AltSci Cell

Mar 21, 2017

learn_kanji-0.4.tar.xz [sig]

This blog is a continuation of this blog post which is a pretty good mix of technical and creative projects that this blog was originally written for. If you look at some of the way-way-back posts you'll see some of the things I've thought about and tried to work on from this perspective.

Sept 1, 2016

Yesterday I published a small piece of software to Small Wide World's git to very little fanfare. It was a generalization of a bad piece of software I wrote the day before. It uses NLTK to perform a simple task: parse a simple sentence which follows the form "subject verb object" with optional additional information starting with "because". Examples of this grammar include:

GnuPG is software
IRC is a protocol
software implements a protocol
Javantea is human
AI3 is software
Javantea wrote AI3
Javantea writes software
Javantea writes English
Javantea reads German
Javantea reads Japanese
Javantea reads Portuguese
Javantea reads Spanish

nlp1.py creates this graph of the relationships:

Feb 16, 2016

learn_kanji-0.2.tar.xz [sig]

For many years I have been learning Japanese as a hobby. I have spent years watching subtitled anime to get my comprehension higher. Anime's often slow and deliberate speech patterns make it fairly easy to grab words. But the pace at which anime goes if you aren't careful you can forget everything you hear. Of course, you'll be more prepared for conversing and remembering if you've heard something 1000 times rather than once, but that doesn't translate into instant comprehension.

If you ever accidentally delete /usr/bin/emerge (happened to me when I ran emerge -aC dev-lang/python-exec), don't panic. That file is just a wrapper for /usr/lib/python-exec/python2.7/emerge. So you can fix your system by temporarily using /usr/lib/python-exec/python2.7/emerge.

Yes, it's that simple. This is also a useful way to execute pylint and pyflakes on python3 files while still having your system's default python be python2. Simply run /usr/lib/python-exec/python3.3/pyflakes (substituting whichever version of python you use instead of 3.3) and you're set. Yes, it was actually designed to work that way.

In case you want more to read, read this. In case you're more interested in playing than reading, click here.