Muninn | But I fear more for Muninn…

Learning AppleScript Studio

I yearn for the old days of HyperCard, which I started learning back in the glory days of the late 1980s. I’m trying to learn how to use the monster currently maintained by Apple that is AppleScript Studio. It is the flawed scripting language AppleScript, which has some similarities with the scripting language of HyperCard, in the programming environment of XCode. It feels like a marriage between a Nuclear Power-plant and a water wheel that’s missing some of its blades.

I am, however, going through one of my 3-month programming cravings, so I have decided to play with AppleScript Studio and see if I can make an upgrade for one of my favorite old applications (more on that if I ever make any progress). I made a little weblog to chronicle my efforts and leave some tips behind for other beginners who might happen upon it later:

Fool’s Applescript Workshop

Pinyin Tone Dashboard Widget

I’m happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and will add the tone marks where appropriate (e.g. zhong1guo2 becomes zhōngguó).

Many years ago, before Unicode became dominant, I used a Microsoft Word macro written by a Chinese language scholar, James Dew, as the basis for making an old Mac OS 9 application that translated texts between various pinyin fonts that were floating around online. Later, I made an online script that could convert tone numbers into unicode tone marks. I was surprised to hear from various Chinese language instructors at a conference I presented at a few years later (2003) that many of them used the script regularly when preparing texts for their Chinese language classes.

The online script still works but there is a much more elegantly written online script which does the same thing written by a more skilled programmer in Taiwan named Mark Wilbur hosted on his site Doubting to Shuō. You can find his tool here: Pinyin Tone Tool.

My old PHP script is ugly by comparison to Mark’s compact javascript so I have essentially installed his script to work in an OS X dashboard widget. You can download the widget here:

Pinyin Tone Widget v. 1.02
Continue reading Pinyin Tone Dashboard Widget

Charles Tilly

I just heard from Sayaka that Charles Tilly passed away. He was an amazing scholar whose work has had a powerful impact in the fields of sociology, political science, and my own field of history. I have learnt much from reading his work and attended several of his talks. I have always been impressed by his truly wide range of knowledge and have immense respect for his careful and modest attempts at synthesis across regions and centuries of time; something he manages to do without losing sensitivity to the complexities of context.

I only met Professor Tilly once, but the experience left me even more impressed. I was working tech support for professors at Columbia University about 6 years ago and was called into his office to revive Windows on a recently upgraded machine he was working off of. He was incredibly friendly and instead of going on with some reading as he waited for me to tinker away at his computer, he pulled up a chair and asked me about my own studies, posing sharp questions about anything I said that sparked his interest, all as we waited for things to install and the computer to go through several restarts. I remember asking him about the relationship between the disciplines of sociology and history, and though the substance of his comments now escape me, I remember he went on for some time about it even when I had finished setting things up for him. I only wish all my customers while working for Faculty Desktop Support were as willing to chat with their visiting technician.

Fool’s Flashcard Review

A long time ago, in the last millennium, I designed a flashcard application for Mac OS that implemented something I called interval study (known elsewhere as spaced repetition or the Leitner method). I sold and later gave away the software at a website I created for my software tinkering called the Fool’s Workshop. I used the software every day for my own Chinese language study and I acquired a few fans before I abandoned development of the software when OS X came out. I also listed some of the other applications for Macintosh that I found online and reviewed some of them on the website and was surprised to find that this page is still riding high in the Google rankings for a number of different search terms.

I currently use iFlash for my vocabulary review. I’m particularly partial to iFlash because its developer was one of two who implemented interval study in a way that is almost identical to my old Flashcard Wizard application. I am always interested in the development going on around the web of similar kinds of software, and like an old timer telling war stories on his porch when he wasn’t really ever much of a soldier to start with, I again feel like sharing my thoughts on some of these applications.

To this end, I have created a new weblog over at the old Fool’s Workshop website:

Fool’s Flashcard Review

Here I will occasionally post reviews of flashcard software, to begin with mostly for Mac OS X, and I will especially focus those applications which attempt to implement some kind of interval study. My goal is to give language learners a resource to compare what is out there but even more importantly, to hopefully reach some of the developers who are working on this kind of software and convince them that these applications need to have certain basic features to be useful to those of us using their software to learn and maintain the languages we have studied, especially when we are away from the native language environment.

Korea National Police University Song

It seems like everything has a song in Korea. Go to the web page of almost any institution, whether it be a school, political organization, clubs of all kinds, you can often find their song online.

Maybe I’m getting a little too “close” to my topic, but I was on the website of the Korean National Police University, looking for professors that might be interesting to talk to about early postwar police who had worked during the colonial period, and as I flipping through links quickly I misread the word 교가 (school song) as 교수 (professors). The staff pages wouldn’t be listed under that word anyways.

I then found myself listening and actually digging their university song, it got me psyched up and ready to kick some bad guy ass. You can find the words and listen to it on their website or get the mp3 here:

Weekend in Kanghwa-do

Spent the weekend in Kanghwa-do with a friend. I have never been one for the usual tourist destinations so many of the highlights of the island listed in tourist brochures went unseen. The highlight for me was the hike on the first day through some hills on a small country road in the south of the island, through some farmers’ fields and along the southern coast of the island to a popular beach. Since the island is so close to North Korea, the coastline was actually a military restricted area but we walked unmolested along most of it. A man on a bicycle passing by told us it was restricted but we learned from soldiers at the next checkpoint that he was a high ranking officer out on a bike ride. When we told the biker/officer we were trying to walk along the coast to the beach, he let the soldiers further down the path know that we were harmless and to let us through. The many empty checkpoints and observation boxes along the coast had human shaped plastic scarecrows that could be set up to look like people were manning the positions.

We ended up not climbing any of the hills on the island, which in any case average around 350 meters. I’m actually glad, the hordes of other climbers, all clad in standard Korean hiking uniforms and equipment reminded me of climbing on Halla-san in Cheju-do where we essentially stood in line to get up the mountain behind hundreds of people (including groups of women sweating through their heavy make-up). Much more enjoyable was the wonderful and quiet stroll along forested country roads we got on Saturday afternoon when a local told us how to get through the hills to the coast the fastest way by an older road not marked on many maps. I recommend these country strolls in Korea as a wonderful alternative to the industrial tourist staircase that is so much hiking in Korea. You can often find yourself behind so many mountaineers you might have guessed you were on a subway stairway at rush hour if it weren’t for the fact that everyone is wielding useless metal poles and carrying plastic mats to keep the rear of their expensive and fashionable hiking pants from getting any dirt on them when they sit down.

A few places that got saved on my GPS from the weekend:

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Trip to Cheju-do

I haven’t had a chance to blog much about it but I made a trip of almost a week to Cheju-do. The original purpose was for a Fulbright researcher conference where all the junior researchers presented on the progress of their research but I went early with one of my fellow researchers because the conference was only a few days after April 3rd. This year is the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the April 3rd, 1948 uprising on Cheju island. We went early to participate in various memorial events, visit the Cheju 4.3 peace park, and the huge museum just opened in the park, and I was also able to attend an international conference on the uprising. I may blog more about Cheju 4.3 over at Frog in a Well – Korea but in the meantime, here is a quick google map mashup of places visited, something I was able to create quickly since I saved various locations on my GPS reader.

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That Very Special Day Has Arrived

Google Korea has offered something really special for this year’s offering on this very special date:

Google 사투리 번역을 소개합니다
Introducing the New Google Dialect Translation Service

If you read Korean, check out the hilarious webpage showing examples of translations between various Korean dialects, how to attach dialect “modes” for translation of dialects in Google Talk and an explanation of how Gmail will provide one click translations of those dialect filled emails into standard Korean.

I think the idea would be just as hilarious if Google Norway (as well as countless other localized Google sites in countries where there is a high degree of dialect variation) were to try it.

Pitfalls of a Hotel Hallway

I am usually not too picky about my sleeping quarters when I travel. On my recent trip to China however, I met a really friendly university student on the bus who offered to help me scout out a relatively clean and conveniently located hotel near Shandong University. The place turned out to be more than adequate and I enjoyed numerous conversations with the half dozen or so staff there during the five days I was there.

One morning, however, I woke up to what seemed to be the sound of a jack hammer drilling into my hotel room wall. I managed to ignore it but when as I walked out of my room, I found the source of the noise as soon as I opened the door:

Mega Bread

I’m not sure what the Chinese name is for it, but there is a kind of huge bread often found sold on the streets of China that I have to admit is pretty tasty. It is not the kind of hearty whole grain material that I usually like but there is something satisfying about the approximately 3cm thick, chewy composite layers of this bread covered by a crispy and salted exterior.

Mega Bread

The bread is often sold in large square slabs the size of a small coffee table, but you can also ask to buy only a quarter chunk, the size of which you can see in the picture above.

When I bought some in Jinan on my trip to Shandong recently I was reminded, however, of the fact that food hygiene is still not quite up to the standards one might want, especially for street venders. When I asked to buy a chunk of the bread, my vender took the slab of bread to the back of his pick-up truck and used the rusting metal back ramp of the vehicle as the fulcrum upon which he broke off the piece I requested.