Holizz versus the Web

I just found the worst kind of bug one can find while unit testing: a caterpillar. In my bowl.

Then I looked through the broccoli to make sure there weren’t any more… and ewwwwww!

Two boiled caterpillars in one bowl is too much for me. Eww. Really, just eww. I don’t feel like eating so much anymore.

P.S.: Firefox’s dictionary didn’t seem to include the word “anymore”, so I Googled it, and found that ocurrances of “anymore” are almost twice that of “any more”. I also found an interesting article on the subject which notes differences in usage between British and American English.

Hehe, I’m becoming rather obsessed with language at the moment. It can only be a good thing, considering my final year project is, after all, a language learning tool (well, a library with several prototype interfaces). I think I can allow myself to spend a day doing exactly what I want to do every once in a while, as long as I do my work eventually.

1. Read news (/., BBC News, OS News, etc.) for two hours
2. Shower, eat, etc.
3. Read some of Beginning Syntax
4. Go to the library to borrow The French Experience (BBC book on the subject of the French language) and Understanding Semantics
5. Read a chapter of The French Experience and a chapter of Beginning Syntax for about three hours (I’m thinking more and more about the similarities between human languages and computer languages - that is, languages designed as an interface between humans and machines - I’m not especially interested in assembly or byte-code)
6. Talk to Davina while mostly reading a resource I found today: Nihongoresources - grammar - an excellent book that teaches Japanese grammar using the Japanese terms (I still don’t know which verb group (I or II) corresponds to 一段 and 五段, and I don’t care to)
7. And now it’s nearly midnight. Bonne nuit!

Last Friday I suddenly got the feeling that I wanted to learn a language (possibly because I started reading How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own by Barry Farber - rather interesting*).

* He appears to take a somewhat different approach to Jack Seward in Japanese in Action, especially towards learning the rude words. I personally believe that knowing the vulgar terms as well as the polite is important, but certainly it would be a mistake to start with the curses. My favourite piece of advice comes in the phrase I spill more than you drink!

I started with Russian on Friday (okay, I just learnt the Cyrillic alphabet), French on Saturday, Korean on Sunday evening (mostly just learning Hangul, which is indeed a great writing system), then a little Mandarin on Tuesday.

In the end I chose French. Partly because Davina speaks it, and maybe to prove a point about compulsory foreign language education (I learnt it for three years before choosing GCSE German for the sole reason that it wasn’t French).

Salut.

This post I’m translating from English to Japanese.

このポストに英語から日本語に訳します。

I made a release of KLookup! The second release. Aptly named 0.2 (the first release was called 2006-11-26).

KLookupをリリースでしたよ！二番のリリースだから0.2と呼びます（一番は2006-11-26と呼びました）。

KLookup is my fabulous final year project. It’s coming along really well.

KLookupは俺のすばらしい最後の年のプロジェクトです。中々上達しています。

The easiest way to install it is (with RubyGems):

優しい方法は（RubyGemsで）：

gem install klookup

Also, you can check it out via Subversion:

だって、Subversionでもチェックオウトできます。

This release (このリリース): svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/klookup/tags/REL_0.2 klookup-0.2

The trunk (幹？トランク？胴体？分かりません！): svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/klookup/trunk klookup

KLookup comes up as the only result for kanji on RubyForge, which is somewhat interesting due to a slight Japanese focus of Ruby in general. It’s quite possible that this sort of tool just wouldn’t be particularly useful to the average Japanese person who’s completed twelve years of education and maybe university.

kanjiを探せばKLookupは只一つの答え。それは面白いとおもいます、Rubyはちょっと日本に中心するから。もしかしてこんな道具は役に立ちませんかな、なみの十二年間の学校や大学校を受けた日本人に。

Ugh. I really need to make a blog CMS myself soon…one that is language-aware.

ああ、もう早いに言語を気がついてるブログCMSを作らなければ成りませんなぁ。

My latest goal is to learn the first three grades of 教育漢字 (educational kanji) before March. My next goal will be to learn the following three grades before some other realistic deadline.

教育漢字 is a non-coded character set containing 1,006 characters, which are taught to children in 小学校 (little school). The first three grades contain a total of 440 characters.

I’ve already learnt all of the characters in grade one (80 characters) - I only needed to learn one I didn’t recognise and a few I couldn’t remember how to write. Grade two (160 characters) looks like it may take a little more work.

Maybe when it gets closer to December I’ll start learning kanji based on JLPT character sets.

会いたかったです。みんなに。

ちょっと前に日本語授業へ出かけましたがキャンセルでした。橋戸先生が病気ですから。仕方がないでも楽しみましたから今、残念です。

こんな事の所為でよく楽しみません。なんか寂しいですよね。

じゃ、一人で日本語を勉強しますから。

まあ…私にはちょっと子供らしいと思います。

一番の悪い奴がいつも負けて「ナニー？！」と言いました。大ステレオタイプなキャラクターでした。

このアニメの存在理由は作品を売る事だけではありませんの？

Why Pretty Cure　（なぜプリキュア？）：

* This proves that almost everyone watching Pretty Cure bought its toys!

たしかに存在理由はおもちゃを売る事ですね。（ところで、「prove」はちょっと違いますよね。）

良い所はね…えっとう…キュアホワイトの声優がCCさくらのメイリンの声優ですし、キュアブラックの声優が「耳をすませば」の仕手の声優ですし…以上だと思います。

これはトムの大アニメレビューでした！次回の記事を楽しみしてね！

一昨日、またダイアログを録音しました。

私が「母の金魚が死んでしまいました。」と言って、他の人が「わたしのすきないろはみどり。あなたは？」と言いました。

私がそんなに笑っちゃっていましたから録音をとめなきゃでした。

あのせりふの後で「好きな色はむらかみです。」と言いました。

と言うわけで、大成功でした。

IMEs are the best invention in the world. This week I’ve typed Ï€ and done some box drawing without having to look at 文字マップ (Gucharmap in this case).

Today I learnt Ï€ to 9 digits thanks to the Japanese language and this post. It was HARAGUCHI Akira’s recent escapades into real numbers that made me want to find Ï€ in Japanese phrases. It’s a great language for memorising numbers.

Today I have also been looking at fun things like graphical toolkits. It’s hard to put into words why GTK+ 2 could beat Qt or Tk in a fight. Just say that GTK+ 2 has a wider deployment and hope for the best. And then try to think up a good reason to choose Ruby over Python (I don’t think “Ruby is more Japonz” will cut the mustard in final year project documentation).

I shall probably start some coding of that soon (maybe sooner than my Gantt chart tells me I should be doing - but I’m sure I’ll live).

Well. I should go to bed now so I can go swimming in the morning and then write lots and lots of documentation.

P.S. I subscribe to the Doctor Will documentation methodology: have everything in a wiki then just print it out and call it a report.

Oh my god. I tried Damn Small Linux today. It has NO FONTS! It didn’t render a single character of Japanese. I was so not impressed.

DSL gets a holizz-rating of ♇ (that symbol means Pluto) - keep it up and you might be a real planet distro one day.