A Good Day

Today was a good day. (This post never got finished until now, so it’s a bit old.)

This morning, I woke up late, and tottled off to work. I was kinda grumpy at myself as this was the second day in a row I was late. Upon arrival, Jenni was working with a guy on the Bassaa Dictionary. She needed a way to search for all the words that had the same form in the plural as the singular, so that we wouldn’t have to duplicate them in the dictionary. Using a Regular Expression formula I had worked out the week before, she was able to find the simple ones.

\\lx (.*)\r\n(.+\r\n)*\\pl \1

Later, I realized we hadn’t covered all the possibilities, so we came up with a new version:

\\lx (.*)\r\n(.+\r\n)*\\pl (\1($|,).*|(.*), \1(.*)

Anyways…we found all the possibilities, no matter where they were hiding in relation to the commas.

Next fire!?
Leo called. He couldn’t type his Bible in Paratext. I grabbed Kevin (the Newbie) and we trotted off to see him. Easy fix (2 clicks to change the view), and we left with his thanks.

Next.
Ginger called, having some trouble with installing SIL converters. I grabbed Kevin (the Newbie) and we trotted off to her office. Basic computing says un-install older versions of software before installing the new. I uninstalled 2.6.1, and 2.6 failed to go away quietly. I couldn’t install 3.1.1 either…we were stuck.

Hmm…Microsoft System restore.

I chose a point just before, and as we rebooted, Microsoft quickly put things back in place. We installed 3.1.1 (which knew better than I how to un-install the old ones) and the document was converted. Lunch time!

Wednesday afternoon is professional development/training time in our department. After lunch, I went through the notes from Ouaga and picked out what seemed important to share with the team. We had a wonderful afternoon sharing what I had learned in Ouaga about Language Technology, and what they had learned about Linux and software. We learned a lot from each other.