THE MEANING OF LIFE

One of the great benefits of membership in To The Point is the exclusive columns of technology genius Dennis “The Wizard” Turner, psychologist Joel Wade, investment guru Leslie Chase, and Nasdaq mastermind Dagny D’Anconia. Many To The Pointers consider any of them alone to be easily worth TTP membership. They are exclusive to To The Point — you can read them no where else. Dennis Turner’s “Dennis The Wizard” column focuses on how to live better and much more safely with your computer. This week we offer this bonus column (in addition to Dennis’ regular column) in full to the TTP Free List as a clear demonstration of the value of being a member of To The Point. —JW

Snappy title, right? Fortunately, discovering the meaning of Life is simple – if you know where to look. Life is a “characteristic state or mode of living.” And a “mode” is a “manner of performance.” And a “manner” is a “way of acting or living.” Or maybe Life is “the course of existence of an individual”. And a “course”….

I could go on all day like this – if fact, I actually did go on for several hours recently, with one of the best free programs I have ever come across. A friend sent me the reference. I took one look at the web site, downloaded and installed it.

I’m taking a break from Bluetooth and security this week because this program is just too good to pass up. It’s called StarDict, the most amazing dictionary you will ever use, online, download, print or otherwise.

I would never have come across StarDict myself, because it’s not promoted by a shareware or commercial software manufacturer. I learned about in a hacker forum. Originally developed in Taiwan, it’s located on an obscure web site dedicated to non-Windows software.

If you’re looking for a complete off-line (on your hard disk) , all-in-one dictionary, thesaurus, style book, gazetteer and translation database for about 35 languages, StarDict has everything you need.

Many of the available free programs for Windows were ported (translated) from Linux, which is based on Unix, to Windows. These programs don’t cost any money, but they are not necessarily freeware; they are distributed under a set of licenses that reserve the copyright to the manufacturer or distributor, but ensure that the user may use the program with few restrictions.

While the philosophy is nice, there are drawbacks. No automatic security updates. Little or no support. No forums, except for developers’ tools. And until recently, non-Windows and free software was not nearly as user-friendly as commercial Windows software.

In the case of a dictionary, however, you have few security concerns. And you can check the site from time to time to see if there are updates.

StarDict is a case in point. You’ll have to do a little work to get it installed on your computer. In my opinion, the effort is worthwhile. The program’s Linux origins require that you install a couple of prerequisite programs in order to use it.

First, you need to install is a program that can unzip the dictionary files you are going to be downloading for StarDict. These are in a compression format called BZ2. There are dozens of compression formats out there in the computer world, almost all of them used primarily outside Windows. Normally in Windows we use Zip, Rar, and occasionally Ace. Neither WinZip nor Windows XP’s build in zip-compatible compressor-decompressor recognizes the BZ2 format.

I recommend you download and install IZArc
here . It’s a free program that can handle nearly every compression scheme out there. You can configure it to decompress just the BZ2 files, or use it in place of Winzip.

[Note: If all this seems complicated, even anarchic to you, you’re in good company. It’s the reason Microsoft is on 90% of the desktops despite its high costs. Open-source software has its drawbacks as well as its advantages.]

Next, since StarDict was written in GTK (Game ToolKit, a software environment often used in Linux) you need to download the GTK+ runtime toolkit for Windows at the program’s site
http://stardict.sourceforge.net . It’s a big file – 84MB – but without it, StarDict won’t work. GTK+ is free, of course.

When all this is done, you can finally download the program itself. For Windows, download the file called Stardict-2.4.3.exe and install it as you would any other program.

There’s a smorgasbord of dictionaries to download. The are dozens available, many in English, but also in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, French, Afrikaans, Arabic and more.

When you download a dictionary file, right click on it and decompress it with IZArc, which should appear in your right click context menu. You’ll end up with one or two subdirectories, with three files (with their names ending in .dz, .idx and .ifo) in them. Copy all the files to the following directory on your C: drive (or whichever drive your Program Files directory lives: .ProgramFiles\StarDict\dic (don’t open up StarDict until you’ve copied them over).

As you will discover, just in English you can choose from Webster’s Unabridged 1913 Edition, WordNet dictionary, US Gazetteer, Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary, The Devils Dictionary, CIA World Fact book 1995, and the Elements Database 2000, along with an English-Spanish and English-French dictionary.

This process is messy and geeky to many, but it’s not so difficult. The benefit is that it’s free. The cost is that it’s not nearly as friendly as regular commercial software.

When you have all the decompressed files in the right place, it’ll be time to open the program and see what you got for all the work you’ve done. When you open the program, you will find a dialog box on top of the application window. Type in your word, and if you start following the links, your whole afternoon will be delightful gone.

Dennis Turner