Japanese writing system/japanese

Posted on 2003-12-30 by ivo :: /japanese :: link

The following excerpt is from the article Outline of Japanese Writing System, an otherwise very worthy read:

In English, the relationship between the above words is somewhat obscured by the fact that the concept of water is expressed in three different written forms, i.e., hydr, aqua, and water. In Japanese, on the other hand, although 水 has different phonetic forms, i.e., an on reading of sui and a kun reading of mizu, it has only one form, i.e., 水. The kanji thus provides a visual link that transcends the different pronunciations. This ability of kanji to represent a given meaning with little or no dependence on their pronunciations is perhaps one the most distinctive features of the Japanese script.

While this may be true, I still find it hard to guess the exact meaning a certain japanese word has. This is confirmed by a following paragraph:

Generally, the more common a character is, the more numerous are its meanings and the more complex is the relationship between them. An extreme example is 上 jō 'up; go up'. This dictionary lists a total of 114 meanings for 上, subdivided into 16 subentries. It has 27 meanings as an on word element, 3 meanings as an independent on word, 17 meanings for 5 kun word elements and 67 meanings for 9 independent kun words. Although 上 is a very long entry and is hardly typical, many characters do have more than ten on and kun meanings combined.

So how can you be sure which meaning you are supposed to give to a character in a random word? I'm sure it gets easier to guess right when the character you're looking at is less used, but for a beginner such as myself, it's not a great advantage of kanji. This so-called advantage of using kanji is greatly overrated.

Fortunately it's not exactly a burden either, like how you don't have to know all the Latin or Greek roots to understand English. You just look up these unknown words in a dictionary. But saying that it's easier to guess the meaning of a Japanese word if you know the meaning of several basic kanji is like saying that you can guess the meaning of an English word if you know French.

One thing that does make kanji useful is that the Japanese language has lots and lots of homophones. This is caused by the import of a huge amount of Chinese words, totally ignoring the tone accent and subtle distinctions in the pronunciation. Using kanji in written text makes it very easy to discern between homophones, because they are usually written with different kanji for different meanings.

Studying Fuseki/go

Posted on 2003-12-29 by ivo :: /go :: link

Now that I'm a little further in mastering the game, I can see where my weaknesses lie and what I should do or which books I should read to get more skilled. Right now I think that my greatest weakness lies in the opening, the 布石. So I went to the store and bought a few books about it. Reading these books makes me aware that yes – I needed it.

There are lots of areas that I need to master, but the fuseki was the most urgent. I think the next field of interest should be the endgame, but I'm not sure yet. Reading these books on the fuseki pushed me up quite a bit, and I haven't even finished yet…

But even when studying these exotic games the books give me, I still feel that I'm picking up on the principles that lie behind them, even though I'm not always sure about what it is.

It is the experience of suddenly seeing yourself play a new type of move, because you saw the principle behind it explained somewhere, that makes you feel good. It doesn't even matter if you lost or won the game as long as you can see you've learned something.

Waarom Amerika gehaat wordt/politics

Posted on 2003-12-27 by ivo :: /politics :: link

Iemand wees me op dit artikel in het tijdschrift Onze Wereld.

Design Patterns in Python/programming

Posted on 2003-12-18 by ivo :: /programming :: link

While searching for an algorithm to sort a graph topologically, I found an online version of the book Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python. This should be mandatory reading for anyone wishing to do something a little bit more complicated in python. (By the way, the website has implementations in Java, C++ and C# as well.)

The author was nice enough to include a link to a fully working python package, in which the classes from the book have been completed and extended to a very nice and easy to use library. Unfortunately it's unusable in any project, because it has no license. There's a copyright notice in the package, and a little notice about the copyright on the texts on his website, but no license.

I have mailed the author, asking for an explanation. Let's see if he answers, and what he has to say…

Learning Japanese/japanese

Posted on 2003-12-15 by ivo :: /japanese :: link

Someone passed me this link about the Japanese language.

Japanese Teacher: Good morning, Harry.

Harry: Good Morning.

Japanese Classmates: (gasps of horror and shock)

「ほしのこえ」/movies

Posted on 2003-12-14 by ivo :: /movies :: link

「私は、ここにいるよ」

「ほしのこえ」, also known as Voices of a distant star, is the product of Makoto Shinkai. It is a short anime movie that tells the tale of a young couple that is torn apart when Mikako enrolls in a UN mission to Pluto and ends up on Agharta, a planet of Sirius.

Even in this short film, Makoto Shinkai manages to depict the characters as well formed, complete personalities. The way the Mikako stays connected with Noboru by sending messages to him is touching.

I highly recommend this anime to anyone. I watched the fansub by Shinsen Subs, and I'm currently waiting for Amazon to deliver the DVD to me.

Random thoughts:

1. Why does the U.N. enroll 15 year old girls in the army?
2. Why do they allow loose objects to lie around in a fighter unit during combat?
3. Why does it take 8 years for an email to reach earth, but only a few moments for a spaceship to go to Sirius? Surely they must have found out a way of accelerating the email if they can transport four entire spaceships over that distance… They do give a hint on this one: We haven't yet found a way back to Earth yet. But why they chose to go to Sirius instead is beyond me.

Kifu recognition (part 2)/go

Posted on 2003-12-08 by ivo :: /go :: link

Well, the first steps have been made, I can now find lines in an image. Below you will find an example of what sort of result this yields. Unfortunately this is only the easiest part of step 1, recognizing the grid on the goban… :(

Here are some of the intermediate steps that were necessary to get this image. I put another example here.

Kifu recognition/go

Posted on 2003-12-06 by ivo :: /go :: link

For a while now I've been thinking about writing a program that can take an image of a go board and translates that to a kifu in SGF. I know this has been done before, but as far as I could see, there isn't really a readily-available program to do this, let alone any free software.

So I'm accepting the challenge. Here's a simple list of a few of the things this program has to be able to recognize, roughly in increasing difficulty:

1. The grid on the board;
2. The stones on the board and their exact positions on the grid;
3. The color of the stones;
4. The size of the board (19×19, 13×13, 9×9);
5. Any markings on stones;
6. Number/letter markings on stones;
7. Number/letter markings anywhere on the board;
8. The position in a photograph of an actual game, where stones may not be placed exactly on the points in the grid.

Starting with generated images and scans of images in books, I will be working my way down this list. I'm now trying to get a simple program that does nothing more than recognizing lines on the board, and define where the grid must be.

Colonialization by the U.S./politics

Posted on 2003-12-05 by ivo :: /politics :: link

“People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs! People of the world, be courageous, and dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.”

Mao Ze Dung, "Statement Supporting the People of the Congo (L.) Against U.S. Aggression" (November 28, 1964)

Even back then it was the U.S. who was seen as the world's aggressor, and indeed I feel like I'm living in a country that has been colonialized by the U.S. mindset. All too often people, influential people, stare at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and try to copy american ideas, while they are completely out of context, irrelevant and sometimes plain wrong.

A good example of this, and a source of quite a bit of frustration, is the way the Delft University of Technology tries to be the MIT aan de Schie, and tried to copy a considerable amount of nonsensical concepts; they may make sense when applied to an american university, but here they don't, at least not in the way people seem to want to apply them.

The prime minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende, is sometimes seen as not having a clear vision, and as someone who blindly follows other political leaders. I would say that this t-shirt should be created for us living in the Nederlands. (And some italian I met was wearing a similar t-shirt about Berlusconi.)

Making fun of world leaders/politics

Posted on 2003-12-04 by ivo :: /politics :: link

(This is still just a lot of loose ends, I'm going to write followup articles to address some items in this article. Trying to write down all these thoughts is part of the process of understanding it, so the articles this section will probably remain chaotic for a while.)

Try doing a Google search on miserable failure. The first item you will see in the search results is the official biography of the American president George Bush. This is the result of a meme that's apparently been going on for a while; see this and this weblog entry. The key is to get as many sites as possible to include the following piece of text (note that I'm contributing to this meme by quoting it here):

“From this day forth, I will refer to George W. Bush as a Miserable Failure at least once a day. Why, you ask? Well, someone came up with this great idea to link George W. Bush and Miserable Failure in popular search engines. If you have a blog or web site, help raise the link between George W. Bush and the phrase ‘miserable failure’ by copying this link and placing somewhere on your site or blog.”

Thank you very much for your participation.

Satires and parodies on Bush, his behavior, his words, his administration, and more have been published ever since he got into the public eye, as documentaries, jokes in popular television shows, websites, cartoons, blog entries such as the one above. Even books are published which make fun of him. To me it seems like the amount of these satires have been increasing over the past two years, actually, ever since that tuesday in september 2001.

Lots of websites have arosen during the term of his presidency, trying to explain to the public how bad his administration is performing, how much the so called war on terrorism has cost the U.S. and other countries (a lot), and what is actually being accomplished in it (not much good).

I won't say that Bush is to blame for all bad things that are happening, but he's the most visible in the media. It's certainly not the first american president to be considered incapable; have a look at an old airings of shows like Saturday Night Live, you'll see jokes about how the president can't spell, that he's an idiot, and so on. Besides, the U.S. isn't the only country with an idiot for president. Idiots have been running this world for a very, very long time.

Plato's cave

There is a duality in the role of the news media. On one side they are capable of showing the masses what is going wrong in the world, on the other side they are obeying the official stream of information in everyday news broadcasts.

The first kind of news requires a lot of research, most information will be kept secret. This is usually done in background articles, documentaries, movies. It requires effort to get to this information, and only sometimes published as a truthful, well-formed, readily accessible piece.

The second kind of news is what big news corporations do all day round, they buy eachother's news items, mingle that into a low-level broadcast and fire it off into the masses, hoping that enough people will read/see/hear their version of the story.

This second kind of news is what causes people to be too much focused on what the media are telling them. It's like Plato's cave, we can't go out of the cave to see what the outside world really looks like, instead they are kept inside and have to rely on the information the media are giving them. The reality is too hard for us to grasp, too overwhelmingly wrong, too real. And only every once in a while some background or in-depth research is provided, but most people only seem to be interested in what's happening now, not what was happening twenty years ago.

With the uprising of the internet, where critical people from all over the world can comment on the world's major (and minor) events, this is slowly changing, with alternative news feeds such as Indymedia, Alternet gaining in popularity.

This numbness of the general public is also caused by (or maybe is causing) companies to put ever more effort in trying to sell products to the public, using increasing noisy, flash, brightly colored, annoying advertisements. The summit of all this must be the infomercial...

In the movie Blade Runner, Ridley Scott portraits a world full of commercials and advertisements. The big mass have grown so accustomed to this constant stream of big screaming bright colors they don't even notice.

Some people even seem to have forgotten there even is an outside world, and that it is indeed possible to go outside the cave they're in.

Revolution

All we can hope for now is some kind of revolution. The first step is to take anything you hear with a grain of salt. Distrust conventional mass media news broadcasts such as those on CNN. Go and look on the internet for alternate resources, IndyMedia may be a good place to start.

“There is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction.”

Mao Ze Dung, "Circular of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party", May 16, 1966

Let the destruction begin.

Why you should be using zsh/

Posted on 2003-12-02 by ivo :: / :: link

Initially I wanted to write an entry about some of the basic features that makes zsh the most powerful shell for everyday use, that everybody should be using. However, there already is such a document: An Introduction to the Z shell. So I'll point to that instead :)

This document doesn't really point out the differences between zsh and bash, or why zsh is better than any of the other shells out there. The Zsh workshop by Larry Schrof contains some more information, but may be too much in-depth; or maybe just read the Why zsh? sheet. There's also a little bit of information in the zsh FAQ about similarities with tcsh and bash. Maybe I'll write a document about the differences in the future.

Released python-gnutls 0.2/programming/python-gnutls

Posted on 2003-12-01 by ivo :: /programming/python-gnutls :: link

I have just released version 0.2 of my python wrapper for gnutls. The project homepage for python-gnutls is http://home.o2w.net/~ivo/python-gnutls/. The released files are here.

The changes since version 0.1 include:

• New classs 'server' and 'conn' have been added. The classes 'client' and 'server' are derived from 'conn', and most methods from 'client' have been moved to 'conn'.
• A method handshake() has been added. The handshake is no longer done implicitly in the gnutls.client constructor.
• New methods:
  • Class conn: cipher_get, cipher_set_priority, compression_get, compression_set_priority, kx_get, kx_set_priority, mac_get, mac_set_priority
  • Class server: generate_dh_params
• New constants defining various gnutls functions. They are named exactly like their counterparts in gnutls/gnutls.h, but without the GNUTLS_ prefix.

Reporting bugs in software/programming

Posted on 2003-11-29 by ivo :: /programming :: link

For free software to work, it is essential that people report any bugs they may find to the authors. When the feedback is accurate and correct enough, they can then fix their software.

However, when you've finally tracked down a bug in a software package, it's sometimes a lot of very frustrating work to find out what exactly is causing the software to break. This is essential information to the programmers, without this they usually wouldn't know where to start looking for the cause of this problem (there are exceptions of course).

As a Debian developer, I know that having incomplete information in a report for a bug that doesn't manifest itself on my system can be extremely frustrating and annoying. Asking the user for more information can help, maybe he needs to be guided a little, for example by providing a way to get a gdb backtrace.

Here's the tale of my latest adventure in this area, as a user. About two weeks ago, a CGI script written in Perl was failing mysteriously on a production server. I had checked everything, even changed the locale the script was running in. The code was pretty simple:

if ($value =~ /^$allowed$/m) {

$allowed is .*, and $value contained some UTF-8 text, with an ä in it. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it wouldn't work. The match statement would always be false. After hours of debugging, it turned out that when $allowed was compared to .*, it wasn't equal. We could set it to .*, in which case the expression was true. (Using $allowed = join('', split('', $allowed)) didn't help either, but maybe perl optimized that a bit.)

So, we looked at the perl bugs. The system I was developing this on was running Debian stable (woody), which has perl 5.6. So you have to look at bugs in perl 5.6. Or Debian bugs for the stable release. The bug under examination may or may not have been fixed already, either in new releases, CVS code, Debian patches, mailing list posts, or somewhere else entirely.

On the other hand, the bug might not even be in perl. The value of $allowed is passed on via a complicated structure of hashrefs and arrays from a parsed XML file, using XML::Simple. So maybe that module is at fault. XML::Simple gets its data from expat, so it might even be expat.

All these little bits of information make it pretty hard to find out if a bug has been fixed or not. I have been trying to see if the bug exists in more recent versions of perl, but so far I haven't been able to reproduce the situation well enough. For one thing, I would have to setup a system that is exactly the same as the production platform, which may take up quite a bit of time. And of course, time is money.

So, what do you do, report the bug or not, knowing that the information you have is incomplete, probably inconsistent and maybe even incorrect; knowing that the developers may ignore or flame you for your report?

I didn't. Hacking around the problem by replacing ä with ä was much easier.

Musings on a cold saturday in autumn…/

Posted on 2003-11-22 by ivo :: / :: link

人
形

Python wrapper for gnutls/programming/python-gnutls

Posted on 2003-11-05 by ivo :: /programming/python-gnutls :: link

I've re-started on my little project to create a simple python wrapper for the GNU TLS library (gnutls). The code is available from CVS only for now. I'll create a more permanent website for it in the wiki, under PythonGnutls.

This time I'm not using SWIG, mostly because I couldn't find out how to create a custom class, without resorting to C++; and I wanted to understand better what SWIG is trying to do for me. Maybe I'll switch back at some time in the future, when the first issue is solved.

Hacker logo/site

Posted on 2003-11-04 by ivo :: /site :: link

You may have noticed I added the "Hacker logo" to the bottom right of this page somewhere last week. Of course I first read about it when it appeared on slashdot. The reactions there were mostly negative, with arguments such as:

• Hackers don't need a logo;
• It will be abused by crackers and other dubious figures;
• The media will use it for anything related with computers, and bedazzle its meaning;
• Why does Eric Raymond want his statue carved in the face of the moon;
• Why did he have to chose a glider that moves down?

Personally, I like the idea of having a logo. Like it says in the FAQ, having the logo on your website doesn't make you a hacker; that is a title you have to earn. Instead I want to show my sympathies to the hacker culture, show anyone that I share visions.

I agree somewhat with the sentiments that "a gun crazed wack job that would scare most moms out of the day care center". Like Richard Stallman once said at an edition of FOSDEM, It doesn't help your case for free software if you mingle your views with political statements. People will close their minds for your arguments for free software if you also make statements that they disagree with, even if they are in a different field.

But even so, Eric has done a lot of good work for the open source/free software world in general. I have never met him in person, I wouldn't know if he deserves any of the criticism he gets. In any case, it would be unfair to refuse to use the hacker logo solely because you disagree with Eric.

The idea to take a glider for the logo is brilliant, of course. It's simple, and could be represented in ASCII very well. I don't care much that Eric chose the one that goes down, any variant would do. Plus I think this one looks good :) I've just become interested in finite state machines and cellular automata.

I don't fear much for usage of the logo by people who aren't hackers in the original meaning; "we'll find some way to shame and reject you publicly if you mess with ours."

And the media, well… that's just a matter of consequently using the image as a link to Eric's explanation page. People will pick up its real meaning, and if they don't they should be politely corrected. I hope the real hackers among us are civilized enough to keep their anger down if anyone uses it in the wrong way.

Dutch programming contest/programming

Posted on 2003-10-27 by ivo :: /programming :: link

Last weekend, I participated in the Dutch rounds of the InterCollegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Since we ended on the highest place of all teams from Delft, we can continue to the Northwest European finals (NWERC), in Lund, Sweden. The final score list lists our team (ECFh) on the sixth place, but Quintiq and ASML are companies, so they don't count on the score list for students.

While this is good news in general, it is weird. Instead of sending the top-10 teams to the NWERC, the top-x teams from each university are admitted. I'm not fully familiar with the rules and regulations of the admission policy, but this strategy seems flawed.

The problem set was horrible. The problems were written very badly, with clear errors and very vague wording. The examples weren't really supporting the text, and sometimes a restriction was only given in the explanation for the example input/output.

I realize it's not easy to write a clear, challenging problem set, that still leaves enough pitfalls to make it interesting. But please, don't clutter the goal of these contests with weird requirements. For example, there was a problem in which the input was given in Roman numerals. The problem was hard enough to do in decimal numbers, the Roman numerals just make it harder to verify input and output. I don't think that this added value to that particular problem.

Dogville/movies

Posted on 2003-10-24 by ivo :: /movies :: link

Dogville, by Lars von Trier is an interesting movie. It is divided in nine acts and one prologue, each introduced with a title screen that shows what will happen in that act.

The main thing about this movie that critics seem to be pointing out continuously is that the entire movie is shot on a set with virtually no attributes, except a few desks, beds and cars. I didn't think it was irritating at all. In fact, it seemed to put emphasis on the fact that Grace is a newcomer, she can't see through these walls. The people from Dogville appear to be able to do so, even though this is not stressed very much.

The entire movie has the feel of a classic movie from the 1920s, but it is much more vivid, events happen much faster. Despite this, the movie is still almost three hours long. It was able to keep my attention throughout all of it.

The scenes are sometimes accompanied by a male voice over, outlining some of the things that can't be seen. The events displayed in the second half of the movie are pretty gruesome, but the narrator keeps the same, slightly cynic tone throughout it all.

The role of Tom Edison isn't entirely clear. I don't know if his actions were inspired by a cunning plan meant to abuse Grace in all her vulnerability, or if he acted out of an ignorant naivety, with nothing but the best intentions that just didn't work out as well as he had hoped. I'm not sure if Grace saw Tom's real intentions either. The ending seemed to suggest she did, which would also mean that Tom was acting out of cruelty more than ignorance.

The end is surprising, to say the least. Von Trier appears to want to say that anything that happens in or comes out of America is bad. But if you assume that people really are the same everywhere, he appears to be disapproving of human nature. During the movie, I was constantly thinking about which way it would end. I thought of a lot of possible endings, including the one Von Trier chose. But when it was over, I was left insatisfied, feeling that the end wasn't appropriate somehow. On the other hand, I don't think that any of the other endings I thought of would have been better.

I still feel dissatisfied with it, partially because Von Trier leaves some things implicit, and I am sure that everybody who goes to see this movie has his or her own interpretation of what is happening, what Von Trier tried to tell and whether it applied to all of us, or just America and its inhabitants.

Machinae Supremacy: Attack music/quotes

Posted on 2003-10-23 by ivo :: /quotes :: link

What we learn is never free / we walk with evil
But in bliss we tend to be / so forgetful

You won't see it crawling back / just out of nowhere
And finally when they attack / they've always been here

Commonly confused characters/programming

Posted on 2003-10-22 by ivo :: /programming :: link

When looking for the html entity for an ellipsis (…), I came across this page. It shows the difference between the different apostrophes, double quotes, dashes and spaces. For each different character, the author lists how to create the character in UTF-8, HTML, LaTeX.

The page is a good read, even if you already know the difference.

Why sed rules/programming

Posted on 2003-10-22 by ivo :: /programming :: link

Or: why you should use perl when you notice that your sed expression is becoming far too complicated.

sed -e 's/^\([0-9]\+\);--;\([0-9]\+\);\([0-9]\+\);;\([0-9]\+\);--;\([0-9
]\+\);\([0-9]\+\);;\([0-9]\+\);--;\([0-9]\+\);\([0-9]\+\);;/pa=\1-\2\&za
=\3\&pb=\4-\5\&zb=\6\&pc=\7-\8\&zc=\9;/g' -e 's/zc=\([0-9]\+\);\([0-9]*\
);-\?-\?;\([0-9]*\);\([0-9]*\)/zc=\1\&pd=\2-\3\&zd=\4/g' | sed -e '=' |
sed -e 's/^/+/;N;s/^+\([0-9]\+\)\n/\1 /' | sed -e 's/^\([0-9]\+\) pa=\([
0-9]\+-[0-9]\+\)&za=\([0-9]\+\)&pb=\([0-9]\+-[0-9]\+\)&zb=\([0-9]\+\)&pc
=\([0-9]\+-[0-9]\+\)&zc=\([0-9]\+\)&pd=\([0-9]*-[0-9]*\)&zd=\([0-9]*\)$/
pa\1=\2\&za\1=\3\&pb\1=\4\&zb\1=\5\&pc\1=\6\&zc\1=\7\&pd\1=\8\&zd\1=\9/g
' | tr '&' '\n'

The first thing I ran into is that sed only handles nine backreferences. I should have switched then, but I was stubborn and managed to do it anyway using the trick of running sed twice on the same line.

I should have switched to perl or python or whatever else, but I almost had it working... until line numbers had to be added. I found an example in the info page, using the = and N commands. It worked, but since they had to be inserted in each line in the output, another nasty regular expression emerged.

It worked, and luckily the input wasn't too big, but I really should have done this in perl right from the start, like I usually do…

Japanese Calligraphy/japanese/calligraphy

Posted on 2003-10-22 by ivo :: /japanese/calligraphy :: link

I have recently become interested in Japanese calligraphy. I have even bought my own brush, 筆 (fude). http://www.takase.com/ has a few good examples of what I hope to achieve eventually :)

http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2095.html seems to be aimed mostly at selling books, but it has a few words on the basic terminology.

A site which has some good examples of Chinese calligraphy from the past: http://www.chinapage.com/callig1.html.