I updated my two lists of articles: English / Hungarian

Yet another gigantic heap of articles in Hungarian… lately I’ve also been writing hardware reviews, it’s great fun as long as the device doesn’t want to explode in my hands Right now I even have a cool infobox listing my ebook reader reviews on the main page of nyest.hu, just below the Facebook app.

I should write more in English, I know, I know! I haven’t written anything in months and now it’s just the backlog. It’s time to send out a bunch of article queries! And there is also research to be done… *cue Portal theme song*

A “20 éves az Elméleti Nyelvészet Tanszék/Szakcsoport/Kihelyezett Intézeti Akármi” konferencián előadott prezentációm.

Itt a PDF

Az ígért hivatkozások pedig a hajtás után – (more…)

I updated my list of Hungarian popular-science articles; I hope this isn’t getting repetitive for non-Hungarian-speakers! FYI – I don’t recommend Google Translate for Hungarian in its present state: when I sent a friend of mine an anti-racist essay, said friend managed to conclude with the aid of automatic translation that it was a racist essay! Uh oh.

I need to thank Dash (of Expanded Horizons fame) for recommending “Biblical Hebrew mistranslations” as a topic, the article is already available and it’s proving to be quite popular. Thanks again!

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If you are in Hungary, I have a conference presentation at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Linguistics next Thursday morning. I’m going to talk about the necessity of applying formal linguistic methods to semiotic data in light of the recent Indus Valley controversy. It’s going to be a short presentation that’s intended to be thought-provoking, it will have amusing pictures and oddball references.

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A bit of squee about projects I’m involved in: nyest.hu just reached 1000 Facebook likes yesterday (like it and win random stuff!), and World SF News had this to say about Expanded Horizons: “Expanded Horizons has become the premier webzine publishing international writers these days, and their latest issue is a strong one, including two Apex Book of World SF II contributors! Check out stories from Hungary, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico, Hong Kong and the Philippines at this great publication“.

Donate for Expanded Horizons, we’re all volunteers at the magazine and all donations go toward paying our contributors! Teaser: the next issue is going to feature, among other things, interviews by Muslim and Arab authors we have previously published. In the meanwhile, the Muslim/Arab special issue of Apex Magazine is also out!

I also got She Nailed a Stake to His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror (edited by Tim Lieder) in the mail and read it last weekend; I wonder if I can find a market for a review… This sort of stuff should be reviewed as often as possible – the more biblically-themed fiction, the merrier! Now I just need to find some time to finish writing that Bible space marine story…

I updated my list of Hungarian magazine articles with the October stuff, I wrote a lot on quite diverse topics  ranging from WWII to ebook readers and everything in between. Nyest.hu now has Facebook integration, so I can directly gauge the success of each article by how many people press the Like button It’s pretty cool – when you do a lot of freelance writing, it can be quite hard to get feedback other than “well, the magazine bought my article…”.

Fiction writing has taken a backseat, and that poor visual novel game has been at ~90% completion for ages now, untouched; I apologize and I’ll try to do something to make up for the delay once I have more time away from work (B”N because now I’m hesitant to promise anything).

I had my thesis defense a few days ago (master’s in theoretical linguistics), I got an A, it went fine. I don’t know anything about the graduation ceremony… but this is one step up from when I originally enrolled in this program.

Crazy anecdote from several years ago: I went to the admittance exam, two rounds, everything went OK and I got a good score. Then I got a notice from the university administration that despite my score being over the threshold, I was not admitted. No further explanation. Huh? The next day I called the department – they told me I was in, I told them I apparently wasn’t! Confusion ensued. In the end it turned out that an administrator thought the university did not even have a theoretical linguistics program and sent out similar notes to several prospective students. Augh!

I hope they realized by now because I’d like to receive my diploma… sometime… It did take a bit longer than expected because in the meanwhile I finished a different master’s program, started a PhD and also had an unfortunate illness. *sigh* But it’s finally over, I graduated, happy joy! Now on to publish my thesis results.

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I’m quite busy right now and I have a deadline at hand, but I also have content for the site, so I’ll try to do updates more often!

I did not forget about Amesirun either, but unfortunately it had to take a back seat to work right at the threshold of completion. The game is mostly finished, I just need to put it together, compile the executable and send it out to closed beta. (Thank you for everyone who volunteered! I even got someone to test the Mac version, which I did not even want to release because I could not test it myself.) Hopefully next week!

Have you ever been to a journal club where someone wanted to present an article, didn’t feel like making a a set of slides, but still had to show something (after all, someone had to lug the projector all the way…)?

If you are a grad student, you probably have Here is a very easy solution that beats putting your average pdf reader on screen and suffering around with the scrollbars! (Scrollbars on an unfamiliar laptop can annoy the heck out of even the most patient presenter. Trust me on that.)

I talked about making complicated zooming presentations with Impress!ve in the previous entry, but this versatile little piece of open-source software can be used for this purpose too, and you don’t need to do anything taxing.

Just install Impress!ve (it should run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but I only tried the first two) and run it on the article pdf! Absolutely no configuration necessary, though you might want to launch it with the -e parameter if zoomed-in pages are low resolution (depending on your video card and drivers).

That’s it! You immediately have the article on your screen and converted into a nice presentation. Useful commands:

* Left/right arrow to move forward/backward

* Tab to create an overview (choose between pages)

* Enter to create a spotlight (really spiffy! You don’t need that laser pointer)

* Z to zoom in on the page (it zooms where the cursor is placed)

Have fun!

I have two scientific projects I’m involved in at present, I’m going to describe them briefly just for you to get the idea what the other posts in this category will be about, etc. Click to read more!

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