“We were playing a little bit with where science ends and speculation begins.”
— Doug Randall, co-author of the "secret Pentagon report on climate change" that has the Left bashing Bush againMore toying with dictionaries
[Update: the editing form is now hooked up to the database, in read-only mode. I’ve linked some sample entries on it. …and now there’s a link from the dictionary page; it’s still read-only, but you can load the results of any search into the form]
I feel really sorry for anyone who edits XML by hand. I feel slightly less sorry for people who use editing tools that can parse DTDs and XSDs and validate your work, but still, it just strikes me as a bad idea. XML is an excellent way to get structured data out of one piece of software and into a completely different one, but it’s toxic to humans.
JMdict is well-formed XML, maintained with some manner of validating editor (update: turns out there’s a simple text format based on the DTD that’s used to generate valid XML), but editing it is still a pretty manual job, and getting new submissions into a usable format can’t be fun. The JMdictDB project aims to help out with this, storing everything in a database and maintaining it with a web front-end.
Unfortunately, the JMdict schema is a poor match for standard HTML forms, containing a whole bunch of nested optional repeatable fields, many of them entity-encoded. So they punted, and relied on manually formatting a few TEXTAREA fields. Unless you’re new here, you’ll know that I can’t pass up a scripting problem that’s just begging to be solved, even if no one else in the world will ever use my solution.
So I wrote a jQuery plugin that lets you dynamically add, delete, and reorder groups of fields, and built a form that accurately represents the entire JMdict schema. It’s not hooked up to my database yet, and submitting it just dumps out the list of fields and values. It’s also ugly, with crude formatting and cryptic field names (taken from the schema), but the basic idea is sound. I was pleased that it only took one page of JavaScript to add the necessary functionality.
[hours to debug that script, but what can you do?]
Dictionaries as toys
There are dozens of front-ends for Jim Breen‘s Japanese-English and Kanji dictionaries, on and offline. Basically, if it’s a software-based dictionary that wasn’t published in Japan, the chance that it’s using some version of his data is somewhere above 99%.
Many of the tools, especially the older or free ones, use the original Edict format, which is compact and fairly easy to parse, but omits a lot of useful information. It has a lot of words you won’t find in affordable J-E dictionaries, but the definitions and usage information can be misleading. One of my Japanese teachers recommends avoiding it for anything non-trivial, because the definitions are extremely terse, context-free, and often “off”.
Dear Apple,
Please stop making products that subject your customers to electric shocks.
Really, there are better ways to keep the cult alive.
Dear Apple,
Please stop. Plugging in my iPod is not an appropriate time for you to be plugging MobileMe. iTunes should never display an ad when I sync my device.
Never mind that I’m already a .Mac user and you damn well know it; I just haven’t enabled it on my iPod Touch, because the sync is still broken and your servers go offline at random intervals. I don’t want to hose my email, bookmarks, calendar, and contacts by syncing them through an unreliable service.
[speaking of which, plugging in an iPod Touch does not trigger a sync; you have to hit the button manually. WTF?]
