Crunchytoast.com

Today I sat through 120 minutes of furious scribbling, deducing and cursing my momentary lapses in concentration. To most people this strange exercise is known as the Business Japanese Proficiency Test (BJT). I prefer to think of it as the BIG Japanese Test.

As you may have guessed from my other posts, Japanese and Coding are two of my three favourite pastimes. Having successfully stumbled through the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, Level 1 in 1999, I figured some 10 years later I would attempt the BJT.

As is par for the course, I am narrow-casting my impressions out to you.

BJT Test Format

The test is comprised of 3 main sections:

i) Listening (50 mins, 35 questions)
ii) Listening & Reading (30 mins, 30 questions)
iii) Reading (40 mins, 35 questions)

Each section contains a range of questions from somewhat easy to very hard. All are designed to detect if you really have lived in Japan too long.

During practice, the Listening Section was not impossible, given time to think and a second hearing. Under test conditions however you get about 1 minute per question and only hear it once! Even easy questions can be flubbed by paying too much attention to the rising damp in the test room (gotta love Japanese universities!) Read the rest of this entry »

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, I discovered the fix.

rake rails:update

That was all it needed! The Rake task will rename the file accordingly, and instructs you to update your source code repository. I guess it serves me right for not using the same Rails version on my development and production servers. On development I use 2.2.2 and on production I upgraded to 2.3. A point release can be a big difference!

Hope this saves you some desperately late nights.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Graham often wrote about “makers” — those people who “create” something from nothing as a profession, obsession and way of life. This video features Ira Glass, the host of This American Life on Chicago Public Radio.

The real value here is how well he describes the struggle all artists/artisans go through. In particular, how one  transitions from just struggling to a unique and enviable level of accomplishment. I hope you also enjoy it when he “dredges up” an embarrassing news piece from early in his career. Check it out here…

Watch Out, You Swine!

I have to admit, the only reason I am blogging about Swine Flu is because of the warning diagram published by Japan’s Health and Labour Ministry.

At first glance, it seems to have been re-purposed from the “Don’t get close to drunk guys” warning posters. But on closer inspection, those spewed dots may be from the “Foreigners shouldn’t eat natto“ series!

Currently the mood in Tokyo is a little bipolar. On the one hand, all drug stores have sold out of their supply of face masks. On the other hand, no more people than usual are wearing masks on the subways, and people continue to congregate in large numbers. Admittedly in Tokyo, the only way to avoid congregating in large numbers is by being really smelly, or staying at home!

Read the rest of this entry »

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 infer the likelihood of unobservable events (e.g. what the weather was like).

Example:
If your friend tells you he did this for the last few weekends … Watch TV  -> Play Football -> Watch TV -> Clean House.

HMMs helps us work out what the weather will probably be at the end of the chain … Rainy -> Sunny -> Rainy -> ???.

In other words, we can work out the probabilities of events we cannot see or observe (this is the “hidden” in Hidden Markov Models) based on related observable events.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 at unicode.org), I was able to clear up somethings for myself. Hopefully it helps you too, where-ever you are!

Read the rest of this entry »

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 read UTF8 data, called a character map. It tells Sphinx which unicode charcters to index, and which to discard.

Here is the character map for Japanese:

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally got fed up with YourSQL, a no longer supported MySQL client for Mac OS X. Digging around I stumbled upon Sequel Pro (www.sequelpro.com). Extremely fast (YourSQL was horrendously slow), and so far much more stable than mySQL Administrator for OS X. It’s early days using this, but I must say it looks impressive!

Mac OS X Clients

• Your SQL (nasty, stay away!)
• MySQL GUI Tools (okay, but there is better)
• Cocoa MySQL (the forerunner to Sequel Pro)
• Sequel Pro (peace at last!)

Et voila, another open source project delivers a quality and indispensible tool for development on OS X.

Mashables has released a custom iPhone App to view their posts, tweets and events on the go. Despite the title of this post, overall it is a great little app, and potentially much better than browsing through the normal browser. Unfortunately it is still in need of some “polish” to make it really sparkle!

PROS:
The RSS feed list is responsive and easy to read, the Tweets list is cool too. The embedded browser starts-up straight away and drops down in a visor like fashion. The main page also sports a pleasant background image (it would be cool if this changed periodically). Overall the design plan was well executed.

CON: Offline Mode
Whilst all men were created equal, some men created 3G networks more equal than others. My carrier in Japan (Softbank) has terrible reception in subway stations. In between stations, don’t even bother (apparently only Seoul, Korea has this super-3G-ability). Admittedly the Mashable app isn’t the only culprit in failing to think of subway users, however, it does have it’s very own annoying “out of range” prompts. In fact, one for every RSS image it fails to load whilst out of range!

CON: Stability
Basically the in built browser loads quickly, but crashes the app pretty quickly too. I like the idea, I just want it to be more stable!

CON: Caching
It doesn’t seem to cache anything and will not load if you are not out of network range.

Conclusion
As a strategic move, the Mashable app is a great idea! It will certainly win a number of iPhone users away from competing sites like Tech Crunch, Read Write Web and similar. As for the Mashable app, I am keen to see a stability fix in the near future. Click here to get the app from the iTunes Store.