Holizz versus the Web

昨日、恐ろしいことをしました。YouTubeでアニメ等を観る為にアドビ・フラッシュをインストールしまいました。ノンフリーソフト（自由ないソフト）をインストールとはとても恐ろしいことです。申し訳ございません。

Yesterday I did a terrible thing. In order to watch anime and such on YouTube I installed Adobe Flash. It is a terrible thing to install non-free software. I have no excuse.

まあ、Ubuntuはノンフリーソフトをデフォルトにインストールするからそんなに悪いのか。

Well, Ubuntu installs non-free software by default, so perhaps it’s not so bad…

フラッシュをインストールしてノンフリーソフトの弱点をすぐに気づいた。その弱点はノンフリーソフトがあまり良くないと言うことだ。二度ビデオを観るとFirefoxがすぐに凍結する。誰もソースを編集できないから改良できない。バカらしいなと思うけどYouTubeはBitTorrentより早くダウンロードし、YouTubeのは字幕ないから。

Once I installed Flash I immediately realised one of non-free software’s weak points. That weak point is that non-free software isn’t very good. If I watch videos twice, Firefox immediately freezes. Nobody can edit the source so it can’t be improved. I think it’s stupid, but YouTube is faster than BitTorrent and YouTube’s videos don’t have subtitles.

ああ、そう言えば、YouTubeには手話のビデオが一杯あるらしい。ASLとBSLと日本手話とか。小さいころから手話に興味があった。練習のビデオもある、また習おうと思ってる。

Ah, speaking of which, YouTube seems to have lots of sign language videos. ASL, BSL, JSL, etc.. Ever since I was little I’ve had an interest in sign language. There are educational videos too, I wonder if I should try learning again.

先日、またDebianをインストールした。でも、フォントはあまりきれいじゃなかった。アンチエイリアスの問題だと思った。一杯システムの設定を変更したりしたけどまだ下手にレンダリングをしていた。

The other day I installed Debian again. But the fonts weren’t very pretty. I thought it was an antialiasing problem. I changed a load of system settings but it was still rendering poorly.

Firefoxはきれいにアンチエイリアスしていたが他のアプリがまだ変だった。

Firefox was anti-aliasing, but other applications were odd.

まぁ、結局フォントは問題だった。新しい日本語のフォントをインストールしてXを再起動してきれいになった。

But, in the end it was a problem of fonts. I installed a new fonts, restarted X and it became pretty.

フォントはttf-vlgothic。何とかFirefoxがさざなみや東風のフォントをアンチエイリアス出来るけど、他のアプリは出来なかった。パン語は変な魔法を使ってるようだ。

The font was ttf-vlgothic. For some reason Firefox could anti-alias さざなみ (Sazanami) and 東風 (Kochi) but other applications couldn’t. It would appear that Pango is using strange magic.

I discovered the wonderful little Sonata the other day, and to make a short story even shorter, it now has a 0install feed.

Then I thought but what about Emacs?, checked for a binary package from GNU and decided to have a play with 0compile, and the end result is yet another 0install feed. It doesn’t appear to work with the -nw option. I’m not quite sure why that is.

FFXIIはとてもいいゲームだが、一つ問題がある。

FFXII is a very good game, but there’s one problem.

バルフレアがショットガンで始まったが今、バルフレアの一番強い武器は剣に成っちゃった。もう、フランしか皆が剣を使うんだ。このライセンスシステムは確かに面白くて楽しいけれど皆が同じ所で始まって、皆がずっと同じだろう？

Balflear (Balthier?) started out with the shotgun, but now his strongest weapon is a sword. Now Fran is the only one who doesn’t use a sword. The licence system is certainly interesting and fun, but everybody starts at the same place, so everybody’s the same.

そんなに悪い問題じゃないけど、ちょっと詰まらなくなる。

It’s not such a terrible problem, but it makes it a little boring.

今日、あのフェニックスのボスを倒すために一杯レベルアップしたりした。チェインレベルが１３１に成った。あの大砂海オグル・エンサのプラットホームであのちっちゃい奴らを皆殺ししていた。チェインレベルが百位に成って２敵１個の白くて大きな宝が落ちた。すげぇ金持ちに成った。大砂海の店で土の石を売って一万ギル越えた。

Today, I did a lot of leveling up in preparation for that phoenix boss. I got a chain level of 131. On the platforms in the Great Sea of Sand (???) - Oguru Ensa I was genociding those little people. When the chain level reached around one hundred, I was getting about one huge white treasure per every two enemies. I became incredibly rich. After I sold Earth Stones at the shop in the Great Sea of Sand I had around ten thousand gil.

この後、ダルマスカへ帰って魔法や武器や武具を買ってあのフェニックスの奴を簡単に殺す積もりです。

Next I plan to return to Dalmasca, stock up on magic, weapons, and armour and then easily defeat that phoenix.

今朝ワードプレッスをアップグレードした。前の版は1.5で今のは2.2。初めてアップグレードするのは簡単だし速かった。でもまだ翻訳とか出来ない。このjLanguageプラグインは良そうだったけどダメだった。時々英語と日本語でブログしたいからね。どうやったらいいのかな。そして、単記事の言語を決める事が出来ない。

そして、前でテンプレートはHTMLだった（自分で作った）から記事はHTMLだったから今、XHTMLとしてもHTMLとしてもvalidate出来ない。直す気がない。

ほら：漢字表ツールで〜す！

これで簡単に漢字を勉強出来ます。昨日、このようのソフトで一杯勉強しました。今日、この新しいソフトで一杯勉強しました。

これはPythonなのでこのサーバで出来ます。

どう？便利？使いました？バグありました？メールしてくれませんか？

Look: Kanji Display Tool!

With this, you can easily study kanji. Yesterday I used something like this to study a lot. Today, I used this new tool to do a load of studying.

This is Python, so it works on this server.

So? Useful? Used it? Found a bug? Won’t you email me?

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.

Finally, after quite a long while, I have finished writing my report on the Acer Aspire 3662WLMi. If you are thinking of buying a super-cheap laptop, you can see if it suits your needs. I also submitted it to Linux on Laptops, which is where I found information on many Acer laptops, but not specifically this one.

I was motivated to finish it off because Linux 2.6.22-rc1 was released the other day, and this release candidate actually has support for the sound card, which makes me happy.

I was watching CSI:NY last night (I was babysitting and apparently television cannot continue its existence without showing CSI).

There was some evidence on somebody’s computer they wanted, so let’s go through their process of getting the evidence off of their computer and into their laps in a safe and reliable way:

• Switch the computer on (it booted very quickly, or perhaps the monitor was just turned off)
• A password prompt appears (the dialogue box looked a little like it was using Qt)
• Connect a USB device
• We’re in
• Go and find the document that was previously mentioned and read it
• The end

I think the proper procedure is something like take the computer to the lab, open it carefully (checking for tripwires), take the hard disk and image it, and use an image of the image for hacking. I’ve read up on it, because I’m interested in Bradford University’s Forensic Computing MSc.

I’ve heard people say they don’t like TV programme X due to ridiculous things that they know are wrong, especially crime dramas. I don’t really understand this way of thinking, because I see stupid things done with computers all the time in TV and movies and I sometimes laugh (the mention of a mainframe in Underworld: Evolution) or just groan silently (oh, they can zoom in that far and see this person’s reflection … again), but I won’t cite it as a reason not to watch the show. Of course I notice many silly things related to other subjects, but mostly computer science.

I’ve met two people who dislike Bones because of its fictional osteological practices. Pfft; it’s just a bit of sci-fi. I liked Bones so much I bought the first book in the series Bones was based upon (Déjà Dead by Kathy Reichs) even though I’ve never been particularly interested in crime books (although The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was rather enjoyable). I haven’t started it yet because I’m reading Chocolat right now (I’m nearly half-way through, it’s becoming very exciting).

Other exciting things: today I finally defeated Evrae (FFX) on my fourth and final attempt, then was forced to play through perhaps half an hour or more of fighting minor baddies and watching FMVs before I got to a bleeding save point. I started out by self-destructing Kamahri (he’ll just be lying there dead, or somebody will be able to replace him, right?. Wrong.) and so I fought with only two characters for the rest of the battle.

Waaaah. I have to start doing things at some point in the near future or I’ll have no house, no job, and no (more) education.

Speaking of education, Bradford College appears to be cutting most of its classes that don’t directly relate to getting employment (and charging extra for the ones it doesn’t). I was very shocked that their letter actually expresses displeasure at this fact, usually people seem to get decisions handed down to them and then have to pretend to think it’s the best course of action. I’m happy that modern foreign languages are still valued (they used shock quotes in the letter too) but fewer choice of courses is always bad news.

Ah, enough of my rambling unstructured autobiographical writing, I must do something … something useful, or at the very least entertaining.

I was thinking about writing a post about how the newly released stable Etch is rather good, and was easy to set-up and get going. Well, it was easy to install and get all the things I needed installed, but it’s crashed more times in the past few days than Ubuntu has in the past few months.

Also, the default IME (uim) is difficult to configure (I want to make it use a task bar icon rather than the GTK toolbar and make the selected IM persist throughout a session, rather than being per-field).

Using the Google search box on Iceweasel crashed X twice (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace worked), X crashed such that I couldn’t even Ctrl+Alt+Backspace or switch to a VT a total of one times (one too many), and Gajim crashes in an entirely reproducible manner (but only on stable Etch as far as I know - #3104).

In GNOME’s コンピュータ (computer), and in the 場所 (places?) thing which holds a list of places one might want to find things both have nine items which should not be there. They are “volume”s of varying size, some of which look like they could be unmounted partitions, none of which are in /etc/fstab, but there are too many for them all to be partitions on this machine.

When trying to rename files with Nautilus, it usually just doesn’t work (i.e. no selecting and typing over, stops accepting input after several characters have been typed - I haven’t even tried entering Japanese text).

To its credit, it did give me a somewhat appropriate environment when I selected Japanese at the installer - an IME, Japanese fonts. Although the IME is not as good as Ubuntu’s default (scim), and there are not as many fonts as Ubuntu comes with (i.e. enough to render all of the text of the list of languages on Wikipedia’s Main Page - on Debian all but three code-points of Telugu will display after an apt-get install '^ttf-*'). And the default font in Iceweasel looks like it’s bitmapped.

In other news I have translated approximately 20% of Gajim to Japanese (the easiest 20%).