Holizz versus the Web

With one and a half hours until my final year project viva (presentation/demonstration/Q&A - I hadn’t heard the word before this project), I’ve just created a new study tool (in about ten minutes).

It takes a file of characters as input, and prints the meanings, which you then ponder about, and then you hopefully write the correct character down. Then if you want to check, you can uncomment the line that prints the character itself.

require 'rubygems'
require 'klookup'

include KLookup::Lookup

list = []

open('kyouiku3') { |f|
  f.read.each_char { |c|
    if Kanji.exist?(c)
      list << Kanji.new(c)
    end
  }
}

list.each {|k|
  20.times { print '-' }
  puts
#  print k
  puts "t" + k.meaning.join("nt")
}

You’ll need the KLookup library (gem install klookup). And some kanji: try Wikipedia’s 学年別漢字配当表 (kanji lists separated by school year).

I wrote the above before my viva. Now it’s after my viva.

I feel it went well, but my project tutor had to be very supportive and he showed the other lecturer a lot of things, like the ChangeLog (1179 lines, wow), and auxiliary code like the Rakefile, and such. The general impression I got was that I didn’t communicate well enough in the report, and I completely neglected to mention a lot of work I’d done. But it’s all over now. No more university in the immediate future.