I just finished moving vultaire.net's hosting over to MonsterHost. Apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused. The sudden shift was hastened by GoDaddy dropping my main e-mail address as soon as I transferred my domain name to MonsterHost's registrar, even though I had not yet cancelled my account and the nameservers were still pointing to the GoDaddy site. Way to go, GoDaddy! Somehow the kick in the butt on the way out makes me feel much better about changing hosting services...

Anyway, I had troubles uploading the J-Ben file folder automatically overnight, so I will upload the missing files later this evening. My apologies for any intermittent downtime.

- Paul

J-Ben 1.2.0 is finally available to the public. It has a nice new interface, support for KANJIDIC2, a multi-method kanji search, and more! Check it out!

- Paul

The Japan Blog has received a much needed update, including pictures and videos up until the present, some additional pictures which I forgot to upload before, and an explanation of events in my life since I've returned to Japan from America.

Expect more updates to come, possibly today, but probably within the next few days.

- Paul

I know some people are hoping I'll take the time to update something other than J-Ben, so forgive me for forgoing the Japan Blog once again.

J-Ben 1.1.3 is out. I put in a lot of man hours on this one, improving the Windows and Linux installers and doing a bunch of improvements to the internal code. Not much has changed in the program itself, other than making it start on the word dictionary tab first and changing the preferences file a bit. However, the next version will, I promise, have more ways to search for kanji (stroke count, maybe some other methods).

One more bit of good news: I contacted Jack Halpern about using SKIP data in my program since KANJIDIC does have codes for it. Originally the data was available under some unclear license terms. He replied and notified me that he's changed the licensing recently, and so now I can add SKIP code support to J-Ben. I'm ideally planning to add a SKIP search to the next version if time permits.

Well, that's that! I expect to keep busy with J-Ben, but the next update will likely be to the Japan Blog. There is some news there, but I'm going to update that another time.

- Paul