Holizz versus the Web

百％貰う事初めて何ですよ。大学校には。Deploying Web Technologiesのもう一つのコーソワークに九十％貰いました。受けた試験も高いパーセントを貰ったらいいですね。

Turns out I was a week behind schedule for, well… everything.

I discovered earlier today that the Sports and Societies Fair is this coming Thursday, not the Thursday after next.

Just this minute I discovered that I’d agreed to help out the union this week (they still want help next week, but I’d agreed to help this week).

So as it turns out, I could have been doing things all week. I missed the archery social on Thursday too because it slipped my mind.

But I have something to do tomorrow, so that makes me happy. And then Sunday I have two things to do: swimming in the morning and helping people move in to halls (assuming I don’t forget that too). In theory I should be able to make myself useful to the union at other times in the week (assuming I am able to find out how to do this without excessive effort on my part).

I did part of a practice test for the 日本語能力試験(JLPT) ３級 and gave up when my lack of understanding got to me. As it turns out I came fairly close to the pass mark. So it might be possible to do ３級 this year. I have until the end of the month so I have more study time before I make the decision of ３級 or ４級.

ふー

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.

Next week we have two courswork deadlines (Wednesday) and a SEGP deadline (Friday). DS I found out about today; two thirds of CASS2 is impossible (and half of the third I can do is quite tricky (read: I feel like screaming at it until it goes away)). Luckily for my group, SEGP is the one I’d rather do.

XuQa.com is an academic social networking Web application. (NB: UB is listed as The University of Bradford).

It’s pronounced Zoo Ka, apparently. I should really learn PÄ«nyÄ«n and its pronunciation one day. Chinese is quite a popular language and I’d like to be able to at least pronounce people’s names.

I quite like it. Not least because the developers seem to get it when it comes to the forms. Under Sex there’s an option for Complicated and under Ethnicity there’s an option for Mixed. They also seem to get Web application design better than some bigger social networking sites; it’s just easier than some other sites. The fact that they beat Facebook to Bradfordthe UK endears me a little too.

Here’s my profile.

I’m currently eating a great load of miso soup and wondering when I should fast, and how.

Some of my house-mates are installing a TV cable from the aerial that comes out in Mike’s room to the rest of the rooms.

The first Student–Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC) on Monday was fun as usual. The basic premise is that a few student representatives moan about a few issues and then the staff tell us that they’ve been moaning about the same thing to the beurocrats over the road (in Richmond) for two months.

As could have been predicted, there was no first year representative present. Just me and Will for the second year, Nat from the final year, and Neil who is now a post-graduate.

Thanks to pathetic timetabling, I shall be missing careers talks whenever I attend SSLC. What should I do? Go and be told how to improve my career prospects or actually improve my career prospects by learning the social skills needed for meetings and turning my course into something better than it was?

Mmm, that was good miso soup.