, they don't say "le homme" they say "l'homme", and they don't say "les femmes" pronouncing the "s" on the end of "les", but they do pronounce the "s" on the end of the "les" in "les hommes". en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_(linguistics)]

I eventually got much, much better at German conversation and decided I wasn't cut out for French. For years I used to say "Je regrette, monsieur, j'parle pas francais".

Since I moved to my current apartment, though, I've been watching a lot of French tv, because I'm too cheap to pay the landlord's gouging price for cable and French TV5 is the only European channel that's broadcast in PP.

Initially I didn't bother watching anything without subtitles (I actually preferred subtitles *in French* because I felt a little bit virtuous about watching tv if I was learning something). But I started trying to follow more and more programs without them. And quite recently something clicked; although my vocabulary is still rather unsatisfactory (for instance I just learned today that you can use "faire" to mean "look", eg "cette jupe fait bien") I am quite suddenly able to detect the elisions and liasons in real time and at least understand the words I already know.

I have started to realize that the issue of changing the pronunciation at the end of words is common to learning many different languages. The most obvious case is Thai, where you just have to learn that a final (written) L is pronounced N, along with many other cases more or less wacky.

Cambodian has the problem in a different way: final consonants are pronounced "unreleased" (which is why I recently added the symbol for that to my phonetic font) and in theory that should allow you to generate the correct sound for each final consonant (although I have my doubts about final affricates, which to my ear sound exactly like "k"... and when I was completely mispronouncing one word as ending in "t" when it actually ended in "k" my pronunciation was immediately accepted with no comment at all, so I don't think *their* hearing is all that magical either).

German indeed alters the sound of final consonants, but it does it by a clear phonological rule (converting voiced consonants to their unvoiced form) so it was never a problem for me.

The most complex case I know is probably English, because English has much stronger intonation effects than other languages. Leaving aside some major terminology and definition issues with the concept of "tone units", I can say that when we pronounce English words continuously – without gaps – we pronounce word-final consonants in an unreleased form, but before a pause we release the consonant. (I am using the term "release" to cover all such effects, although I think most texts use it to refer only to plosives. For instance, try saying "this man is a fool" and then just "man" by itself.)

Since the unreleased and released versions of words seem to my ear to sound so very different, it is a mystery to me how foreign learners manage to correctly analyze English words when they have no understanding of this effect much less the practical ability to generate or hear it. (It seems to me it should be at least as big a problem for them as the absence of gaps between words in written Thai and Cambodian is for me.)

Oh well. My conscious grasp of the elision/liason issue seems to have helped me not at all to grasp French. What actually helped was just a lot (hundreds of hours!) of watching TV, plus a tip I'm happy to pass on: turning up the treble to max and the bass to min improves the clarity of any speech I've tried it on. On the other hand, it may not make any difference to you if you're a few decades younger than me!

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 16 [ Mon ]

The "Uncanny Valley" for expats

An article on Slashdot led me to the following article on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley] The "Uncanny Valley" is a theoretical phenomenon which has been discussed extensively in connection with the advances in computer animation: although *perfect* emulation of human appearance would be no problem, slight imperfections in emulation cause the animation to appear much more disturbing than *major* imperfections.

The article goes on to make an analogy with human migrants. As they adapt to the local culture, they become more and more acceptable, but perhaps when they get *close* to native behavior any small errors become much more offensive. That seems quite possibly true to me.

If I make some error in pronunciation at the stage where I am clearly struggling with the language the hearer can certainly write it off as an error. But I am at the stage where I can sometimes produce an entire sentence of Cambodian which is immediately understandable, so a minor error might not be detected – for instance between "kan" for hold and "khaan" for fail. Or jomnorng for knot and jomnong for enjoyment!

When I tell the maid how to put out the laundry she might think I am warning her not to expect me to help her orgasm... You know, she *does* look at me strangely sometimes.

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 20 [ Wed ]

Thaksin has been deposed

French TV tells me that the Thai army has taken control and declared amrtial law while Thaksin was away in New York, so it seems he is no longer in charge.

I just find it hard to understand why people are rejoicing. Are you really happy that the military has the power to depose prime ministers in Thailand? How do you think Thaksin came to power? Who gave him power? Aren't they the same people that control the military?

At the very best we can expect to see Thaksin hanging upside down fronm piano wire. Almost all other outcomes are no fun at all.

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 26 [ Wed ]

Acclimatization and heat stroke

Victims of heat stroke tend to be people who are already used to hot temperatures, which seems strange. However my theory of acclimatization provides an explanation for this and other observations.

As I've said before, the body adapts to a hot, humid climate by slowly changing the type of sweat produced, from a greasy, viscous variety intended to maintain moisture levels in the skin despite low humidity in heated homes in a western winter, to a much more volatile formula which evaporates fast even in high humidity at temperatures close to body heat.

In my view, Western heatstroke victims have already achieved this adaptation. However, they have not yet become familiar with the *sensation* of heatstroke in their acclimatized state.

Heatstroke does not provide the victim with clear warning signs. Although they are conscious of malaise, they will not connect it with heatstroke because they are *not sweating*. And they are not sweating because they have *used up* their sweat supply. This can hardly happen to an unacclimatized person: their sweat does not evaporate, so they can easily feel that they are overheated, and the effort of producing high-viscosity sweat is easily recognizable. Thus, before they even get close to heat stroke, they can lie down, drink etc.

But for the acclimatized victim, the sensation is only general malaise. They have become used to managing in the heat, and to continuing to function despite some overheating. They do not connect their symptoms – particularly the cessation of sweating – with heatstroke.

I think a contributing factor is the effect of fans used at high ambient temperatures. The fan motor itself gets quite hot, causing the stream of air to be actually *several degrees* above ambient. If ambient is already 96 F, that's a big problem. I believe the heatstroke victim may often park himself in front of a big fan set on max, without realizing that the fan is actually *heating* him.

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