I was surprised today to see an advert from Founder, one of China's major computer manufacturers. It caught my eye because it was promoting the company's new line of dual-boot Windows+Linux desktop machines. Although selling computers with Linux preinstalled isn't particularly strange here, this is an encouraging sign because it shows that the reasons for offering Linux aren't just to save money any more - previous Linux offerings in China seem to have assumed that customers would just wipe the OS and install Windows (my laptop came with several discs of Windows drivers and software like WinDVD). Ironically, the fact that Founder considers it worthwhile to sell (and promote) dual-boot PCs may say a lot more about the suitability of desktop Linux than pure-linux products from Dell or Lenovo.

I recently wrote a Chinese flashcard program for mobile phones - mostly to help my own Chinese language skills, but I decided to put it online for free download from my website for anyone who wants to use it.

The basic principle is fairly simple - the program shows a word in one language (either English or Chinese), then displays the pinyin (Chinese pronunciation) of the word and finally gives the word in the other language. You can choose whether to go from English to Chinese or from Chinese to English, and also other options like whether to view words in order or in a random order, and whether or not to remove cards after a certain number of successful answers.

At the moment the program comes loaded with seven word lists at different levels, and you can also add your own lists in the CEDICT format (it's a little tricky to do this, but nothing too difficult).

To use the flashcards your phone needs to support Java (MIDP2 / CLCD 1.1), which should be no problem for most phones bought in the last couple of years, and to see the Chinese characters you need to have Chinese fonts installed as well.

DRM is pretty ubiquitous in the mobile world - most mobile java download sites automatically add DRM to the content you get off them - and I don't want that to happen to my own program, so I'm waiting for GPL version 3 before I release the code. In the meantime, I put the jad/jar files up for download on my website under the Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike license.