AltSci Cell

May 5, 2017

On Thursday of this week (May 4, 2017) I released a mail client. It's pretty humble, but I've been using it for a decade and so it was worth it to me to iron out a handful of bugs and make it good enough for other people to use. Currently it won't be much use to you if you run Windows, Mac OSX, don't run your own mail server, or don't understand what fetchmail is*. But those things are fixable and I intend to fix them in the months to come. That means this blog post doesn't have to cater to end users, so I won't attempt to. This blog post will be about how I came to write a mail client and why it makes sense in 2017.

* The wording of that sentence was pretty bad so I'll reverse it. BikeIM-0.5 is usable to you if you run Postfix, if you run Dovecot, if you run OpenSMTPD, if you run fetchmail, if you use GnuPG, if you use Mutt, if you run Linux or *BSD, if you use Git, and understand how to report bugs.

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.