Holizz versus the Web

I am slowly becoming literate in Japanese. It’s great fun, because I can put what I use to use straight away by reading news stories and comics.

At this very moment I am at the 42nd character of the characters one would learn in the fourth year of Japanese middle school (教育漢字の第四学年). I’m still using my great tool, and occasionally adding improvements. I’ve nearly finished my fifty characters for today, which I will later go over again, and probably add the ones I’ve forgotten to a file, which I can then stick in the list/ directory in my tool and I can revise them at a later date.

I started the fifty-a-day policy on Wednesday (the day after my final exam), and I’ve kept to it. I finished the third year in four days. Of the 200 characters I only stuck 25 into a file for more practice (and some of those I can read in context). Not bad, eh? I’m really pleased with myself. Who cares about humility (遠慮《えんりょ》) when you’re learning things, I covered 200 characters in four days and I’m proud. According to my diary, I will have finished the middle school characters by the sixth of the sixth (that’s June). Then that’ll be 1,006 characters. Maybe I’ll have to set my sights on something higher than 日本語能力試験 (JLPT) level 3, because I’ve well surpassed the 300 characters needed for that level. Once I’ve done the upper school kanji, and perhaps the people name kanji, I should be on track for level 1, at least in terms of kanji.

Doing rough calculations, I should be able to learn 9,000 characters before the JLPT exam, which is well above the number of characters covered in any Japanese national coded character set (6,349 in JIS X 0208:1997), and approximately half the number of characters in China’s GBK (source: CJKV Information Processing, Ken Lunde, aka 小林剣 - I want a copy of that book). And apparently, I could learn all the Chinese characters in the Universal Character Set, (Unicode Version 4.0 and ISO 10646-1:2000, that’s 70,207), it would take me just under 4 years (and a further 1.5 years to learn the remainder of the UCS, 96,382 characters).

English month name gaiden [外伝 (がいでん) (n) supplementary biography; anecdote;]:

I only have to count the months on my fingers (that’s BSL - one-handed counting) if it’s five or greater and the month in question isn’t next month or the month after. Sometimes I make mistakes and end up with December as the eleventh month, and I have to start again. I’ve never gotten on with the month names in English, especially since I discovered that there used to be ten or something - thus October and December being plus two their root numerals.

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.

I’ve only really had a vague idea about wanting to do programming, perhaps with some internationalisation or localisation thrown in. But something caught my eye on the Jobs side bar while catching up on the latest from Slashdot this morning: Google: Software Engineer, Japanese Product Focus - Mountain View.

That’s exactly the sort of job I want. Only it’s Google, on the other side of the Atlantic, and they want fluency in Japanese. I’m going to apply for it anyway, my CV is nearly finished. Then I’m going to search for some other jobs, using keywords like Python, open source, Linux, internationalisation, localisation (and the American variants), Japanese, Japan, and such.

So the new plan, by the way, is to find a job (I’ll be getting a temporary job to pay the rent until I find a real job) because I have most likely passed every deadline there may have been for funding (I’ll still apply, if I can work out how). Next year, if my employment isn’t so fun I’ll either try the teaching English in Japan route, or see if I can get funding for a masters (perhaps I’ll be able to fund myself? I don’t know).

P.S. I’m going to PyCon UK this year. If anybody else is going, I’ve booked the hotel for the Saturday night, and I will have space for two more people (see also: RoomSharing). If you want to join me, it will cost you £11 for the privilege.

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.

My relationships with women tend to be much the same as my relationships with men. They exist, I exist, on occasion we interact. Not much more can be said on the matter.

私と女の人の関係は私と男の人の関係の様です。あの人が存在して、私が存在して、偶に対話します。この件には…えっと、えっと…ごめん、訳せません。

So that was a paragraph rather than a book, but I’ve proved my point, Niall. Now I want to see your book on international relations.

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%).

I read an interesting article by the BBC on proposed changes to the language curriculum (i.e. starting foreign languages in primary school).

Some of the comments noted that after a GCSE in a foreign language most kids can’t even have a conversation. That was certainly true in my case. I spent a couple of pre-GCSE years studying French, and one year pre-GCSE and two GCSE years studying German and I didn’t have anything to show for it (yet I still came out with a C in German). I certainly didn’t have the confidence to use German at all when I had a trip to Berlin right after my GCSEs (but that was possibly due to shyness, not lack of proficiency).

And after one year of Japanese at evening classes (and a little more studying over the Summer holidays) I started the Tandem Learning Scheme (language exchange) and I was able to hold short conversations. Also note that I’m maybe six years older than when I took my GCSEs so my capacity for learning back then was immeasurably larger than it is now.

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.