Stuff
This page contains a collection of items that I couldn't find a more suitable location for just now. Once the collection grows, I may consider organising it in a more suitable manner.
Creations
This is proof that I have, or at some point in the past had, too much free time. For now, I'm going to order this in reverse chronological order (newer stuff first).
Japanese-English dictionary for ZBEDIC
ZBEDIC is a dictionary viewer that can be used for a large number of dictionaries. I created a Japanese-English dictionary based on EDICT using a Python script.
The main advantage is that allows both kana and kanji look-ups. The existing dictionary only had kanji keywords for words written in kanji, making life hard for the illiterate people like myself. I've gotten around this at the expense of increasing the number of entries -- for each entry containing kanji, an entry containg the appropriate kana is created. The new entry contains a link to the original entry -- this minimises data duplication. Entries with the same keyword are grouped together into one entry. This mostly avoids keyword duplication.
I have a feeling the script I created can be used with other dictionaries in the EDICT format as well, but I haven't tried them yet. You can get a substantial list of existing dictionaries here.
Motobook
The following is an excerpt from the README file:
This is a command-line utility that can be used to backup and restore the phonebook on a Motorola phone. I was motivated to write it as I couldn't find a way to backup my phonebook without booting into Windows. I use it with my RAZR V3, and haven't tested it with any other model, so your mileage may vary. If you've tried this application with your phone and it worked for you, drop me a line.
It is written in C++, and uses glib (to parse command-line args) and libxml++ (for serialisation/deserialisation of phonebook data).
In developing this application, I relied greatly on the information supplied by Hugh Sparks, the developer of motobackup, a similar application for Windows. His web-site goes to great lengths to explain the commands used to access the address book from the Motorola phone. Without his detailed write-up, developing this program would be much harder.
[ Source ]Russian JCUKEN (ЙЦУКЕН) layout for SCIM
Since I'm lazy, I'm just going to copy text from my blog...
Over the weekend, I started feeling a bit nostalgic about uni and decided to install Fluxbox on my home machine. One of the first problems I ran into was switching keyboard layouts -- I needed to enter text in Russian and Japanese as well as English. Previously, I used Gnome, which had an app to change the X keyboard layout, and SCIM, which I could use as an input method for Japanese.
I had long wondered whether I need both the X keyboard switcher and SCIM, since SCIM seems sophisticated enough to handle it alone. But, alas, the only Russian input table I could find was the somewhat weird Yawerty. The more popular Jcuken was nowhere to be found. But I didn't really have a reason to do anything about it... until now.
There didn't seem to be any good keyboard layout switchers for Fluxbox, so I decided to have a go at writing my very own SCIM table. It actually wasn't so hard... Armed with instructions from the SCIM page, Fluxbox FAQ, the Yawerty input table, and a copy of Vim's russian-jcuken.vim tables, I set out on my heroic quest.
The result -- behold... Russian Jcuken keyboard layout for SCIM. Done deal.
I thought I might clarify why exactly you'd need this sort of thing. After all, keyboard layouts are handled perfectly fine by X (setxkbmap). You don't really need SCIM here. It gets a bit more complicated when you want to input in languages that require a little more than a keyboard layout change -- in my case, I sometimes need to input Japanese. So to save myself using two separate input language switchers, I decided to use SCIM for both of them.
PS. I'm back to using gnome. I'm still using SCIM, though.
[ Source ]