Happy New Year!
Currently working on a rough draft of a language translation processing utility.
It is a fun exercise in User Interface (UI) design and great opportunity to test some new ideas. I designed this for quick reference for translators. They quickly check on recently added words and phrases using this mobile tool. Hope you find this useful.
Have fun!
… つづく
I am currently experimenting with new Chinese Number Conversions.
Per request from several users, I have placed the traditional Chinese characters before the simplified characters in the search results where available.
You can also search traditional Chinese results on Google, Flickr and YouTube again. Learn more about Chinese Tools 1.9.
Yeah. I said it.
Private Equity Firms. Mutual Funds. Hedge Funds. Federal Reserve. You can call them whatever you want. They are all banking cartels.
I just read this post on Austrian Economists.
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/12/did-the-gold-st.html
Mismanagement Gold Standard Helped Cause the Great Depression?
Yes, But the Root Cause Was Antitrust.
History also remembers that the Great Depression was an antitrust problem that started by real estate crisis in Florida and set off a chain reaction nationwide. Lack of antitrust legislation and the era of the robber barons produced a class of Americans that possessed 90% of the countries wealth.
Upon accumulation of all this wealth, the robber barons exercised conventional wisdom abject stupidity in the management of commodities such as gold, silver, oil …. well, just pick any commodity, and chances are they mismanaged it. ^_^ The few families who got out of the market early survived. You may have heard of some of them: Rockefeller, Vanderbilt.
What is all this antitrust nonsense I am talking about?
It may be hard to remember, but in the U.S. there were actually laws (antitrust laws) that clearly stated that your bank could not do your taxes, your tax preparer could not provide your insurance, and your insurance company could not manage your mutual funds.
Most of those laws were repealed and now you are seeing the results.
Sadly, per Brooding Issue #1 in my previous post, I see massive bank failures ahead.
It appears that the giant private equity firms (who bought real estate at the top of the market) will fall and come crashing down crushing all the little people underneath. (Just like in Florida in 1929).
Currency Collapse May Be Eminent
If we are lucky, we will experience an orderly currency collapse. However, two smart guys named Bill Gates and Warren Buffet fear a disorderly fall of U.S. dollar, which will turn the Great Depression into a discussion about happier times.
… つづく
Just Relaxing Between Major Projects. I don’t blame him at all.
Brooding about the following thoughts:
All these figments of my imagination. right?
…
EDIT: Probably. It’s just a bad dream.
I’ll wake up soon. I’m not worried at all. No, really.
This is one of my favorite speeches because it made people stop and think. Many nervous laughs in the crowd which means… his message was received, by some at least.
This is Guy Kawasaki’s Blog. Very good reading.
Morinaga’s Dark Green Tea Chocolate Snack is very interesting.
It has great packaging, as it is careful to protect the contents while building a very nice presentation for guests. Nicely done.
Mmmmmmmmmm *** ~~~
The following are my notes about Rapid Site Development I jotted down during the dot-com bubble. I wrote upon reflection on how the dot-coms splurged their company budgets on expensive cars and furniture, while I worked on a shoestring budget.
–
Rapid Site Development
Taking Advantage of Web Workshop Based Web Development
Why is Primezero web development so peculiar?
Primezero is not a dot-com company. Primezero is not a design boutique. It is a workshop. The only goal here is to innovate. This means making faster, smarter robots to help people live better lives. This means streamlining development processes to reduce cost of doing business. Primezero does not fit a mold. That is why it is peculiar.
The following is a brief discussion about how ideas at Primezero come to fruition.
Notice that the test for economic viability is one of the final steps of the process. In a workshop, the focus is on rapid development instead of quarterly profits. Although the project may not make money, it may help many people which is why it may still be available for free.
Time Duration: 2 days of due diligence
When you spend hours and hours writing code and developing a product, you may become attached. You may treat a section of code or a filename with tenderness and may never want to let it go.
Hmmm, I just read a post from the Google AdSense blog:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/12/farewell-onsite-advertiser-sign-up.html
Ben raised an excellent point: “sunsetting” features is sometimes necessary to improve the overall ROI of a product. Of course, phasing out features does not require deletion from your library of tricks.
Just as companies like Toyota constantly research customer need, I also use Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to determine what customers really want and what they really need.
I often remove features based on the metrics and remove emotion from the design process… most of the time. 
Download the English-Chinese Dictionary Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X. Now you can start English-Chinese translation searches on Primezero Chinese Tools from your Mac desktop.
See a list of features.
Again available is Chinese practice paper in various shapes and sizes. The version I drafted in 2004 are now available, back by popular demand.
I need a tab-delimited file of the periodic table, but all I could find out there is this:
ftp://ftp.nist.gov/pub/dataplot/other/reference/PERIODIC.TXT
So, I guess it is time to use some text-processing techniques to get what I need. These are not tabs you see; these are spaces but nothing consistent.
Let us replace the white spaces between 2 and (let’s say) 20 spaces with exactly 1 tab.
FIND: \s{2,20}
REPLACE: \t
This is your result.
Done.
Developer Notes:
They finally captured a photograph of a Pols Voice!
Seeing this photo brought back memories about hours spent playing Legend of Zelda. The resemblance is very striking.
One of the key features of the Primezero dictionary tools has been the ability to jump on Chinese search engines without knowing how to type or pronounce the Chinese.
Here is a quick example.
You want to find that funny commercial that has been playing on TVB lately… so you go to Primezero Chinese Tools and query “Amoy”
From this query you find the Chinese translation of Amoy. Now, you want find the video on the Chinese language version of Youtube? No problem. Click on the Youtube to “淘大”
So, as you can see, search Chinese without knowing Chinese is as simple as 1-2-3.
Bell and the two knuckle-heads from hell are at it again in this latest online HKBN Commercial. The cartoon is in Cantonese. 
Quite funny.
Latest Commercial Here: http://www.hkbn.net/26timescomic/
Developer’s Notes:
It appears that they are test-marketing storyboards online prior to spending money on new commercials with similar characters. If that is true, this is a smart move and a great way to get attention of subsets of customers (some will enjoy; some will not ).
There are a few ways to use 喂 as an interjection.
1. When someone calls you on the phone, you answer the phone saying: 喂.
2. When you want to get someone’s attention, you can say: 喂!
3. When you want to interrupt somebody in the middle of something you can say: 喂!!!~
.. as you can see in this commercial for Amoy Dimsum, now available in the freezer aisle in your neighborhood grocery store …
Just launched on Google a few minutes ago: you can sign on to AIM using Google Talk.
Uhh… People still use AIM?
Google TV Ads? Hmm. Google is become quite an impressive ad broker.
This is a brief guide discussing how to add your Chinese Chop Google Gadget to Blogger. In this step-by-step tutorial we will have two tasks:
If you have questions, please post them in comments.
Let’s get started.
Task 1: Get Google Gadget Code
First, you will need the Google Gadget code that you will copy and paste to you blog.
Change your Display Settings.
Click on Preview Changes to take a sneak peek at your new chop. When you are happy with your, chop click on Get the Code.
Copy the code in the form.
You are now ready to add this content to blogger.
Task 2: Publish the Google Gadget to Blogger
We start at the Blogger dashboard. Click on Layout for your blog.
Click Add a Page Element.
The Choose a New Page Element window will open. You want to add an HTML/JavaScript Element so click Add To Blog.
Paste your Google Gadget Code into the content box.
Click Save Changes.
You will return to the Layout window and click Save again.
Your done!! Now, check out your new Chinese chop~~
If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer in Windows XP to sail around the World Wide Web, you will be happy to know that I have just updated the Primezero Chinese Chop Google Gadgets and WordPress Widgets so you can actually see your personalized Chinese Chops that you have added to your blogs.
I just got around to some pre-release testing and find to my surprise that Microsoft Internet Explorer does not like the automatically generated PNGs. So, I did what any good doozer would do…
Updates for Chinese Tools 1.8:
Updates for Primezero Chinese Tools 1.7:
More links to tools and information for Chinese language processing :
To simply submission of Chinese vocabulary lists, I have only requested that Chinese characters be placed in column A and the translation be placed in column B. The idea was that you did not have to worry about the Pinyin/Romanization in your lists.
Some editors find this too restrictive. Fair enough.
So, I am adding a pinyin override option for a few editors to see how this works out.
If the tests are peachy, I’ll make this feature available to all lists. Notice how Column A must be Chinese, but Columns B or C can be either Pinyin or English (to avoid everyone having to redo your list). Also notice that rows do not need a pinyin override.
Community Drives Content Drives Community … and so on.
One of the key components of Primezero Chinese Tools is the community-driven content.
Why?
I want to afford everyone, from new students to professors to native speakers, an opportunity to share a learning experience and with that, their perspective on their language of interest.
Primezero is designed to mediate a dialogue between tutor and learner, which works out well since we are all one-word teachers. We can all learn from each other.
Looking at different perspectives helps build community and this very-specialized mode of social networking for language learners supplements various pedagogies, which all have the common goal: fluency for everyday conversation (not mastery of 小说, but just plain, simple fluency).
Ready or NOT… here they are…
Far from ready for showtime, but I wanted to share something you: Primezero PHP.
Primezero PHP is set of classes I have been using to write applications for processing Chinese on Primezero Chinese Tools. The code is available in my Google Code site:
The fundamental idea from this collection of classes is that writing Chinese applications for translation or learning should modular and allow developers to build simple and flexible learning experiences quickly.
Here is a list of some of the things you can do with Primezero PHP:
I will be adding for features and more importantly, more documentation shortly with some example code and applications. I love the documentation part of projects because it affords me an opportunity to understand design decisions and make further changes.
Hope this helps someone. Send feedback anytime.
Developer Notes: Links to Great Resources on Chinese language processing
Other places with info about Chinese language processing stuff out there:
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