Holizz versus the Web

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!

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。

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.

RUnicode is coming along nicely.

I just implemented a few methods for String. One was String#blocks, which returns the names of the blocks codepoints belong to.

  # "今日はトム君。Niall is a ☆.".blocks
  # => ["CJK Unified Ideographs", "CJK Unified Ideographs", "Hiragana",
  # "Katakana", "Katakana", "CJK Unified Ideographs",
  # "CJK Symbols and Punctuation", "Basic Latin", "Basic Latin",
  # "Basic Latin", "Basic Latin", "Basic Latin", "Basic Latin", "Basic Latin",
  # "Basic Latin", "Basic Latin", "Basic Latin", "Basic Latin",
  # "Miscellaneous Symbols", "Basic Latin"]

And then I decided Ruby needed a real String#upcase and String#downcase. The original String#upcase just transliterates ASCII.

The operation is locale insensitive—only characters “a’’ to “z’’ are affected.

My version performs simple uppercase mappings according to the data found in UnicodeData.txt. Although it takes about a year to do it.

  # "天空のエスカフローネ Tenkū no Esukafurōne, wörtlich".upcase
  # => "天空のエスカフローネ TENKŪ NO ESUKAFURŌNE, WÖRTLICH"

String#downcase just calls String#upcase to do its dirty work. And String#upcase! and String#downcase! just use String#replace.

This Ruby Unicoding is rather fun. It’s a good language to work with. It’s just so hackable. Maybe the next step should be to work out how to get String#upcase running in a timeframe similar to the original String#upcase, and then I might like to make some Ruby extensions in C. Although I’m not fond of C, I do think it’s a good choice for low-level things, and this is indeed low-level stuff.

RUnicode started out as one method I needed for my KLookup final year project. It’s growing a little, but I’m keeping it in the KLookup source tree for now. You can check it out with the following command:

svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/klookup

There’s a cute little demo in demo/ which makes use of the String#tr method (which is also available in jcode, I discovered) to convert Arabic numerals into (Japanese-style) kanji numerals. There’s a shell script to print the date from the Ruby script:

二千七年一月八日

It only goes up to (10**26)-1 at the moment. If you’re interested, (10**26)-1 (that’s a nine followed by 25 nines) looks like this:

九万九千九百九十九億九千九百九十九万九千九百九十九兆九万九千九百九十九億九千九百九十九万九千九百九十九

Enough babbling, goodnight.☆

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。

I started my year by eating おせち料理 (New Year food), watching anime (魔法騎士（マジックナイト）レイアース - Magic Knight Rayearth), and counting-down on xclock -update 1 (of course my clocks are set by OpenNTPD - I wish my mobile and large-display LCD clock could do the same).

I ate 年越しそば (year-crossing soba), もち (mochi), and 梅干し (umeboshi). Super-yummy.

前に大掃除した。部屋の全部を掃除した。そう言う事はなかった。

じゃ、もうすぐ練らなきゃ。

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！

Lately I’ve been seeing lots more police officers around than usual. It’s gone from seeing a couple walking about each week to seeing many walking or driving every day. This is generally around where I live (which is in the general area of the university).

And this afternoon there was suddenly a huge gathering of police officers on Laisteridge Lane. I seemed to have missed the action and nothing’s appeared on the news yet, but something must have happened.