Ergonomics: Besides the frenzic run to miniaturize and embed everything, with the increasing average age, when a small footprint will become a hindrance instead of a feature? This is my uncle’s landline phone, bought exactly to permit him to dial without donning his glasses. He’d kill for a similar cell phone,and accordingly with all the people I’ve seen wearing glasses in public just to dial up, he’s not alone.
I really do love this piece of code I came up with. Needless to say the URL and width are fixed just for the example’s sake.
I am slowly adding these tips to my .vimrc file: productivity’s going up!
Last night I cloned the Rubinius git repository to start playing with it. I really love how easy it is to build everything with Rake (and this is also easy for Shoes, but that’s another love story I’ll soon go back to), but soon (well, after my iBook stopped churning atoms to compile everything) I stumbled into a little bug:
a gem was not installed due to a missing directory.
Hence my first contribution to the Rubinius code base.
Anyway, I did not post this to brag about it (how possibly come I’d brag about an added mkdir_p?) but to share the satisfaction you have when you contribute to something bigger ;)
Gosh… I was looking at one license to use and I simply didn’t have any idea of the Pandora Vase I was going to open…
Today I’ve deployed my first app for Google App Engine.
I wrote this little application to learn some Google App Engine and to practice my lately rusting python skills. I was inspired by the work of Simon Willison with his json-time and json-head. Studying (well, actually trying to study) Mandarin I found cumbersome to get to know the reading of unknown characters, so this app was made to scratch my own itch and as an excuse to play with Unicode, JSON and Ajax.
While it’s relative easy to find the correct meaning of a phrase using the amazing GTalk Translation Bots while chatting in Chinese, outside webpages (and definitely not in Safari) pinyin reading is out of reach.
Sure, on websites you can easily use Chinese Pera-Kun and Google Translate offers good translation APIs, but pinyin is inaccessible.
I wrote a python script to get the pinyin readings parsing the Unihan database, I ran it locally on my iBook (I basically took all the characters having an existing kMandarin field) and populate with them a GApp Datastore.
The API is dead simple:
call http://json-zh.appspot.com/pinyin?hanzi=大猩猩 if you just want the pinyin reading in JSON format,
or append callback if you need the results in JSONP.
Obviously there is more than one reading for lost of Chinese characters, but to keep things simple, I choose the first one. After all it seems the majority of the characters are not polyphonic. I plan to show the other readings if you ask only one character, but I wanted to release it soon , you know how it goes otherwise…
Feel free to use it and if you found it useful don’t hesitate to drop me a mail.
I love fiddling with options, technicalities and tinkering with things, I’m a Geek after all. When today I read this post from Jamie of 37signals fame, I got struck by the realization I was wasting my time postponing the start of my website just because I wanted to do the things right at the first shot.
I quote:
This email would have been delayed until it was perfect at Crate and Barrel, and I had trouble releasing the design when there was a way to further improve it. After fixing this there would be another thing and then another thing. A 2-day project would drag on for a week of redesign, approval, and development. Instead we deployed what we had because it is better than what we have now. Done. I finally got Real.
all these things interfered with my desire of just writing longer posts than my other tumblelog.
So I decided to take the plunge, create a new tumblr instead of installing Habari and start writing.
Well, Thanks Jamie
Oh, as for Habari, I do love it, the test installation (see? this is me fiddling with things again…) was great and inspiring, but… I did not find a theme that I liked, and the themes list was so hard to navigate trough. I’d resolved to write my own theme and I started to, but you see? another time sink…
