My little online database of quotes is growing. It has temporarily dissapeared from the top right of my blog due to a bug but will be back once I switch this blog to WordPress. You can see the quotes from the PHP script that I wrote: Fool’s Quotes script page. Just keep reloading for a new random quote. I should strongly emphasize that I don’t agree or endorse all the ideas in the quotes, some of them were chosen for their absurdity, shock value, or “historical” value.
Category: Workshop
East Asian International Affairs Blog
I am starting 4 or 5 new blogs, all with the goal of increasing communication and cooperation between graduate students in places like the US and those in places like Japan, China, etc. The first of these to go online is the East Asian International Affairs Blog (temporary title until we think of a cool one, recommendations welcome). It will focus primarily on East Asian international relations, international security issues, and foreign policy in the region. Starting off our line up of initial authors are Sayaka, Jaehwan, and at least until we get more people, myself. I have invited a number of other people and I hope Sayaka and Jae will be recommending some more people but we will be expanding slowly over time. The other group blogs I will be setting up will be related to modern history in Japan, China, and Korea, and a separate blog idea for studying intellectual history in Japan. More on that later as I get some people together…
Conference: Technology and Chinese Language Teaching
I just spent a few days in New York attending the Third International Conference and Workshops on Technology and Chinese Language Teaching at Columbia University. I presented a short paper in which I argued that flashcard study in language education is one area where there is great potential for the separation of form and content in educational technology and shared some ideas on how this could be done and why I think it is useful. I also gave two of the workshops at the conference, where I showed everyone my new version of the OWLS software that I will be releasing July 1st under the GPL open source license, and let all the instructors work with the software throughout the workshop. I doubt my paper presentation left much of an impact, but the workshops were warmly received and I hope this translates into some use of the software by instructors in the future.
Continue reading Conference: Technology and Chinese Language Teaching
Article: Losing the Soul of Japan
I have written an article for Chanpon, a wonderful website dedicated to mixed up cultures, identities, and a multicultural Japan. In the article I talk about the use of foreigners, especially those who have a deep appreciation for Japan’s traditional arts, in advertisement campaigns attempting to instill a sense of “lost culture.” I talk about some of contradictions that inevitably result from this and emphasize the illusory nature of an essentialist view of a national culture.
Updated JSFlash
I updated my open source JSFlash script to 1.1. This little Javascript program creates an interactive flashcard web page which works in most recent browsers. I have embedded the script into OWLS, Jii-chan, and the upcoming Fool’s House of Cards project for practicing vocabulary. I even put it into a timeline/bibliography/biography database project I am working on. While not an important feature, it will be handy to be able to review events from any timeline in the database. These last two projects are still buried in construction.
The update I’m releasing today adds one new feature: the ability to advance to the next ‘card’ or mark a card ‘incorrect’ using a keyboard command (‘z’ and ‘x’ keys by default but you can change this in the code).
Comment Problems
There is suddenly a problem posting on my blog, as you can see from the error message as you try…I’m going to look into this when I get some internet access and free time, I apologize in the meantime…
UPDATE: I fixed it…
Design
I downloaded a style sheet from Movable Style and modified it a bit before installing it for this blog. I also added a few things to the list of links, and the Muninn raven picture. I don’t know if I’ll keep it, but for the time being this is how the site will look. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
Fool’s Quotes
I wanted to show the random quotes from my PostNuke installation here on this new blog software. Given the details of a Mysql connection, and the table information for the quotes, I wanted to make a new script to display a random quote below the calendar.
I slapped together such a script and you can see the results on the blog (over to the left). I have, of course, released this script as GPL Open Source and you can see the code for the script here:
Feel free to use it for your own projects. If I ever get around to it, I’ll build in other features like adding, editing, and deleting quotes, showing specific quotes, and showing multiple quotes.
Update:I have updated the quote script to allow the adding of new quotes. Do this by accessing the script with the command “add”, like this: quote.php?command=add. I also added a header/footer file you can use. Download this version, open source:
Incidentally, you can view my quotes and see what I have by accessing the quote script directly. This is faster than simply reloading my home page. You may view the quotes by themselves here.
Silent Move
My servers are getting a little out of control. I am trying to consolidate all my sites to a single server in such a way that allows room for expansion, better control over my domains, and lowers my hosting costs. If you are reading this message, it means that the domain Muninn.net has successfully made the transfer to its new server where I have several gigabytes of hosting space to work with and freedom to add domain accounts. This server will probably also serve as a base for other web design projects and OWLS software hosting.
Discovering RSS
I have understood the basic principle surrounding RSS for some time now. I understood its promise in a rather broad way and how it works on a technical level. However, just as of yesterday, when I installed and began using an “RSS browser” have I really come to appreciate the power of RSS to provide me fast access and overviews of articles from my favorite websites.
Incidentely, if you have an RSS browser or wish to add the RSS newsfeed from this site (Syndicate this site as many blogs put it) you can get it here.
If you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about but wish to learn more about RSS there is a host of articles over at O’Reilly.