QED Wiki and the Zend Framework
Filed under: Computers, Javascript, PHP, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
IBM are working on an impressive looking product called QED Wiki, developed with the Zend Framework.
Fundamentally it’s a wiki like any other. But there is a cool layer on top of it that could be revolutionary (although like many Web 2.0 concepts will probably fall short and just be “cool” – we can hope). The interface allows you to create “situational applications” that can link different components together with the ease of a wiki.
It doesn’t really make much sense just reading about it so go watch the video about it.
On a related note, you can now get snapshots of PHP 6.
How much fluff is needed?
Filed under: Computers, Languages, PHP, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
I’ve been sorting out exactly what needs recording for the language app (which I finally have an idea for a name for) and I was trying to decide how much extra instructor speech is needed. Situations aren’t described for instance (no “Image an English man sitting next to a French woman”) and you aren’t asked to say things explicitly (“How do you ask someone if they speak English?”). Will this harm the process at all?
The best thing to do perhaps would be to avoid trying to be Pimsleur quite so exactly.
Multilingual pretty URLs
Filed under: Computers, Languages, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
There is more and more emphasis on pretty URLs these days. With things like Ruby on Rails around to easily support it and better knowledge and use of things like mod_rewrite the days of horrible query strings is going away (excluding of course the most used websites – search engines). But how do you make your multilingual website have pretty URLs?
My language learning app uses the Zend Framework and so uses pretty URLs by default. I need the interface available in many languages, but then the URLs should be pretty in a localized way.
For example, starting a new Finnish lesson uses the following:
/lesson/new/fi
That would be the new action of the lesson controller with an extra language code parameter of fi.
In German this should be something like:
/lektion/neu/fi
By default this would access the neu action of the lektion controller.
The “simple” solution would be to write lots of controllers that just delegate to the real one. Which is silly. Instead an extra layer has to be added to the routing process some sort of look-up table mapping localized URL fragments with “real” canonical ones. This should be fairly simple with Zend Framework (although I haven’t actually tried yet).
Just an important issue no-one seems to have brought up yet…
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
It’s so crazy it just might work.
I heard about
It’s essentially a work marketplace wrapped in a web service API. Your application creates a job request (called a Human Intelligence Task) which someone then completes with the result being sent back to your application. So far it’s commonly used for processing lots of small tasks (for example there’s one about verifying info about some restaurants that only pays $0.03 but there are over two thousand individual tasks available), but it can be used for anything.
The relevance is that it might be possible to get people to record audio for the language app through it.
Using XHTML, XSLT and XForms for Xemplorary performance
Filed under: Computers, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML
Alliteration and bad pun. Good start 
One of the features the language app will need is some sort of module editor. Although the XML format of the scripts is straightforward to anyone used to hand editing HTML, a lot of other people will not have a clue. Therefore a WYSIWIG would be a cool addition. And lots of X’s may be the way to go.
Although XForm support in browsers isn’t exactly stellar, the fact that only script editors will require means that needing a plug-in or extension isn’t such a big thing. And I get brownie points for being Web 2.0 as well.
I’m going to assume you know what XForms and XSLT are. If you don’t, then go find out. I’ll probably explain in a future post, but for now just accept them as “cool” 
Basically a module is included directly into the XHTML source of the page. The only change is the addition of a namespace declaration (which are normally absent from the modules). XSLT is then used to add some nice formatting to the conversation along with XForm stuff for editing (including adding/removing elements). This makes the server side code really easy since the whole XML of the module gets posted back to the server.
In theory the XSLT shouldn’t be needed since XForms can do repeating and stuff. The only problem is I don’t think it can handle recursion which is a bit of a limitation.
There is one bit of the XSL that I’m stuck on there. I have the XML fragment in the head of the XHTML document. I need to be able to transform a copy of it and place it in the document body, but keep the original intact in the head. Does anyone have an XSL snippet to do that?
Almost ready for a public viewing
Filed under: Computers, Languages, PHP, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML
The still unnamed language learning app is almost ready for a first public viewing. I’m just trying to get some audio of some other than myself. Firstly because I don’t like really hearing my own voice (and for this purpose my less than perfect pronunciation is too obvious) and secondly I need at least two people just for it not to be confusing.
In the meantime I thought I’d share an example of the script file I’m using:
It primarily contains English translations although one phrase is done in a few more languages.
It does highlight one possible issue. I had to change the German ß to ss. Although Windows seems perfectly fine with Unicode file names (internally it uses Unicode for storage (either UCS2 or UTF-16 – not sure which)) PHP refuses to open them (fopen, file and file_exists for instance just don’t work) and Apache 2 seems to have issues as well. For German there are workarounds but for other languages it will get fiddly. This might not even be a problem on Linux where it will ultimately reside and it only affects file names which only have to give you a rough idea of what’s inside. But still, it’s annoying…
Best bits of the language app are done
Filed under: Computers, Languages, PHP, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
The most important bits of my cool language learning web app are done. Here’s quick overview of how it works.
Everything is split into modules which are XML script files and accompanying audio files.
Currently one type of script is supported, a “conversation”. This contains a short (less than 10 sentences) conversation with sub elements all marked up in XML. Sub elements are phrases, terms and notes. At the moment phrases and terms are handled almost identically. Notes are little explanations or possible stumbling points (for example the test script I have alerts the listener to the difference in the ending between “Ich verstehe” and “Sie verstehen” in German).
Any element of a conversation that is to be repeated is named (literally – the XML tag is given a name attribute). The system keeps track of the number of times a name phrase/term is played to the user and when it was last played so the automatic repetition system can work.
A lesson is currently very simple. A module is loaded and the conversation is played straight through. Then the named phrases/terms are played* with translations. Then any phrases/terms scheduled for repetition are played*. The repetitions are actually determined before the conversation is played however so that if too many are required then no new conversation is played.
* Played in this case means a specific format. First the native version is played, then a pause, then the translation is played twice.
Audio in Linux
Filed under: Computers, Javascript, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
I’ve started writing the page to actually play the audio clips in my language learning app. At the moment it loads the
Flash would be the obvious answer I suppose but I have an uncommon requirement – I need to be able to access the object via Javascript. Specifically, I need to know when a track is finished and the next one begins (from a play list) and none of the freely available Flash media players do that.
Any advice from anyone?
Zend Framework
Filed under: Computers, PHP, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming, XML
I started writing my clever language thingy in it.
The biggest problem I had was getting it to work with IIS. Which I couldn’t. I decided since I had IIS installed I’d give it a go. Unfortunately you require mod_rewrite which IIS doesn’t have. So I installed ISAPI_rewrite, a version for IIS. After an hour of trying to get it to work I went and downloaded Apache 2.2. Which was my second mistake You see it seems PHP doesn’t work with Apache 2.2. Not sure why but I found a vague mention of it on a forum after trying for another hour to get it to work. So I got Apache 2.0 and everything worked.
Of course there are reasons not to use PHP 5 with Apache 2, but meh.
There is one little problem with the Zend Framework, I think. It seems to be printing a space somewhere before any other output. It wouldn’t be a problem except I need it to output XML and a space at the beginning makes Firefox (and probably Internet Explorer) explode.
Back to language learning
Filed under: Computers, PHP, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML
work, my interest in foreign language learning with the aid of a computer has returned.
My main goal is a Pimsleur style system but with the repetition handled by computer – i.e. with just the individual phrases (and words and syllables for earlier lessons) as audio files, the program should generate complete conversations with sensible parts repeated and useful instructor comments in between.
That sounds like it requires some sort of script in some sort of markup language. Since it needs to be highly structured I guess that only leaves XML as a sensible possibility. So I marked up a conversation from Pimsleur’s German I. There was an unexpected result. It’s fairly straight forward to have multiple source languages in one script file. Although there are certain things that would not work best this way, a lot of things in German (for instance) would be taught the same regardless of what language you are learning from. Ultimately source-language-specific scripts would have to be supported though.