…the black cable controls fan speed. I’ll need this information again soon.

I’ve made quite a few improvements since putting the code up on Github. Just having it out in public made me clean it up a lot, but trying to produce a decent sample made an even bigger difference. QAing the output of my scripts has smoked out a number of errors in the original texts, as well as some interesting errors and inconsistencies in Unidic and JMdict.

The sample I chose to include in the Github repo is a short story we went through in my group reading class, Lafcadio Hearns’ Houmuraretaru Himitsu (“A Dead Secret”). The PDF files (text and vocab) are designed to be read side-by-side (I use two Kindles, but they fit nicely on most laptop screens), while the HTML version uses jQuery-based tooltips to show the vocabulary on mouseover.

For use as a sample, I left in a lot of words that I know. If I were generating this story for myself, I’d use a much larger known-words list.

"If you don't have the social skills to phrase a polite question, Slashdot is perhaps not the ideal place to go looking for advice..."

(via, where the person quoted is actually answering the wrong question…)

About two and a half years ago, I threw together a set of Perl scripts that converted Japanese novels into nicely-formatted custom student editions with additional furigana and per-page vocabulary lists. I said I’d release it, but the code was pretty raw, the setup required hacking at various packages in ways I only half-remembered, and the output had some quirks. It was good enough for me to read nearly two dozen novels with decent comprehension, but not good enough to share.

When I ran out of AsoIku novels to read, I decided it was time to start over. I set fire to my toolchain, kept only snippets of the old code, and made it work without hacking on anyone else’s packages. Along the way, I switched to a much better parsing dictionary, significantly improved lookup of phrases and expressions, and made the process Unicode-clean from start to finish, with no odd detours through S-JIS.

Still some work to do (including that funny little thing called “documentation”…), but it makes much better books than the old one, and there are only a few old terrors left in the code. So now I’m sharing it.

https://github.com/jgreely/yomitori

(via the NSFW BC Ikusani)

One kilo of pure Sucralose powder, for ~$200.

This is either a lifetime supply, or a lifetime supply, much like the kilo of pure caffeine, which is about a hundred lethal doses.

• George W. Bush was legitimately elected President. Twice.
• Vaccines save lives, and do not cause autism.
• There is no such thing as a "climate-change denier", just people who think that Global Warming is 99% social engineering and 1% climate science.
• George Zimmerman did not get away with murder, and the verdict, which did not depend on "standing his ground", would likely have been the same in 48 other states (and possibly even in Ohio).

Don’t get so distracted by Anna Konno’s hotness that you forget about the laws of physics.

(via the very, very NSFW Gazou Navi)