I used to work at an old bookstore in Boston and sometimes had to take packages over to the post office between Boston Common and Chinatown. One day I noticed a small plaque that mentioned that the telephone had been invented there. Made me sort of sad that all they did was put up a stupid plaque.
A guy named Peter Schickele (Have no idea of the real spelling. Ok, lemme go google... Wow - I got it right.) a music professor and composer has been 'deriving' compositions, 11 albums' worth, of the mythical son of JS Bach, PDQ Bach. Funny stuff, yet very scholarly, in a weird way.
Anyway, he has a website at pdqbach.com.
His peices always have great names too, like Music for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion and The Short-Tempered Clavier and Other Dysfunctional Works for Keyboard. Worth a listen.
I stand corrected. As I said, it was something I had heard and thought interesting. It made sense at the time, as I know that the Portugeuse were active here in the 1600's. Thanks - Jim
BTW, someone mentioned earlier that Kanji is spelled out using Katakana. This is wrong. All Kanji are spelled out using Hiragana, as becomes clear when taking a look at Furigana, which are simply Hiragana, and show the pronounciation of a character of Kanji.
Actually you could use either - a good rule to follow is that if you would put the word in italics, use katakana. It's used for foreign words, too, the same way you would italicize a foreign word in English. Once a foreign word has been in the language long enough, say 300 years, it becomes like a native word and you use hiragana, but even this is rare and somewhat debatable. I've heard that this is the case with the word for 'Thank You', 'Arigato', which is always spelled out in hiragana, even though it probably came from the Portugese word 'Obrigato' (spelling?). Cheers, Jim
The anecdote I related was almost 4 years ago when I was just beginning to learn to read Japanese - during a lesson that was pretty frustrating... I mentioned it because I found it to be true. You can pack a hell of a lot of meaning into a single kanji. (Ever wonder why browsing the web in Japanese on a cellphone can be a lot more tolerable than in english? It's because Kanji is about 5 times more efficient in conveying meaning.) I've kept with the studying and I'm not bad at reading it now, to the point where I can extract a lot more meaning from a chunk of text with kanji than I could if the same text were written in romaji or kana, so, I may still be an asshole, but not for the reasons you mentioned...
There's 1945 kanji known as Joyu (sp?) that are the bare minimum needed for literacy - those are the ones you learn through high school and the ones that they pretty much stick to in newspapers and official documents. Plus in Manga, of course, where they have a larger percentage of 'semi-literate' and younger readers. Believe it or not, Japanese literature actually does get a bit deeper than this - they have books and magazines that use lots of difficult characters that must be supported in the fonts and character sets. After the initial 1945, there's another 18,000 or so that, while less common, are certainly not 'falling into disuse' - some percentage are only used for names and such nowadays, buy that pretty much makes them a requirement. After all, how do you sell someone a computer incapable of displaying his name or the name of a polititian? Sure, you could spell it out in katakana, but that's just lame.
It gets trickier, because there are several encodings in common usage, such as JIS, Shift-JIS and EUC, all which must be supported in any viable operating system. As far as I know, Unicode is a latecomer and not really an important player yet in Japan. It does show promise, though. Until then, systems will have to transparently guess which encoding to use. One of the first words you learn in Japanese when dealing with DBCS information systems is Mojibake - garbage rendering of text.
The good news is that Linux does a great job of handling all of the encoding issues. I use it daily for this stuff and it certainly surpasses anything I've seen on Windows, though IMHO, Mac is a bit slicker. (No surprise there.)
As an aside, I was once venting frustration to a friend while studying kanji - "When are the Japanese going to give up this crap and just use roman letters like the rest of the world??" "Never!" she replied, "Because once you've learned kanji, it's too fscking convenient!"
If you're really interested in this stuff, do a Google for 'Jim Breen', the professor from Monash who is possibly the leading expert in the field - he's also a hell of a nice guy.
That's why this is not a threat to.Mac - people like you who can see the added value of using the paid service that Apple is offering. (Not to mention using Apple's incredible bandwidth to store the 50MB quicktime movie of the kids...)
This is just a sort of neat hack for those of us who like this kind of stuff...
You can sync your PDA and Apple hardware just fine using iSync, you just can't store the synched info on a remote server, unless you hack one up as described in other posts.
Mirror Hotmail and Yahoo's login pages on a local server and collect passwords. Write 'creative' emails on their behalf to their friends and parents and (potential) employers.
Rewrite stock quotes on the fly...
Write a perl script that will rewrite outgoing POP emails (s/Regards,/I love you,/g is an old favorite of mine...)
I figure if someone uses my network without asking for permission, I have the right to make them look like an idiot.
Show me a game that isn't basically about tapping buttons in some sequence...
In the arcades of Tokyo, This is the game that they stick out front, the one to draw people in. Whenever someone is half-decent at it, a crowd gathers around to admire their skill. (Taiko is actually a big deal over here - most of the summer festivals prominently feature a taiko player or two, playing along to the {often pre-recorded} music while people dance.) Inside the arcades, they have the games with the impressive 3D graphics and surround sound, yet this dumb taiko game is the one that gets people to come through the door...
But then again, playing Tetris is just like being a bricklayer, isn't it...
I've never had a machine that I liked using as much.
The thing that makes a big difference for me is that the internationalization is seamless; right now, I'm converting a PHP app from English to Japanese. Using my iBook I can open the files from the Linux server using samba and easily convert the strings in the text editor that comes with Os X. If I have to do other editing to the code, I prefer vi, which comes standard. SSH is right there for me. My shell works the way I need it to, without installing Cygwin.
I have 4 computers on my desk - Redhat/Japanese Windows dualboot IBM Thinkpad, 2 NT Workstations (Eng. & Jp.) and my iBook. I could use any of them that I wanted, but the iBook is what works best for me. (The RedHat box comes close, but I've tweaked the hell out of it to get it just right - it would take weeks to set up another box the same way, whereas I could pick up another iBook and replace this one instantly.)
The suite of "iApps" (iCal, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iEtc...) are a joy to use, better than anything you can get for Windows. Really. Mail filters out spam perfectly for me out of the box. Viruses? Not even an issue.
Plus, every app looks great. I stare at the computer all day at work, it might as well look good. Let's face it, Windows is tired-looking, even XP, which to me looks cartoonish and pathetic.
As for games, I wouldn't know - I haven't got time for them.
After a while, you get to the point where you'll be happy to pay a bit more for a machine that actually works.
I tried to use a 'regular pen' the other day to outline something in a meeting - It had been so long since I had 'written' that I felt like I was using my left hand instead.
Even then, I kept using the Grafitti letter forms that I use to input text into my PalmPilot thingie.
"The" looked more like "7h3". When my boss asked me to xerox my notes for him, I just typed them up and emailed them instead.
My handwriting was never any good, but it's certainly gotten much worse lately...
I just searched for MMDC (my own site) on SearchKing and the results seemed to be lifted directly from Google: Google's index of my site:
MMDC Tokyo:: Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas... Aug 29, 2002 - 11:43 PM, MMDC Tokyo, Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams, Main Menu.... mmdc.net/ - 47k - Cached - Similar pages
SearchKing's:
MMDC Tokyo:: Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas... Aug 29, 2002 - 11:43 PM, MMDC Tokyo, Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams, Main Menu....
What are the odds that they both crawled my site at exactly the same minute on the same day?
If they do it as a browser cookie or something as lame - Without a password - better a pass*phrase*, it's going to be nearly useless. But then again, people see passwords as being hard to remember, so they make them weak or non-existant. Bad password management is the weakest link in almost any security scheme. At the very least, it will be an interesting exercise to see how they try it and how well or badly it all works.
Of course, there's always boimetrics, which is a vile concept.
(Maybe canada could buy up surplus Cue::Cats and issue citizens a tattoo with a barcode?)
With pgp/gpg and keyservers like pgp.mit.edu, it's painfully simple to create and revoke keys that you control - as long as Canada picks a similar system, the citizens are still in control. If you feel your key has been compromised, revoke it and go create a new one next time you go to the post office or city hall, or however they verify people...
I've *never* felt that having a digital ID was a threat to my privacy - if I control the keys, I can use the ID when I feel like proving who I am. Nothing stops me from generating a new ket for some other purpose either - I usually create one for each job/work-email that I use. I've had my private one since '96 or so - you can go grab it from my slashdot profile.
Slashdot Mirror
Say a small prayer.
I predicted pretty much this same scenario in This Post a week or so ago.
I hope you're for real - I'd really like to see this happen.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
I just signed up for a 12Mbit line here in Tokyo.
(I'm upgrading from 8Mbit - the 12 is actually a cheaper plan.)
Regular DSL, IIRC. Used the 30 year old wiring in my place, no problem.
Even on the 8, I've had Internet downloads stream in at better than 1500K.
A year or two ago, Japan was *way* behind in internet access - I was using ISDN (cheap here) and I was a bit of a rare case. Most people used dialup.
So what's really holding DSL back over there? I'd bet the reasons were more economic than engineering.
Just a thought,
Jim
I used to work at an old bookstore in Boston and sometimes had to take packages over to the post office between Boston Common and Chinatown.
One day I noticed a small plaque that mentioned that the telephone had been invented there. Made me sort of sad that all they did was put up a stupid plaque.
Cheers,
Jim
He does look a bit like an old-school Unix Hacker, what with the big Programmer Beard(TM) and all...
Just looking at him, I would guess he'd be pretty good at writing device drivers...
Cheers,
Jim
A guy named Peter Schickele (Have no idea of the real spelling. Ok, lemme go google... Wow - I got it right.) a music professor and composer has been 'deriving' compositions, 11 albums' worth, of the mythical son of JS Bach, PDQ Bach.
Funny stuff, yet very scholarly, in a weird way.
Anyway, he has a website at pdqbach.com.
His peices always have great names too, like Music for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion and The Short-Tempered Clavier and Other Dysfunctional Works for Keyboard. Worth a listen.
Cheers,
Jim
Actually, I always thought Jude Law looked a bit like Tintin in Gattaca... (Or was it Ethan Hawke? Whatever...)
Cheers,
Jim
I just got back in (Tues. morning here in Japan,) after having not seen a single one. (Worst combination of time, location, moon, clouds.)
:-(
Last year was amazing...
I stand corrected.
As I said, it was something I had heard and thought interesting. It made sense at the time, as I know that the Portugeuse were active here in the 1600's.
Thanks -
Jim
BTW, someone mentioned earlier that Kanji is spelled out using Katakana. This is wrong. All Kanji are spelled out using Hiragana, as becomes clear when taking a look at Furigana, which are simply Hiragana, and show the pronounciation of a character of Kanji.
Actually you could use either - a good rule to follow is that if you would put the word in italics, use katakana. It's used for foreign words, too, the same way you would italicize a foreign word in English. Once a foreign word has been in the language long enough, say 300 years, it becomes like a native word and you use hiragana, but even this is rare and somewhat debatable. I've heard that this is the case with the word for 'Thank You', 'Arigato', which is always spelled out in hiragana, even though it probably came from the Portugese word 'Obrigato' (spelling?).
Cheers,
Jim
The anecdote I related was almost 4 years ago when I was just beginning to learn to read Japanese - during a lesson that was pretty frustrating... I mentioned it because I found it to be true. You can pack a hell of a lot of meaning into a single kanji. (Ever wonder why browsing the web in Japanese on a cellphone can be a lot more tolerable than in english? It's because Kanji is about 5 times more efficient in conveying meaning.)
I've kept with the studying and I'm not bad at reading it now, to the point where I can extract a lot more meaning from a chunk of text with kanji than I could if the same text were written in romaji or kana, so, I may still be an asshole, but not for the reasons you mentioned...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
There's 1945 kanji known as Joyu (sp?) that are the bare minimum needed for literacy - those are the ones you learn through high school and the ones that they pretty much stick to in newspapers and official documents. Plus in Manga, of course, where they have a larger percentage of 'semi-literate' and younger readers. Believe it or not, Japanese literature actually does get a bit deeper than this - they have books and magazines that use lots of difficult characters that must be supported in the fonts and character sets.
After the initial 1945, there's another 18,000 or so that, while less common, are certainly not 'falling into disuse' - some percentage are only used for names and such nowadays, buy that pretty much makes them a requirement. After all, how do you sell someone a computer incapable of displaying his name or the name of a polititian? Sure, you could spell it out in katakana, but that's just lame.
It gets trickier, because there are several encodings in common usage, such as JIS, Shift-JIS and EUC, all which must be supported in any viable operating system. As far as I know, Unicode is a latecomer and not really an important player yet in Japan. It does show promise, though. Until then, systems will have to transparently guess which encoding to use. One of the first words you learn in Japanese when dealing with DBCS information systems is Mojibake - garbage rendering of text.
The good news is that Linux does a great job of handling all of the encoding issues. I use it daily for this stuff and it certainly surpasses anything I've seen on Windows, though IMHO, Mac is a bit slicker. (No surprise there.)
As an aside, I was once venting frustration to a friend while studying kanji - "When are the Japanese going to give up this crap and just use roman letters like the rest of the world??"
"Never!" she replied, "Because once you've learned kanji, it's too fscking convenient!"
If you're really interested in this stuff, do a Google for 'Jim Breen', the professor from Monash who is possibly the leading expert in the field - he's also a hell of a nice guy.
Yes, 24 hours, but at a rate of about 2 hours a year...
That's why this is not a threat to .Mac - people like you who can see the added value of using the paid service that Apple is offering.
(Not to mention using Apple's incredible bandwidth to store the 50MB quicktime movie of the kids...)
This is just a sort of neat hack for those of us who like this kind of stuff...
You can sync your PDA and Apple hardware just fine using iSync, you just can't store the synched info on a remote server, unless you hack one up as described in other posts.
Mirror Hotmail and Yahoo's login pages on a local server and collect passwords. Write 'creative' emails on their behalf to their friends and parents and (potential) employers.
Rewrite stock quotes on the fly...
Write a perl script that will rewrite outgoing POP emails
(s/Regards,/I love you,/g is an old favorite of mine...)
I figure if someone uses my network without asking for permission, I have the right to make them look like an idiot.
Cheers,
Jim
Show me a game that isn't basically about tapping buttons in some sequence...
In the arcades of Tokyo, This is the game that they stick out front, the one to draw people in. Whenever someone is half-decent at it, a crowd gathers around to admire their skill.
(Taiko is actually a big deal over here - most of the summer festivals prominently feature a taiko player or two, playing along to the {often pre-recorded} music while people dance.)
Inside the arcades, they have the games with the impressive 3D graphics and surround sound, yet this dumb taiko game is the one that gets people to come through the door...
But then again, playing Tetris is just like being a bricklayer, isn't it...
102.) If you don't like Mozilla, you have the option of uninstalling it.
Why would I want to have IE on a dedicated database server box?
Cheers,
Jim
I've never had a machine that I liked using as much.
The thing that makes a big difference for me is that the internationalization is seamless; right now, I'm converting a PHP app from English to Japanese. Using my iBook I can open the files from the Linux server using samba and easily convert the strings in the text editor that comes with Os X. If I have to do other editing to the code, I prefer vi, which comes standard. SSH is right there for me. My shell works the way I need it to, without installing Cygwin.
I have 4 computers on my desk - Redhat/Japanese Windows dualboot IBM Thinkpad, 2 NT Workstations (Eng. & Jp.) and my iBook. I could use any of them that I wanted, but the iBook is what works best for me. (The RedHat box comes close, but I've tweaked the hell out of it to get it just right - it would take weeks to set up another box the same way, whereas I could pick up another iBook and replace this one instantly.)
The suite of "iApps" (iCal, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iEtc...) are a joy to use, better than anything you can get for Windows. Really. Mail filters out spam perfectly for me out of the box. Viruses? Not even an issue.
Plus, every app looks great. I stare at the computer all day at work, it might as well look good. Let's face it, Windows is tired-looking, even XP, which to me looks cartoonish and pathetic.
As for games, I wouldn't know - I haven't got time for them.
After a while, you get to the point where you'll be happy to pay a bit more for a machine that actually works.
Oh, yeah, BATTERY LIFE. Sweet.
Cheers,
Jim
> What if we're all part of some gigantic computer and the molecules we put to work computing were already computing something ?
I tend to think that we're more likely the mung that's collected inside God's keyboard...
"News Flash! Hubble Telescope Detects Giant Fingernail Clipping and Cluster of Muffin Crumbs"
Cheers,
Jim
I tried to use a 'regular pen' the other day to outline something in a meeting -
It had been so long since I had 'written' that I felt like I was using my left hand instead.
Even then, I kept using the Grafitti letter forms that I use to input text into my PalmPilot thingie.
"The" looked more like "7h3". When my boss asked me to xerox my notes for him, I just typed them up and emailed them instead.
My handwriting was never any good, but it's certainly gotten much worse lately...
Cheers,
Jim
...Don't want to get sued by these clowns...
I just searched for MMDC (my own site) on SearchKing and the results seemed to be lifted directly from Google:
:: Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas ... ...
:: Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas ... ...
Google's index of my site:
MMDC Tokyo
Aug 29, 2002 - 11:43 PM, MMDC Tokyo, Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams, Main Menu.
mmdc.net/ - 47k - Cached - Similar pages
SearchKing's:
MMDC Tokyo
Aug 29, 2002 - 11:43 PM, MMDC Tokyo, Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams, Main Menu.
What are the odds that they both crawled my site at exactly the same minute on the same day?
These clowns are pathetic.
Cheers,
Jim
If they do it as a browser cookie or something as lame -
Without a password - better a pass*phrase*, it's going to be nearly useless.
But then again, people see passwords as being hard to remember, so they make them weak or non-existant. Bad password management is the weakest link in almost any security scheme. At the very least, it will be an interesting exercise to see how they try it and how well or badly it all works.
Of course, there's always boimetrics, which is a vile concept.
(Maybe canada could buy up surplus Cue::Cats and issue citizens a tattoo with a barcode?)
Cheers,
Jim
With pgp/gpg and keyservers like pgp.mit.edu, it's painfully simple to create and revoke keys that you control - as long as Canada picks a similar system, the citizens are still in control. If you feel your key has been compromised, revoke it and go create a new one next time you go to the post office or city hall, or however they verify people...
I've *never* felt that having a digital ID was a threat to my privacy - if I control the keys, I can use the ID when I feel like proving who I am.
Nothing stops me from generating a new ket for some other purpose either - I usually create one for each job/work-email that I use. I've had my private one since '96 or so - you can go grab it from my slashdot profile.
Cheers,
Jim