Vultaire’s Blog

A few things have happened as of late.  Here’s what:

First, I finished relocating my web site from GoDaddy to HostMonster.  I believe I have successfully copied everything over, and just finished doing the blog today.  My GoDaddy account is now officially cancelled.

Recent events have been around 3 main areas.  First, as a challenge to myself, I decided to try to join Mensa.  I took a test yesterday, which was not exactly as expected - it was actually easier than expected, but I spent too much time second-guessing myself and so I ran out of time.  I won’t know my result for a few weeks, but I don’t think I made it.  I think I’ll try again though - if the next test is anything like this one was, I think I can manage it now that I’ve tried it once before.

Second, I’ve been doing some job hunting related stuff as of late.  Right now my job hunting is a little restricted, but as of July, after finals at the school I work at, I should be free to take paid leave to do interviews.  This gives me a whopping one month to do what job hunting I can before I am officially unemployed.  Not exactly the happiest situation… but at least I have a lot saved up, so I can survive.  It also means I gotta clean this apartment up for the next person, and find a new place to live for myself so that I’m not on the street.  Fun fun fun…

Finally, because I’ve discovered how abundant jobs are in the kansai area for people who don’t speak English well (or rather, the total lack outside of teaching English), I’ve been really focusing on getting my Japanese skill level up.  As I mentioned before, I took the 2-kyuu last year.  As I may or may not have mentioned on here, I did not pass it.  So, now I am studying to get my level up to where it needs to be.

I’ve bought several more study books, and the most recent thing was copies of the 4-kyuu and 3-kyuu tests from last year.  I figured I’d check the lower levels for any weak points, plus it also helps as a confidence boost since the only test I’ve actually passed is the 4-kyuu, many years ago.  Anyway, my overall score on the 4-kyuu was 94.5%, the weak points being all in the grammar section.  I’m taking the 3-kyuu now, and so far it’s in the 80%+ range - I haven’t taken the listening portion yet so I don’t have a final score, but I already know that I can definitely pass the 3-kyuu.  I’ll be reviewing what I got wrong, and studying like mad out of the 2-kyuu books I’ve recently bought, both for the test coming in December and for use in job interviews coming up very, very soon.

This is why J-Ben has been lying stagnant.  Believe me, I want to work on it and do some significant changes - both adding new features and rewriting the loading code so it doesn’t take so painfully long to start up.  Frankly, it’s unacceptable how long it takes to load compared to JWPce, Gjiten, and others, even if it does have some extra features.  However, that project takes a back seat to keeping a roof over my head.  Once that has stabilized, I’ll get back to coding.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve updated this blog, so today I’ll write a few words.

My life’s been pretty busy as of late, preparing for job hunting here in Japan.  I will be continuing to live here for a while longer; I am unsure how many more years.  So, I’m beginning to search for employment here in Japan as a software engineer.  Also, I am actually being kept somewhat busy at my job as of late, which is without question a good thing, except that I do have less time to work on my projects.

Speaking of my projects, Read the rest of this entry »

I started a topic over at Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum about J-Ben, and have gotten a little bit of feedback. So far I’ve only got 2 real suggestions, but one of them was pretty good and the person suggesting it convinced me to give it a go.

So, I’m working on integrating KanjiPad into J-Ben. Or rather, I’ve already completed it - I made a standalone wxKanjiPad program, and then I copied the objects I made there over to J-Ben and got them to work together. The problem right now regards some pretty significant graphical issues, especially under Windows. I’ll be talking over on the wxWidgets forum to see if I can get them resolved. Once this is taken care of, then we’ll have our first kanji input method for the program!

Over the last two days I’ve finished a series of bug fixes for J-Ben, addressing the multibyte search issue, a previously unknown infinite loop bug, and some other minor issues. I’m getting ready for a new release, which I think will be out within the next few days.

However, I think there’s one more feature I want to add to that release, and that is making the English-Japanese search recognize English word boundaries. This will not affect Japanese-English searching; I may add restrictions in the future like 2-or-more kana on kana-only searches, but for the time being I don’t think it’s terribly necessary.

One last detail: I am pushing my code to a public git repository now. Repository details are listed at http://repo.or.cz/w/jben.git. Do I have a real serious reason why I chose git as opposed to CVS/SVN? Honestly, just that I would like to learn how to use git properly since it is what is used for Linux kernel development, and I’ve been curious how different it is from CVS/SVN.

That’s it for now. Oh, if anyone reading this checks out my Japan blog, I uploaded about 11 months worth of photos and videos to the media section last night.

It is done, at last.  Yesterday I finished taking the Level 2 Japanese Language Proficiency Test.  Did I pass?  I’d say maybe I have a 25% chance.  I’ve been studying like mad over the past week, and I think my strongest area may have been my kanji and vocabulary (thanks to using J-Ben as a study tool).  Reading and grammar I think I did better on since I’ve done some practice tests and bought a book for studying grammar, though I’m not sure I met the 60% mark for this part.  My fear however is that my listening portion was weak; during my last practice test I managed 66% but this time I think it fell below 60%.  Anyway, it’s done with, the stress is largely off my shoulders, and now I can work on other things.   Of course, whether I pass or fail I intend to continue my Japanese studies, just at a less breakneck pace.

On today’s agenda, I will be doing some well-overdue updates on J-Ben.  I expect a minor update within the next few days, fixing the J-E/E-J multibyte search bug (done by converting the dictionary files to UTF-8) as well as a few other minor mistakes.

Hello everyone,

I haven’t been posting here lately, but I’ve been keeping myself quite busy in real life. The biggest thing is the upcoming Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Right now I’m taking a short break from studying like a fiend for the level 2 test. It’s probably going to be a close one: most areas for me are around 60%, my listening being above a bit, and my grammar being below a bit more. I’ve been boning up on my grammar lately and have been continuing to study kanji so I can actually read the grammar questions, so we’ll see if it pays off.

By the way, I am totally eating my own dog food; J-Ben is almost constantly loaded on my computer as of late, be it my Linux laptop at work or my WinXP/Linux box at home. Together with the Kanjidic portion of Gjiten for looking up characters by stroke/radical, it’s been working really well for grinding through the kanji I need for this test. (Windows users: JWPce is a great program if you need to look up kanji by radical/stroke count, by the way…)

J-Ben work has been pretty well static. I’ve been making a few minor changes and have prepared a git repository for the source, but I’m deliberately not working on it much right now. I know if I do, I’ll start spending too much time on the software and not enough studying for the test which is now a mere 2 days away.

Anyway, that’s mainly my current situation. But I do want to mention a few things about J-Ben before wrapping up this entry. (Warning: going into techie details!)

Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t written anything in awhile, so I figured I’d do so. I did say I may be busy with my Japanese studies, and I expect this to be moreso the case in the future, so this blog may grow a little stagnant until after the Japanese Language Proficiency Test on December 2nd.

However, I have been working on some new stuff for the software. It started with just a few updates but has lead to several significant feature additions and many under-the-hood changes to improve memory usage. There’s enough new stuff to justify increasing the minor version number rather than just the revision number.

It may yet be a few more weeks before it gets released, but the next version of the software will definitely be worth looking out for.

J-Ben 1.0.1 is now officially released. Please check it out, and leave any questions/comments here.

- Paul

The next revision of J-Ben is coming soon, probably tomorrow. I’ve completed builds on Linux and Windows, resolved an encoding issue between the two versions, and have updated the offline copy of my web site - tomorrow I plan to put the stuff live.

The main errata issues from the previous version still remain. However, I’ve added a very handy new functionality to the program, and will show what that is tomorrow when I make a proper update of my site. Let’s just say that if you’re studying for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), you’ll likely find the new version to be quite useful.

Since I’m taking the JLPT level 2 in December, I actually need to spend less time coding this program and more time using it. However, I’ll try to address any major issues people have, and since working on this is more fun than working on studying vocab and kanji, there’ll probably be another update before December.

I am in the process of doing a number of updates on my site, and so it is quite possible you may encounter broken links.  If you are browsing the site right now, try back after a minute or two, and if you still have problems, then please leave a note here.