Blog

I ♥ Chinese Books

Since I started learning Chinese I've collected quite a collection of books on the subject. These include textbooks, dictionaries, books on grammar, calligraphy, culture, history and a couple of novels (although it's still rather challenging to read those). Some I bought on-line, but a lot of them I bought in Taiwan and China where books are dead cheap. Here are two of my favorites.

Getting subtitles in sync

As an early new years resolution I'll start with sharing more of the snippets I code up to make my life easier. Here's one : the SRT subtitle scaler. It's a little ruby script to sync subtitles with a movie. I don't know how often one needs this, but I got some English subtitles on-line for a Chinese movie and I just couldn't get them to properly line up with the movie.

Chopstick Kong-Fu

Giraf ontmoet KTV lady

Going Gutsy : installing the latest Ubuntu

A while ago the fabulous folks from Ubuntu released the latest version of their popular Linux distributions. The version number of Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu is now up to 7.10 (being the year and month it was released). More often however Ubuntu versions are referred to by their alliterating nicknames. I'll go over my experiences upgrading from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon.

Announcing ZhongWiki

Last week saw the launch of the first version of ZhongWiki. A wiki for people learning Mandarin Chinese. It's still in it's infancy, but I have a feeling it might become a great site and possibly a vibrant community.

Smile :-), it's your birthday

Last week the Smiley :-) turned 25. Happy birthday and congratulations! It was proposed by Scott E Fahlman in a post to a "Bulletin board" at Carnegie Mellon University the 19th of September 1982. Scott proposed its use to mark humorous or sarcastic remarks so they wouldn't be misunderstood.

These two pages have more info on the origin of the Smiley