As part of an elaborate not-getting-laid-at-all-cost strategy, I spent the best of my Friday night hacking at home on a whim, bravely ignoring 1am drunken phone calls from a lonely ex, I didn’t stop until I basically had a working prototype.

And thus here you go:
Dr Dave’s Keitai Kanji Multiradical Dictionary!

Of course, you can use this dictionary from any browser, but it has been made especially compact, so as to offer convenient browsing on a small keitai screen.

Why bother making yet another multiradical dictionary when Jim Breen (and many others, most likely) already offers a very decent one on his site?

Two reasons:

1. I wanted one that be easy to use from a keitai. Jim Breen’s is still a bit heavy to load and browse with a small screen.
2. I wanted a smarter system for radical selection. All the systems I’ve seen so far let you choose your radicals from a checkbox list of all common radicals. Such a list can be quite long. This makes finding each radical quite tedious and particularly cumbersome on a keitai. Mine use a slightly different approach, that requires at least some knowledge of basic kanjis, but make it much faster then.

Instructions

Fairly obvious, really:

• Screen 1: enter a string of kanjis. Can be any kanjis containing one of the radical you want to match or directly a radical. In practice, this means you should pick kanjis that look similar to the one you are trying to match… Say, you want to figure out [汾], you could enter [分] and [海]…
• Screen 2: you will get a list of all radicals matching any of the kanjis entered previously (in our example, you’d get: [ハ], [刀], [母] and [汁]). Select the ones that belong to the kanji you are looking for (e.g. [ハ], [刀] and [汁]). Optionally, enter a number of stroke, with a margin of error (if you want to get any stroke count, do not change the ‘all’ value).
• Screen 3 will give you a list of all kanjis (if any) containing all the radicals selected in the previous screen, ordered by frequency and stroke count (in our example, you’d get only the kanji you were initially looking for: [汾]). Along with the kanji, you are given stroke count and unicode value. Clicking on the kanji will do a word search in WWWJIC (translations). Clicking on the unicode value, will give you WWWJDIC’s Kanjidic entry (kanji pronunciation keys and data).

This script has been successfully tested with AU’s EZweb, but should work on any net-enabled keitai, please let me know if you encounter any problem. Suggestions and general comments most welcome.

Hope you’ll find it useful, I know I will!

Note: As usual, this project uses extensively the amazing amount of data gathered and made available by the EDRG on Jim Breen’s website.

Years ago, in a galaxy far far away, I once co-wrote a 20-page college paper on the study of quantum vortex and EPR condensation in superfluid ³He.

Our choice of topic was essentially guided by these insanely cool videos depicting blobs of superfluid helium making their way out of a container all by themselves, so lively you’d expect them to jump at the experimenters and start hatching eggs.

Unfortunately the equation part was much less exciting, leading us very naturally to cook up a few results through the tested and approved algorithm of “resolution through ultimate obfuscation”. This is the method where you fill half a page with crazy developments up to a point where it is quite painfully clear you are not getting anywhere, then pull some random bullshit argument out of the closest cavity at hand, and jumps to the result you were out to prove in the first place. I had a few incredibly talented teachers in this particular technical skill.

A basic example might be something like:

Step 1: 1 + 1 = 2
<=> Step 2: 4*∫₀^+π/2cos(x)dx + Σ .9(1/10)^k = 2
<=> Step 3: ∫_{- ∞}^+λψ(x,y,z)dx * δ(1.2) + Σ ρ^e = δ φ#$@#$(*&&&(#!~%$%42))

[...]

Step 99: By using a nabla decomposition, we then easily extract the following result:

<=> 1 + 1 = 1

etc.

As you can imagine, the final result, albeit quite impressive by its depth and the sort of topic covered, was very much sub-standard, scientifically speaking. We managed to blow enough smoke in the room during our lengthy presentation to get a tired nod from our supervisor, who knew a thing or two about resolution through ultimate obfuscation himself. Quite obviously, the perspective to skip lunch mattered more to him than the potential reasoning flaws in our work.

Yet, the blatantly poor level of research of this paper didn’t prevent it, through some bizarre quirk of fate, from littering the darker recesses of the Intarweb, whence it was regularly pulled by hopeful young students in science who would then proceed to track me down and contact me to inquire about the very interesting way we seemed to get to that result on page 14 and these incredibly useful properties exhibited by the results on page 17, not to mention, these potential applications, heretofore unheard of, discussed on page 18…

Of course, I felt bad for the poor guys and their crushed spirits when I had to tell them that, actually, black magic and distilled alcohol played a major role in the way these results had been obtained, but on the other hand, there was little I could do.

Yet I knew that karma would come and byte me nasty in the arse one day. And it did.

It probably sounded like a good idea to my esteemed professor to ask me to present this as a validating paper to my previous years of monkeying around.

One of the burning question of these past few months has been then: Will I be able, either through acting class or with personal help from the manes of Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr, to make a sufficiently convincing adaptation of that brilliant piece of work, sustaining a second, possibly more critical observation, come the end of June?

The answer, in short: No

I will be spending a very studious Summer, busy figuring out new and inventive ways to amend the laws of physics to fit my needs.

In other news, I’m boarding my flight for Nihonland tomorrow. Get the sake ready. loads thereof.

Don’t mind the noise in the background: still a few Apple fanboys around the world finishing themselves with WWDC keynote reruns. Man, what a mess the conference hall floor must have been.

A few thoughts to dump on top of the 20 millions (conservative estimate) blatantly unqualified comments on Apple’s recent decision to stick it to IBM and go with Intel:

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[Blogger Advisory: unspeakable nerdery, use of foul language.]

As promised: the answer to yesterday’s riddle (I know, suspense is killing you)…

Upon closer inspection, maybe I went a bit ahead of myself when I postulated the solution was “really easy”. Note that the explanation below, while somewhat tedious and longwinded, should be perfectly intelligible to anybody with very basic notions of arithmetic and a few sober neurons. If you don’t fit either criteria, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.

The Question

Does one stand better chances of: 1) getting at least one ace with 6 throws of a die, or 2) getting at least two aces with 12 throws?

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In the spirit of sharing the pain and suffering, I figured I’d make an entry dedicated to the kind of stuff I currently spend my days doing. Well: apart from giving you gruesome details of my current state of health or finding new, inventive, ways to scratch my ass.

Yes, brace yourself, for today is about Mathematics. Physics may come in another post later this week.

Probabilities

Since, I’m confident none of you, the nerdiest included, really want to hear about quadratic integration and advanced set theory (basing this guess on the fact that I would myself be much happier not knowing anything of their existence), I’ll talk about the only mathematical field remotely interesting to the common: Probabilities.

Unfortunately, probabilities are a very minor part of my curriculum, in what is probably my personal gods’ way of telling me: “see that finger? well that’s all you get, so stick it wherever you see fit and don’t hope for anything better”.

Mathematics, past early college level are fairly useless. The farther away, the more completely, utterly, devoid of potential real-life applications they get. And I don’t mean merely for those who later go on working full-time as stunt doubles in the San Fernando valley: even advanced engineering hardly ever requires mathematical tools that go beyond a first or second year university program, the rest is all for the mere glory of it. That leaves you with research and teaching as the two only career somewhat approaching full use of the curriculum.

Since no institution sane in their mind would ever let me anywhere close to a research lab (least of all: pay me to do so), while the degree of contempt I hold for my fellow humans happens to peak around the age group that frequents universities, it is safe to assume that I won’t ever be needing most of the stuff I am currently expected to master.

Lost in this ocean of tediousness, the barren islands of semi-useful fun that are Probabilities and Game Theory are the most paradisiac coasts you’ll ever lay an eye on. They let you actually glimpse into real uses for some of the wildly abstract mathematical constructs you’ve been using for years… That’s pretty unheard of for a student of Mathematics…

Even if the gist of it is: you would have to be a complete moron to ever lay a chip in a Vegas casino and, in the long run, we are all dead. If you squint really hard, you could nearly imagine that hypothetical situation where an idealized version of yourself, self-assured and composed, would step forward amidst the panic-stricken crowd of your fellow plane-crash passengers, and proclaim loudly: “We may as well save ourself the jump in these shark-infested waters: our chances of survival regardless are below 1% with a 97.48% probability factor. I would know: I am a mathematician.”

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Gen, who works for Technorati Japan just kindly informed me that this blog sits at #37 on the Japan Top 100… Wow…
(it might not last, as understandably, there seems to be some discussion as to whether this blog really belongs in the Japanese billboard)

WordPress 1.5.1 is now officially released. If you are a WordPress user, you really ought to upgrade. This version fixes many of the bugs and shortcomings that were introduced with the botched release of WP 1.5. It takes seconds to upgrade from 1.5 (just overwrite everything in your blog directory except the wp-content directory). Shout out to all WordPress developers and contributors… Great job guys…

With this, I am glad to announce the official release of Spam Karma 2’s first public beta.

In fact, it is pretty much final-grade quality and could probably do without the “beta” label… I’m just a big fan of the greek alphabet.

Many of the lingering issues with the last alpha have been fixed, a few missing features have been added (it now supports curl for those whose host doesn’t allow url_fopen). Check out the dedicated page for details.

Now go and spread the word! there are still far too many clunky SK1.x in the wild out there…

Also, feel free to contribute to the newly-opened official Wiki page for SK2: your help is much appreciated!

Update: Ahem, it would appear I spoke a bit fast. There is a rather nasty bug in this update that can bork your RSS feed. I do recommend updating nonetheless (and follow instructions in the link above to fix the bug).

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I bet none of you did notice that smooth server migration (unless, that is, you were one of the poor fool who tried using either unknowngenius.com or wp-plugins.net during the past 5 hours). Everything should be back to normal now, please contact me if you notice anything broken…

Why’d I change?

While not exceedingly bad (compared to the worse I had), my former host, HostForWeb, really had sub-par uptime (2 or 3 failures a month on average), rather sluggish performances and downright asinine handling of the last DDoS attack on my server (upon seeing one single IP pulling my index page 50 times a second, they simply disabled my account in the middle of a week-end: that is just retarded)…

Renewing my contract for a year with HFW being out of the question, I went with Site 5 instead: they came heartily recommended and their rates for the amount of disk space (one of my biggest priority) is damn near incredible (I’m getting three times what I was getting on HFW, for the same price, and wasn’t getting such a crappy deal either). We’ll see if the rest is on par (so far, so good).

The sharpest among you, dear readers, may have noticed a surge in guest moblogging in recent days.

Indeed, Tracey has joined the powerful ranks of our secret organization, with the established mission to bring a dearly missing element of femininity to these testosterone-drenched pages.

In sticking with the stakhanovist ideals that power this blog, and because no reward shall go undeserved, we promised her a formal introduction as soon as she’d reach the magical threshold of ten posts. Immediately prompting her to deliver, no hold barred, shocking accounts of:

• what she sees from her office window
• what she sees from her office chair…

As you can see, the girl means business…

As long as she leaves gardening up to me, we should be able to find our marks…

OK, she didn’t solely post photos of stacks of paper and urban street parking: she also posted a mug shot of her charming personal sex-slave assistant.

But well before the fascinating insights into the merciless world of a Tokyo power-exec, or even her interesting tidbits on colourful local customs, there is one major reason you should keep an eye open for her contributions: the off-chance of drunken posting featuring nudity and/or behaviours outlawed in at least 15 US states (and punishable by death in 4 of them).

Giving Tracey a cameraphone and moblogging access is a bit like these tv spots for lavish shower products, featuring people lasciviously soaping themselves while the camera always manage to keep the naughty bits tastefully off-frame: there’s that improbable chance the cameraman might one-day trip and show a nipple… a towel fall off unexpectedly… who knows…

Except here, the chances are much higher and the cameraman more likely to be drunk.

But please let that not distract you in any way from the quality of her more traditional contributions to these pages…

N.B: She also has her own dedicated page, where she might one day tell you more about herself. It’s here. At the moment, it only contains the official press kit excerpts, but will no doubt soon be updated with more personable tidbits.

This is quite possibly the most pointless item posted to this blog to date (all right, competition is tough there), but I’m so ecstatic I can’t contain it (yea, I have no life):

Safari apparently received a minor update in the last OS X package (the ones that gets downloaded and installed quasi-silently through the Update manager), and they have finally fixed the “Undo bug”!

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Here is a geeky post that, for once, might be pertinent to more than two or three readers. Read on if:

1. You have a website.
2. This website uses a database (most blog platforms, for example, do).
3. You would really hate to lose all your data in an accident.

It think there is no need to be an übergeek to satisfy all three points above.

So the problem is about backups. Backups are a beautiful and easy thing, in theory. In practice, nobody, but the more anal retentive among us and those paid to do it, will ever go through the pain of manually backing up their data on more than episodic occasions. And since Murphy’s Law applies more than ever here, you can be sure your next server failure will happen the day before your next backup.

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I recently explained my decision to start packaging and distributing my own version of WordPress in order to make my life simpler, as to the distribution of Spam Karma 2.

Simultaneously, I had to deal with an outbreak of issues (or more exactly vocalizations on these issues: it’s unlikely the issues have been any more common than before. They were just given more attention on these pages) with Spam Karma 1.

I have taken the time to write a very detailed response to cover all aspects of the False Positives problem, and provide anybody coming to me with a comment denied by Spam Karma, with the Why?, How? and What Now? of their problem. The bottom line being that, while I’m sincerely sorry about these, I am not responsible in the slightest for the use people make of this program (especially considering how easy it is to screw up the install when you hold yourself too smart to read the docs) and even less so now that there is an upgrade available.

But I care, and think I have proven it in the past, to whoever bothered contacting me without resorting to death threats immediately.

There is, however, one way to make me not care about your problem… It goes a little bit like this:

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As I just lengthily explained, I have very little love for corporate hierarchies and all the folklore that goes with it. Ironically, the ostensibly “free” world of major Open-Source development never fails to irk me in the exact same way…

I have my theories about that, and they mostly have to do with the fact that Open-Source is full of the very same people, who, for one reason or another, might not have made it at the top of the corporate ladder in the traditional world, but are fiercely decided to enjoy the exact same privilege in their own version thereof. Less money, therefore a void to fill, usually by inflating the ego until it touches on all sides. These are all theories… But I do not care to expand on them right this second, if only to add very quickly that Open-Source Software is also filled with an overwhelming majority of selfless, dedicated, bright people, who, in the end, bring the balance way into the positive.

Yet, I do have my beef with many OSS practices in general, and practitioners in particular, but because I have yet to find the recipe for immortality (and just in case you are looking for it too, I can tell you so far that neither baths in young virgin’s blood, nor daily consumption of half a gallon of gin, work), I do my best to spend as little time as humanly possible on such crap. Sure I yammer. a lot. but I am also quite good at packing my marbles and moving to another side of the playground without sulking too much, whenever I really can’t take my little playmates’ bullshit any more…

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From our stating-the-blindingly-obvious department:

You might have noticed this website has just undergone a complete face-lifting…
For the sake of argument, we’ll say it’s not completely finished… But mostly, it is.

It should look good, or acceptable, on every browsers. If it doesn’t, please let me know. But as usual I can only stress how much better it’s likely to look on real browsers (not Microsoft’s twisted version thereof).

I still need to brush up the menu content at the top of this page (organize, add some more items, update my bookmark list etc), but everything else is now in place. And all modesty aside, I dare say it kicks major ass.

Let me use this occasion to invite longtime RSS reader to pay a quick visit to the online version… While I won’t be stopping to provide full-content RSS any time soon, there are in fact many other incentives to checking the page itself that are not visible in the RSS feed.

For your benefits (and the benefit of other less sharp readers who might have missed hidden jewels of this corporate behemoth of entertainment we run here), let me list a few:

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Started playing around with a new layout for this blog.

Not the final version by any mean…

I had to separate the redesign in two phases. This is only the first phase: structural changes.

Second phase (actual theme change) will come later, when I’ll be done with the coding and can concentrate on finding inspiration (I cannot code on mushrooms: just doesn’t work).