Archive for July, 2003

Date: July 7th, 2003
Cate: Chinese Word of the Day

球

球 – Qiu2 – Ball

In my class, we’re supposed to take an existing Java program, and improve it, using Design Patterns. It looks like I’ll be doing that with Ball Universe! How about that!

Walde had a great idea: Take the current Ball Universe, SABOTAGE it, and show it to the professor. Then simply turn in the current one as the “improved” one. Walde’s pretty smart sometimes. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks.

Maybe next semester I can take a course in XML or something and turn in Feed on Feeds as my final project.

Date: July 7th, 2003
Cate: Regular
1 msg

Monkey Mummy

Date: July 7th, 2003
Cate: Chinese Word of the Day

長

長 – Chang2 – Long

長頸鹿 – Chang2 Jing3 Lu1 – Long Neck Deer — Giraffe

Click on the giraffe for more pictures.

Also 長城 – Chang2 Cheng2 – Long City Wall — Great Wall of China

Date: July 6th, 2003
Cate: Chinese Word of the Day

短

短 – Duan3 – Short

Racquetball is 短柄牆球 – Duan3 Bing3 Qiang2 Qiu2 – Short Handle Wall Ball. You might think that Squash would be Long Handle Wall Ball, but you’d be wrong, as usual. Actually it’s 壁球 – Bi4 Qiu2 – Wall Ball. 牆 and 壁 both mean wall. As far as I can tell, Long Handle Wall Ball isn’t anything.

I’m getting these sports names from this page at the “Chinese Taipei” Olympic Committee site. Taiwan isn’t allowed to call their team Taiwan, because Taiwan doesn’t exist, right? So they have to call themselves “Chinese Taipei”. They also aren’t allowed to use their flag or national anthem at the games. In Chinese it’s even worse, that page just says it is the “Chinese Olympic Committee”, but with a word for “Chinese” that means “Chinese people”, (中華 – Zhong1 Hua2) not “Chinese country” (中國 – Zhong1 Guo2).

I wonder if the Olympics come to New York in 2012, with so many people from Taiwan living there, will they try to bring some attention to this issue? And that would be four years after Beijing in 2008.

HA! You want more ridiculous politics? Check this out: SHOULD THE 2008 OLYMPIC TORCH PASS THROUGH TAIWAN? Would that be admitting Taiwan is part of China?

Date: July 5th, 2003
Cate: Chinese Word of the Day
2 msgs

藥

藥 – Yao4 – Drug, Medicine

Strangely gunpowder is 火藥 – Huo3 Yao4 – Fire Medicine. We saw quite a bit of it used up today.

Date: July 4th, 2003
Cate: Regular
2 msgs

And here’s your perfect July 4th post

We already knew that the US military is holding hundreds of prisoners in some sort of weasel-worded legal limbo at Camp X-Ray or Camp Delta or whatever they’re calling it now. We already knew that they’re setting up a fake legal system there, complete with military judges, military prosecutors, and military-appointed defense lawyers. Of course, the accused will also have full access to independent lawyers, as long as they can pay for them themselves. Oh, and the independent lawyers will not be able to see any classified information, which includes all the evidence. We even already knew that work has started on execution chambers there. I guess the military is feeling pretty confident that they’ll be “winning” (whatever that means) lots of cases.

What is new (at least to me) in this article is this: (emphasis mine)

The Pentagon officials also raised the possibility that the military might continue to hold the suspects even if they are acquitted by a tribunal. The prisoners’ status as “unlawful combatants” in the war against terrorism is separate from their guilt or innocence on charges brought before a tribunal, a military official involved in the tribunal process said.

(via dangerousmeta!)

Date: July 4th, 2003
Cate: Chinese Word of the Day

獨

獨 – Du2 – Alone, Single, Independent

獨立紀念日 – Du2 Li4 Ji4 Nian4 Ri4 – Independent Stand Commemoration Day

Date: July 4th, 2003
Cate: Geekism

And in the darkness AGGREGATE THEM

This post made me curious about what aggregators people are using to download feeds from my own site. So I ran a report on the last 30 days worth of logs. By the way, Unix completely 100% rules. To get this report, all I had to say was:

zcat logs/access_log.*.gz | grep '/steve/weblog/b2rdf.php' | cut -f1,12- -d\ | sort -u | cut -f 2- -d\ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

So lets have a look at the raw output:

This report is hard to interpret, actually. NetNewsWire came out with about 300 unique IP’s, but since that is a desktop aggregator, and lots of people have dynamic addresses, that number is probably inflated. Sharpreader is next with about 80. FoF shows 48 unique IPs. Pretty good! I didn’t think there were that many FoF installations in the universe! The rest of the top 5 are Syndirella with ~20, and Radio Userland with ~10.

Date: July 3rd, 2003
Cate: Geekism

FoF – Now with Necho™!

Well – that is if you use iBLOGthere4iM’s Necho to RSS converter.

Date: July 3rd, 2003
Cate: Regular
1 msg

JAPANESE SPEAKING MACHINE

Learn proper Japanese pronunciation, and Katakana at the same time!

Date: July 2nd, 2003
Cate: Geekism

Necho

THE LONG AWAITED OFFICIAL MESSY-78 POSITION STATEMENT ON NECHO, FUNKINESS, RSS, AND WHATEVER ELSE IS GOING ON:

I support it. (But am nervous about the fact that it’s not compatible with existing aggregators.)

Of course I also still support RSS, and will as long as there are subscribers.

Date: July 1st, 2003
Cate: Geekism

J. Random Web Developer at Amazon.com’s weblog

Ted’s Blog

Here it is. The first installment of Ted’s Life At Amazon.com.

What? Well, it’s either a peek inside my mind, a chance for me to blow my own horn, or an effort to get you to join us at Amazon. Who am I? I’m a web developer. In Amazon terms, that means I spend the majority of my day working with perl to produce interactions. It’s more than HTML- a lot of the logic is built into these top few layers.

In fact, I think the general trend is for more decisions to be made by webdevs. This lets the SDEs (software engineers) work on other, bigger things, like database/application service, getting more applications released, and the like. As a webdev, I love having more data available- it’s one less person that needs to be involved in the release of a project, whether it’s a large project or a quick tweak to a page.

I wonder how long this will keep going? The tone of “Ted”’s writing is not 100% human, but it’s still interesting to me for the technical details. So far I learned that they use Perl and Mason.

Date: July 1st, 2003
Cate: Geekism

GNU libidn

RE: International Domain Names

Looks like 中文.com would be xn--fiq228c.com — which is still unregistered!

You can use GNU libidn to encode your own domain names at this page. There’s also Perl modules for this, but I can’t get them to work.

Date: July 1st, 2003
Cate: Geekism

International Domain Names – new in Mozilla 1.4 / Netscape 7.1

What this means is that instead of zhongwen.com soon you’ll be able to type 中文.com into your location bar and have it actually work! (assuming zhongwen.com has also registered xn--ksadhfoiahs.com, or whatever 中文 encodes to.)

This document at Netscape.com explains it all, with links to relevant RFCs.

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