Singularity on the Plane

Word Dump: 好きすぎて バカみたい - 8:34 AM 8/2/2006

The current word dump is 好きすぎて バカみたい (Suki Sugite Baka Mitai) by DEF.DIVA (a H!P unit consisting of Abe Natsumi, Goto Maki, Ishikawa Rika, and Matsuura Aya).

Kanji	Kana	English
	みたい	-like
	ララバイ	lullaby
	あこがれ	yearning
	そうしそうあい	mutual love
	ころ	time
	まける	to lose
	ずいぶん	extremely
前	まえ	before
	こおる	to freeze
	レンジ	stove
	かいとう	thaw
	もどる	to turn back
やり直す	やりなおす	to start over
	ねむる	to sleep
	いじょう	more than
	めいわく	trouble
	くちょう	tone
	さいしょ	first
	おくり	seeing off
下らない	くだらない	worthless
	かえる	to go home
	うなずく	to nod
	おわかれ	farewell

Stats:

• Previous “average new words/song”: 19.5
• New words in this song: 23 (same as previous one)
• New “average new words/song”: 20.67
• Total words in word list: 1240

Without a digital English-English dictionary - 8:37 PM 8/1/2006

When I reinstalled my Windows, I backed up Oxford Dictionary’s folder. However running the executable on the new Windows didn’t work because the program seemed to require a library which was unregistered. Therefore I’m now left without a digital dictionary.

PS: Previously I installed the Oxford dictionary (called “Oxford Advanced Genie) from a CD that wasn’t mine. The content is of course superb (you can even hear the sound of each word), however it isn’t free and the user interface is terrible.

OpenOffice.org Writer’s thesaurus isn’t always helpful. For example, giving the thesaurus “gourmet” as an input brings “epicure”, “gastronome”, “bon vivant”, “epicurean”, “foodie”, and “sensualist (general term)” as synomyms. “Sensualist” didn’t seem to fit the context (it was about food). “Foodie” is a term that is absolutely related to food, but what does it mean? A person that likes to eat a lot? No idea. The other words are complete aliens to me.

How about Wiktionary? The entry for “gourmet” is probably there but I can’t access it from home, obviously.

Somehow, I have the installer for linguist (probably copied off a friend). Since it can function as an English to Indonesian dictionary, I installed it. Searching for “gourmet” gives “ahli pencicip makanan”. Nice, but it seems to be a commercial program (which I somehow have illegally obtained) so I’m quite reluctant to use it.

So, currently my legal alternative is a good old printed dictionary (God bless the trees). I currently have “OXFORD Advanced Learner’s DICTIONARY” (4th edition, 1989) which I borrowed from my uncle. “gourmet” gives “person who enjoys and is exper in the choice of fine food, wines, etc”. Nice description.

Another alternative is a “SAT I” book I own. It has a 3500 word list. There, “gourmet” means “connoisseur of food and drink” and “connoisseur” (an alien word) means “person competent to act as a judge of art”. You can’t count on every word being on this book, but when it’s there, you get a nice definition and an example sentence.

Because a paper dictionary is quite a bother to use, I’m going to search for a freely available English to English dictionary database. Something like EDICT, where you can download the database and use any client to view it (or make your own).

Btw, I encountered the word “gourmet” while learning Japanese. In “Hello! Project DVD MAGAZINE volume 7″, the sentence “ゴルメレポーター。。。” popped on the screen:

Searching “ゴルメ” (gorume) in EDICT gives “gourmet”, an English word unknown to me (”レポーター” (repootaa) obviously means “reporter”). This is not the first time something like this happened. “curfew”, “stingy”, “sulk”, and “fickle” are some other English words I stumbled upon while learning Japanese. It’s interesting that learning Japanese reveals a lot of my English vocabulary deficiency.

Update: The solution is to use StarDict.

Bad handphone design - 10:41 PM 7/29/2006

On my phone (Samsung something) the disconnect button (the one with the red phone icon) is placed above the “3/def” button and below the “options” button. When writing an SMS, pressing that button will discard the message and bring you straight to the main screen. The message will be lost!

With that design, a user that accidentally presses the button will lose the message. Murphy’s law states that “when something bad can happen, it WILL happen”. It happened to me already around 2 or 3 times, and I was really pissed off when it happened.

I can envision 2 improvements:

• When the “discard” button is pressed, prompt the user. This behavior can be found anywhere from Notepad (”The text in the “xyz” file has changed. Do you want to save the changes”) to Firefox (”You are about to close “x” open tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?”)
• Go to the main menu directly, but save the message in the drafts folder. This “no need to save” behavior can be seen in some programs like Tomboy (a great GTK# note taking program).

It’s pretty simple, really. The principle is “don’t let users do disastrous things easily”. Things like this are now taught on a standard Computer Science course, “Human Computer Interaction” (but not if you get my lecturer since he didn’t have a clue what the course is all about).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 8:28 pm by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Hardware & Software, Japanese, Life, Study, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.