This is my first website ... after 15 years of making them for everyone else! Hope you enjoy it too.
Last year I re-posted some obsure Kana & Romaji converter code for Ruby. Although I had fixed it to work with modern versions of Ruby, the romanization converter just didn’t want to work! Finally after dedicating an afternoon to it, I found that the regex used to split the source string was returning nil. At [...]
Technology commentators have noted that Amazon is trying to improve the Kindle browser experience. With the iPad only weeks away, I don’t blame them for trying to play catch up. However, I do wonder if this is really going to be a net win for end users? Wired Magazine’s Michael Calore has described the Kindle’s [...]
Have you ever wanted to compare the pricing of many web based applications? Me too! Let me know if you ever write a blog post about it. All I have is a rather large list of pricing pages that I compiled for a project! Payment Model Types Annual Freemium – Can upgrade to a Pro [...]
This is only a quickie, but important enough to spread the word (oh, btw IE blows!) In all versions of Internet Explroer (IE 5,6,7,8 apparently), the browser silently creates an immutable global variable for every element ID. This can lead to naming clashes when using jquery. For example, I had the following code: startDate = [...]
Hilbert’s Pallette, by Anton SherwoodAwesome colorful boxes! If you’ve been using the Colorbox Plugin for jQuery, you may have noticed that it rocks! Compared to the bevvy of other JavaScript modal dialogs, this one animates smoothly, loads quickly, is lightweight and well suited to jQuery projects. However, the standard way to call it is from [...]
The Application Controller in Rails 2.3 has been renamed to application_controller.rb, whereas previously it was application.rb. If you don’t fix it, calling any controller will return this cryptic error. NameError in MyController#search uninitialized constant ApplicationController After trying to fix this by checking out an older revision, reconfiguring Mongrel/Apache and generally turning things on & off, [...]
Hopefully the title of this post got your attention! One of my (very few) readers asked about the Japanese text transformations I use to enhance Japanese and English mixed text queries. I promised to post some of the snippets, so here they are.
That’s “HMM” as in Hidden Markov Models, not as in “hmm I’m wondering why I never liked math at High School?” HMMs are an impressive and “easier to understand” approach to machine learning. Basically, by measuring the probability of observable state changes (e.g. your friend telling you what he did on the weekend) you can [...]
I recently received some comments regarding the Sphinx Search Japanese character table. This prompted me to document it a little better. To be honest, I originally put the character table together during a late night coding binge in 2008. As such my memory was a little fuzzy. After visiting the Oracle of Unicode (now resident [...]
About 4 months ago I was wondering how hard it would be to get Sphinx to work in Japanese. This fantastic freetext search engine by Andrew Aksyonoff has literally changed my approach to web development. At the time there were instructions for Chinese, but no Japanese unicode character map. Basically, Sphinx needs a “guide” to [...]