Holizz versus the Web

I just posted a personal looking for friends/penpals. It wasn’t particularly taxing to write, but it was good fun. I’ll post it here too:

ブラッドフォード大学校でコンピューター・サイエンスの勉強をしています。

ブラッドフォード・カレジで日本語の勉強をしています。そして、日本人と日本語の勉強してと英語の教えています。一年ぐらい勉強をしました。今年１２月に日本語能力試験の三級をします。

大学校のアニメとカルト・テレビ社会のプレジデントです。アーチェリーや柔術をします。そして毎週母さんと泳ぎます。

もと人見知りですから人々に会いたいです。日本人も日本語の勉強する人も。

英語で：

I’m studying Computer Science at Bradford University.

I’m studying Japanese at Bradford College. I’m also studying Japanese and teaching English with/to a Japanese person. I’ve been studying for about a year. This December I’m going to take the 3rd level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

I’m the president of the university’s Anime & Cult TV Society. I practice Archery and Juujutsu. I also go swimming every week with my mum.

I’m a former shy person, so I want to meet lots of people. Japanese people, and people studying Japanese.

Well my coursework is going very well. The application is complete. The specification said I should add an appropriate feature. So I internationalised it. It comes with British English (en_GB.utf8) and Japanese Japanese (ja_JP.utf8) locales.

It was fun learning new things about Java (which I am really starting to like… it’ll be Open Source soon, then I can install it). I learnt about Locale, ResourceBundle, Class.getResourceAsStream(…).

While writing the documentation I discovered that neither AbiWord nor OpenOffice.org Writer (I haven’t tried kword because SCIM and Qt don’t get on and I’ll be damned if I’m going to use a word processor that doesn’t let me type in my language of chioce) will consult another font if a glyph isn’t found (which appears to be what pretty much every other piece of GUI software does by default). Say the default font is Kochi Gothic (東風ゴシック), ASCII, Hiragana, Katakana, Han, and Ideographic Punctuation will be available. Say you then wanted to insert a â„– (U+2116 NUMERO SIGN) - you could in any half-decent modern piece of software, but oh no, not in AbiWord. It just appears as what appears to be a ° (U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN). In OpenOffice.org Writer it appears as what looks like a (U+0020 SPACE). GTK+, Qt, Gecko, X (or whatever renders xterm and such) can all handle it. Why are these word processors stuck in the olden days of … I don’t know, I’m too young to remember those days.

Speaking of pathetic software, I’m currently on a quest to find a social networking site that doesn’t reject Japanese text. Myspace, Xuqa, and Vampirefreaks apparently suck, and a Japanese site I found was invite-only.

P.S. You know when you’ve been watching too much anime studying too much Japanese when you have to log into a system where you haven’t set your locale to ja_JP.utf8 to find out the English for ８月.

I went through my JLPT level 1 flash cards. There were only 8 I didn’t recognise. So I learnt those. Now I know the 80 kanji in the JLPT level 1 exam, and I know plenty more on top of that.

I remember thinking at some point that the flash cards weren’t much use to me at whichever moment I thought that, but this past week or two I’ve been studying kanji on almost a daily basis and I’m getting to the point where I can read lots of things I couldn’t before.

I’ve been reading previews of comics on Kodansha’s English site, Azuma Kiyohiko’s weblog, text in anime, and pretty much anything I come across.

In an effort to improve my reading skills I have ordered a lot of untranslated manga from Japan.

• あずまんが大王(Azumanga Daioh)〜1から4まで (all of it) - I bought the ADV translation because I liked the series, but ADV did a terrible job of it, so I decided to get the original when I could read it, and I think I’m well on my way to being able to.
• 蟲沛(Mushishi)〜1と2 - I love the TV series, and I read a sample on Koudansha’s English site (amusingly, the mouseover-to-show-English feature didn’t work in Firefox).
• よつばと！(Yotsuba&!)〜1と2 - It’s by the same author as Azumanga Daioh (Azuma Kiyohiko); I couldn’t resist.

Meme stolen from Neil.

I’ll answer bilingually. Because I can.

When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was behind you?

おてあらい。

The toilet.

How much cash did you spend yesterday?

195GBPです。でも、今日は日本から日本語でコミックを買いました。10,844円です。

I paid 195GBP for rent. But today I spent 10,844円 (about 55GBP) on manga. In Japanese. From Japan.

What’s a word that rhymes with mist?

フィスト。

Fist.

Favorite planet, which you would live on, if you could?

土。

Earth.

Who is the LAST person you kissed?

おかさんかな。

My mum, probably.

What is your favorite ring on your phone?

さあ…

I put Paint it Black on ages ago back when it was Davina’s (about a week). It’s not really my favourite, rather it’s the only one that isn’t stupid.

What is the last band shirt you wore?

一つあります。ピクシーズ。

I only have one. Pixes.

What do you think of yourself?

おたく、ね？

I’m an otaku, don’t you think?

Name the brand of your shoes you’re currently wearing?

赤い花緒のじょじょ。

Akai hanao no jojo.

Night light or pitch black?

黒。

Pitch black.

What do you think about the (previous) person who took this?

いい人。

Nice person.

What were you doing at midnight last night?

ねむましたが読みましたかな。

Sleeping, or maybe reading.

What did your last text message say that you received?

そかな。

Just for that poor attempt at using the English language I shall refuse to answer.

Where is the nearest Valero?

バレロが何ですか。

What’s one of those when it’s at home?

What’s something that you say a lot?

そかって。

そか.

Who told you they loved you last?

おかさん。

Davina.

Last furry thing you touched?

さあ…

I don’t know.

How many drugs have you done in the past 3 days?

何もしません

None.

Favourite age you have been so far?

え？

What?

Your worst enemy?

アメリカ王。

King of America.

What is your current desktop picture?

黒です。

It’s plain black.

What was the last thing you said to someone?

えっとえっと…あ、分かりません。

I forgot.

How do you like your eggs?

好きではありません。

I don’t like them.

Do you like someone?

人が好きですかな。

Maybe I like somebody.

The last song you listened to?

分かりませんがあゆからでした。

I don’t know, but it was by Ayu.

きのう、9じはんから10じはんまでCASS2にいきました。おもしろいですからたのしいです。

CASS2のあとでCASS2のしごとをしました。そしてひるごはんをたべましたが、おねがいチーチャーをみました。

そしてにほんごがべんきょうをしました。

水曜日からまいにちトンファーをします。すきです！あしたこぶどでトンファーがべんきょうをします。

All those そして, it’s like I’m five again; beginning every sentence with and then.

Translation (as absolutely literal as possible, because I’m like that):

From 9.30 till 10.30 I went to CASS2. It was interesting, therefore it was enjoyable.

After CASS2 I did CASS2’s (course)work. Then I ate lunch and watched Onegai Teacher.

Then I studied Japanese.

Everyday since Wednesday I practice with my tonfa. I love them. Tomorrow I will study them with kobudo.

たんじょうびは日曜日ありました。2月19日です。

今に20年です。HeroScapeとMagic: The Gatheringがあります。そして好きだ。

今日は（こんにちは）

See? Who needs Ruby CSS when you can implement it with good old CSS2?

For those of you without adequite CSS support, the characters in parentheses would be above those before them, like real furigana.

Here’s the CSS I used: ruby.css. I found it the other week via Wikipedia:Ruby characters and immediately added it to my userContent.css.

やった！

There were some things in Debian that seemed near-impossible but just work in Gentoo. One of those things are IMEs.

An Input Method Editor is how one types something that a keyboard doesn’t have enough keys for (like Japanese). It lets me type densha<SPC><RET>otoko<SPC><RET> and have 電車男 appear.

I spent hours and hours working on it in Debian and all it took in Gentoo was emerge scim-uim canna-cannadic scim-canna im-canna (don’t forget to /etc/init.d/canna start && rc-update add canna default). And then a few lines in my .xinitrc:

export LC_ALL="en_GB.UTF-8"
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
export QT_IM_MODULE=scim
export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"
scim -d

You may need to add some USE flags and update some packages, but if you’re interested in typing Japanese, you probably already had cjk canna unicode in there anyway.

Now I can switch between Dvorak and 日本語 by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Up (or Down).

今年もどぞよろしく。

Happy New Year.

Yeah I know I suck. I just haven’t had anything to write about.

Yesterday I tried to enable Japanese input methods in X (again). I failed, but I think I’m getting closer to my goal. See the pages I found here: del.icio.us/holizz/japanese+input (I have 40 items tagged japanese; it’s catching up to web).

Today I’ve been trying to write some CSS that displays Ruby in a relatively useful way (since I don’t think any current browsers support Ruby). So far I have the rb and rt floating at the left; what I really need is to keep them inside ruby. But my CSS is a little rusty. You can see how far I’ve gotten, if you’re interested..

I’ve decided to exercise every morning. No it’s not a new year’s resolution, I decided upon it last night. Nothing quite so time-consuming (or good) as swimming which I did almost every day over the Summer holidays and into the first term. It’s just a warm-up I plan to do. It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes (whereas swimming took almost an hour in total). I’m telling you this so that if I start to think it would be a good idea to give it up, I’ll imagine my reaction to somebody saying oh, are you still exercising every morning? and reconsider.

I’ve also started eating raw food as a rule (as opposed to before when I ate it by coincidence).