fzort

I suck at my own mother language. I think in an ugly bastard of Portuguese, English [*], and simian shrieks. I think I haven't read a book in my own language in over a decade [**]. I fail at verbal conjugation. Yesterday, I wanted to write "in the grand scheme of things" in an e-mail at work and couldn't think of an equivalent expression in Portuguese.

Maybe I should do something about it.

[*] The international intertubes dialect, that is.
[**] Why bother, if the titles I'm interested in aren't released here and Brazilian books are obscenely expensive (Brazilians - even the ones with money - don't like to read, so print runs are small and prices are sky high). Anyway, imported books aren't taxed, so even with shipping costs imported books are usually over two times cheaper than local editions.

I've had Stevens' "Unix Network Programming" in my bookshelf for like a decade and still haven't read it from cover to cover.

Holy hell, I wrote a lot of Japanese-related games.

Yomouze:


jtypespeed:


Kasui (match kanji to make jukugo, for Android, WIP):


k-rad (kanji puzzle, for Android, WIP):


There are also a couple of flashcard type games (including one that I use almost every day), but no videos for those.

Why do I waste so much time with this language?

So I'm using Slackware 13 at home (yes, I know, laugh away) and UTF-8-encoded Japanese man pages are an unreadable mess. It looks like the groff is the culprit - this is 21st century and it can't handle UTF-8 input.

This wrapper by Bruno Haible fixed the issue. To make things work, I changed the NROFF variable in /usr/lib/man.conf to something like groff-ut8 -Tutf8 -mandoc.

It worked, but section titles are messed up.

Unfortunately, some of the man pages under /usr/man/ja in my system are encoded in UTF-8 and others in EUC-JP. The latter don't work, of course (my locale us ja_JP.UTF-8).

By the way, there's a collection of Japanese man pages here. They need to be converted to UTF-8. Something like

for i in *; do iconv -f EUC-JP | gzip - > $i.gz; done

For some reason, the local sysadmins decided to filter 22. ssh.github.com listens on 443, though. To use it:

1. Add the following to the ~/.ssh/config file to create an alias for github:
   

   Host github
   User git
   Port 443
   Hostname ssh.github.com
   

   
   
   
2. Change ${PROJECT_ROOT}/.git/config to use this alias:
   

   ...
   [remote "origin"]
           fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
           url = git@github:fzort/kasui
   ...
   

   
   

Meanwhile, the company's DNS server still runs on Windows.

Let's keep the dream alive for another year. Keep on rockin'!

I love you all! Happy New Year!

I feel like I haven't coded in ages.

I started a new game project. The code is on Github. It doesn't do much so far.

The game needs some 3D models, so I tried to install Wings 3D (which I used to make the models for Gamma Cephei) on my home desktop, but didn't have much luck (I'm using Slackware 13). So I tried Blender instead, and I'm liking it. Still taking notes and trying to figure it out.

If you have time to read this useless blog, then you have time to listen to Rockzaemon's piano arrangement of Bach's Harpsichord Concerto No. 1. I swear the Allegro improved my productivity at work today.

(By the way, IMSLP is a nice site.)

From the paper Microstructure Abnormalities in Adolescents with Internet Addiction Disorder:

Regional gray matter volume comparison indicated atrophy within several clusters for the entire group of internet addicts (p < 0.05, corrected), which were the bilateral DLPFC, SMA, cerebellum, OFC and the left rACC (...)

Our results (Figure 1) of the reduced gray matter volume in the DLPFC, rACC, OFC, SMA and cerebellum may be, at least in part, associated with cognitive control and goal-directed behavior dysfunctions in internet addiction, which may explain fundamental symptoms of internet addiction.