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Writing a shoutbox

Thursday 22nd of July 2010, 09:55:58 pm

Because I'm migrating some of the functionality of nihongoresources to a new domain, dictionaries.nihongoresources.com I figured this was a good opportunity to let people voice their opinion in a less barrier, more direct way. Shoutbox style. [...]

I, for one, welcome our North Korean traffic wardens

Wednesday 7th of July 2010, 07:51:03 pm

Futuristic deployment methods are futuristics.

Thinking of buying Ziro?

Monday 21st of June 2010, 10:44:18 am

If you're thinking of buying Ziro, the puzzle game, you may want to wait to see if the developers ever write a fix for the terrible mouse lag that the game suffers from. A game this simple (think iPhone app game) should not, and frankly speaking cannot, come with mouse lag. Yet it does. Terrible mouse lag. This makes the game utterly unplayable. Save your $5 or so for now. It really isn't worth the hatred you'll be spewing at your screen.

A simple website link mapper

Friday 14th of May 2010, 02:31:16 pm

Ever had the problem where you needed to do a forward and backlink analysis of a website? Sure, for a simple homepage it's pretty easy, and some blog software will let you do it, and if you like google analytics (why do you like google analytics?) that will conceivably be able to help you do it too, but sometimes you're like me, and you just want a tool to do the job for you. You're thinking of using wget, but it doesn't actually do link mapping, just recursive webmirroring, so what are you to do... [...]

Internationally Published Author

Wednesday 21st of April 2010, 01:33:42 am

At long last, my book "An introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar %26 Language" is properly published and available for purchasing. I will be selling autographed copies via http://www.sjgrpublishing.com and regular copies are available through amazon US, Canada, UK and Germany (since there's no amazon.eu) although that said, the German site seems to sell it at a price 100% higher than they should. [...]

Computing bezier curve bounding boxes

Tuesday 20th of April 2010, 05:04:04 am

Have you ever needed to compute the bounding box for a vector shape? You may have run into the problem that computing bounding boxes for lines is really easy, and that computing bounding boxes for arbitrary curves is, in fact, not. Not to worry! If you don't mind getting your brain dirty, I suffered this problem so that you don't have to. Compute the bounding box for Bezier curves in the knowledge that math is on your side!

Let's talk about democracy

Friday 26th of March 2010, 02:26:12 pm

For the first time in quite a while, I've written a new article on my live journal. This time on the concept of democracy, and how what the US has just pulled off is nothing even close to a democratic process. Feel free to peruse it.

Photoshop CS4 without all the rest

Sunday 3rd of January 2010, 10:28:45 am

I had to redo my computer setup, as I literally fried my system disk (ever seen an HD short circuit? There's a lot of smoke...) and that meant reinstalling Photoshop CS4. This time round I wanted to make sure I only installed what I needed, without all the crap Adobe's installer forces on you, so in the hopes that Adobe doesn't delete the post, instructions on how are here. [...]

Do you use dokuwiki?

Thursday 20th of August 2009, 02:46:27 am

If you do, then perhaps this plugin that I wrote will be of use to you; it lets you use standard tab delimited tables in your wiki, turning it into proper tables when you view the page in a browser. [...]

Playing games in windowed mode

Saturday 6th of June 2009, 08:39:26 am

First off, if you play Maple Story, go away. [...]

A better layout manager

Thursday 14th of May 2009, 06:00:34 am

Layout management in Java gives me lots of headaches. Especially since I'm writing a custom text annotation tool and there do not seem to be any layout managers that are designed to do what you expect for text-like objects: format as lines and paragraphs. [...]

Unicode strings in java

Sunday 3rd of May 2009, 07:54:12 am

I got fed up with Java's inability to properly handle unicode strings due to it relying on a 16 bit "char" primitive. Unicode (at the time of writing) basically covers a space that requires 4 bytes, and char is only 2 bytes 'wide', so it just ... doesn't work. Strings report the wrong length, substring selection can chop up unicode glyphs mid-byte-sequence, it's a mess. [...]

A walk through the garden

Saturday 18th of April 2009, 05:42:15 am

With the weather being pleasant, I decided to take a stroll through my parents' garden and take a few pictures. The result is actually fairly enjoyable so I figured I'd set up a set for it, starting at this photograph.

Need SQLite 2.8.17?

Friday 10th of April 2009, 04:52:49 am

Need SQLite 2.8.17 but can't find it on sqlite.org? Then fret not, because it's still there, just not linked from the download page. [...]

I hate Opera

Thursday 9th of April 2009, 03:52:16 am

The browser, mind, not the artistic music and singing. [...]

Formatting plain text in html?

Thursday 12th of March 2009, 05:55:09 am

What happens when you combine dynamic content distribution with dynamic CSS manipulation? [...]

Personal Freedom

Monday 9th of March 2009, 05:04:37 am

This entry links to my article on personal freedom (elucidated via the crowd-winning technique of using sex as example) and what this actually means in terms of thinking about one's opinion in regards to various freedoms. [...]

Backlog: abortion and the death penalty

Monday 9th of March 2009, 05:02:11 am

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on the morality of abortion and the death penalty, originally posted November 17h, 2008 [...]

Backlog: the division fallacy

Monday 9th of March 2009, 05:00:46 am

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on fallacious generalisation, originally posted September 11th, 2008 [...]

Backlog: timetravel to see the past

Monday 9th of March 2009, 04:59:04 am

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on a curious alternate form of timetravel to observe the past state of the universe, originally posted October 30th, 2006 [...]

Backlog: are you getting the most out of your air?

Monday 9th of March 2009, 04:58:04 am

This entry is a backlog entry, linking to an article on who used your air before you did, originally posted September 6th, 2006 [...]