Who do I contact for help with Pongo?

linghelp at u dot washington dot edu

How do I customize my login shell?

The Linux machines in the Treehouse run the BASH shell by default. Bash shell configuration is done with a .bashrc file in your home directory.

How do I use CVS to check out files between machines in the Treehouse?

You need to tell CVS to use ssh as its export protocol. Add the following line to your .bashrc file

export CVS_RSH=ssh

How do I launch the LKB on Treehouse machines?

Start emacs, and then type M-x lkb RET

How do I use a flash drive under Linux?

On the five Dell machines, you can mount/unmount a flash drive with System Tools/Disk Management. On Gibbon, your flash drive should automount.

(It is said to be good to always unmount a flash drive via one method or another before you remove it...)

Some brands of flash drives still may still prove to be balky. In such cases, insert flash drive before booting computer and it should then work as described above.

How do I extract information from the zipped Google Web 1T 5-Gram corpus?

These files are available on patas at /corpora/LDC/LDC06T13. To read from the zipped files, run the command "gunzip -c filename" for each zipped ngram file. This streams the contents to stdout, where the ngram data may be analyzed.

For example,

for each gunzipped ngram file, A:
    - call the command prompt with "gunzip -c " + A + " > tmp_file"
    - open the created tmp_file
    - grab what you need from the tmp_file, and store it.  For example, in the case where you are calling WordNet to see if each word 
      has an adjective sense:
        - for each word W in tmp_file:
            - set a variable V equal to the command line call "wn -synsa " + W
            - if V > 0, W has an adjective reading; store as necessary.

-- BillMcNeill - 21 Jan 2005 -- EmilyBender - 05 Apr 2005 -- Main.itallow - 28 Aug 2008