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:
- Why does the U.N. enroll 15 year old girls in the army?
- Why do they allow loose objects to lie around in a fighter
unit during combat?
- 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:
- The grid on the board;
- The stones on the board and their exact positions on the
grid;
- The color of the stones;
- The size of the board (19×19, 13×13, 9×9);
- Any markings on stones;
- Number/letter markings on stones;
- Number/letter markings anywhere on the board;
- 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.
