[Update: Replaced the store link; I hadn’t realized that asianmunchies.com was now wholesale-only.]

One of my regrets from the trip to Japan was that I didn’t bring home more ginger-flavored crack(ers). I hoped I’d be able to find them in the US, but the only name I knew to call them by was a Kyoto cliché.

Today, I avoided the con crowd by heading up to SF Japantown, and while browsing through a grocery store, I found two different brands of Shouga Tsumami (“ginger pinch”). They’re a little thicker than the ones we bought in a Gion candy store, and not quite as fresh, but they’re still darn tasty, and they’re available online.

There are several different ways to romanize Japanese. This is the wrong one.

more...

Aozora Bunko is, more or less, the Japanese version of Project Gutenberg. As I’ve mentioned before, they have a simple markup convention to handle phonetic guides and textual notes. The notes can get a bit complicated, referring to obsolete kanji and special formatting, but the phonetic part is simple to parse.

I can easily convert it to my pop-up furigana for online use (which I think is more useful than the real thing at screen resolution), but for my reading class, it would be nice to make real furigana to print out. A while back I started tinkering with using Word’s RTF import for this, but gave up because it was a pain in the ass. Among other problems, the RTF parser is very fragile, and syntax errors can send it off into oblivion.

Tonight, while I was working on something else, I remembered that Word has an allegedly reasonable HTML parser, and IE was the first browser to support the HTML tags for furigana. So I stripped the RTF code out of my script, generated simple HTML, and sent it to Word. Success! Also a spinning beach-ball for a really long time, but only for the first document; once Word loaded whatever cruft it needed, that session would convert subsequent HTML documents quickly. It even obeys simple CSS, so I could set the main font size and line spacing, as well as the furigana size.

Two short Perl scripts: shiftjis2utf8 and aozora-ruby.

[Note that Aozora Bunko actually supplies XHTML versions of their texts with properly-tagged furigana, but they also do some other things to the text that I don’t want to try to import into Word, like replacing references to obsolete kanji with PNG files.]

Marshall, Will, and Holly reunite to pretend they’re adapting Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. In 3-D. This doesn’t look like a winner.

Please tell me that the new GUI package manager is an early alpha, and that the dreadful performance, almost-invisible feedback, downright misleading “install security updates?” dialog box, and reduced functionality is a temporary aberration.

With that minor gripe out of the way, I just need to build the EEE wireless and ACPI packages on a VMware session, grab the updated RPMs that fix Japanese text entry, and then reinstall with a slightly-less-insane package selection, but out of the box, F9 has decent sound, video, and wired ethernet support for the EEE. I found it fairly easy to switch to a full Sun Java install, which got our Juniper VPN software working.

As a side note, while playing around with the new install, I finally confirmed that the furigana and vertical-text-layout features in OpenOffice interoperate with MS Word correctly; the UI is completely different, but it sucks in both, so that’s not necessarily a criticism. Given what an ugly hack furigana is in Word to begin with, I’d say one of the OO developers earned his lunch money on that one.

[this is mostly a theoretical issue for me, since a Word license costs me less than lunch at McDonalds, but it’s nice to know that people for whom Word costs a few burgers can get by for free]

[Update: to clarify a bit on one of the above points, when I turned on my EEE this morning, F9 popped up a dialog informing me that three important security updates were available. Unfortunately, clicking the “Update computer now” button silently installs eight updates, and I can’t even get a list of them without closing the dialog, clicking on the star-bang icon at the top of the screen, selecting “show updates”, and then selecting “review”. In addition to the security updates, it also updates libvorbis, the UpnP SDK, PPP, some Japanese bitmap fonts, and the OS release notes. Bad design.]

[Update: the pop-up window doesn’t have a scrollbar, either, so when I booted up a small-screen machine that had 21 security updates, I couldn’t even see the buttons.]

[This quarter, I’m taking a class that’s focused on reading authentic Japanese text. Everyone finds something short to read, makes copies for the entire group, and prepares a vocabulary list. Well, we’re supposed to be making vocabulary lists, although so far I’m the only one to do so. Two of the pieces I’ve brought in have been from illustrated books, and it seemed wasteful to photocopy the whole things, so I typed them in and added some furigana.

The first one wasn’t really authentic Japanese, being from the ASK reader series, but the teacher really liked that author and wanted us to read it. The second is more contemporary, and I thought it might be of general interest. It’s the latest short story from the Kino’s Journey series. I’m just posting the first scene, since it’s both illegal and darn rude to reprint the whole thing. If you like the story, buy the book, which also includes a DVD of the second Kino movie.

I’ve added a lot more pop-up furigana (with English translations) than I need myself, to give more people a chance to work through it.]

more...

We’re used to getting our laptops back in… “worn” condition. Usually just cosmetic wear and loose display hinges, but some of them get dropped or otherwise abused (our CEO apparently uses his MacBook Pro to stop bullets), and a few have been completely trashed.

The one we recently got back from our copy-writer when she left the company (“Hi, Sue!”) was special.

more...

So, my mother has a shiny new Amazon Kindle, and before they continued on the next leg of their vacation, I helped fill it up with free e-books from Mobipocket’s web site. I also played with it for a while.

Notes:

1. Every time I picked it up, I hit a button by accident.
2. There's no reliable way to void a pending button-press, and it keeps a queue at least five clicks deep.
3. The "like a book" way of holding it with the cover makes the "previous page" button awkward to use.
4. Western European/American font support only. I didn't really expect it to have kanji, but I was surprised that it was also missing things like "ō", affecting things like the English-language Wikipedia entry for Toshirō Mifune.
5. Web sites that can't be rendered are falsely reported as down. I was all set to rush into the co-lo to reboot dotclue.org when I checked from my laptop and discovered that it was fine. The Kindle just refused to render it, because of the Japanese text.
6. It always took a long time to connect to Whispernet, leaving me wondering if our hotel was in a cellular dead zone. No, it's just that slow.
7. Frequent ghosting on the display, something that's less of a problem with newer e-paper displays and ones that do a full erase before a full redraw.
8. Unlike the early photos they showed off of it, it's not hideous to look at. It definitely needs some work in the human-factors department, but it looks much cleaner than I expected.
9. The sidebar-slider UI is a reasonable compromise between clarity and responsiveness, but takes some getting used to.

Net result: I’ll hold off until Kindle 2.0, at least.