Well, another year has come around, and with it, the New Year’s holiday here in Japan. Just got to enjoy a full week off of work, of which I’ve mostly spent just to unwind.

I was planning to do development during this time, but it didn’t really happen – ran into problems with gettextize and MinGW, and didn’t feel like digging too much into things. I’ll see about doing something later. In the near-worst case, I’ll end up recompiling gettext and friends via MinGW or even MSVC and will try again… or in the worst case, I’ll just do the i18n work on Linux and try to see if everything will work on Windows.

I also spent a little time to reflect on my career, and am thinking about what I may need to work on to make myself more marketable. I’ve made great progress in Python, but my C++ skills have been rusting, plus I’m hoping to spend some time writing straight C as well. Python’s great for my current job, but to keep my options more open I should likely spend more time in C land during my free time.

So, although I expect J-Ben work to continue, it may possibly slow down. I’m targeting near-feature-parity with J-Ben 1 by July. (I’ll be dropping the very hokey kanji search function in favor of something easier and more intuitive.) On the side, expect some small little projects. One I’m considering is a rewrite of the JBLite library in C, to make it even more widely usable, although I think the return is rather low for doing so other than C hacking experience. Another is a nonogram solver using an algorithm similar to Peter Norvig’s sudoku solver. Anyway, I’m still brainstorming these ideas. We’ll see what happens.

So, that aside, I guess the only thing left to be said is: Happy New Year!

- Paul