Blue Lotus Blog

A while ago one of the editors at マックピープル (Mac People) magazine asked if they could feature Language Aid in their section on shareware/freeware. I happily accepted and greatly appreciated the free advertising. A while later they asked if they could include Language Aid on a DVD-ROM that they publish containing freeware/shareware called オンラインウェアDVD (Onlineware DVD). The DVD arrived in the mail yesterday (picture is at the right). I have not worked directly on Language Aid for a while but I do have a couple more plugin modules in mind that I want to implement and the next set of new features are all laid out. I have been working a project peripherally connected to Language Aid which has taken a lot of my time lately, but this has come to a good stopping point so that I can return to working on Language Aid more.

I had an interesting thought the other day as I set up my iPhone. When setting up my security lockout number I realized that I didn’t actually know what my bank’s pin number was. This is because my bank pin number is a derivative of another number that I know and my hands just do the right thing as it constructs the derivative of my memorized number. I thought about how this might be useful if someone was ever interrogating me through drugs or sleepiness because I honestly don’t know the answer off the top of my head. I would have to sit there and work through the numbers one by one to construct what the pin actually is. It reminds me of the “Gnilleps” card in Cranium where you have to spell a word backwards. It is fairly difficult for me to do because that is contrary to how my brain visualizes and catalogs the word, but if given enough time I can slowly crank it out.

I really have to give props to svk. It really does excel where the svn client stutters (much in the same way that Subversion surpassed cvs). I have been using svk on my client machines for a while now and have found it rather nice and easy to use. There is of course the great benefit of not having to drag those annoying .svn directories around, but little things like being able to ’svk ignore’ my build directories just make it sweeter to work with. That and the fact that it actually works. I tried to ’svn co’ one of my projects on my source/build server and it would always choke at the same place and complain that it “Can’t copy ‘blahblah-base’ to ‘blahblah.tmp.tmp’: No such file or directory”. I tried to re-check it out but it complained that I needed to svn cleanup, but that would fail because of a similar “Can’t copy…” error message. I installed svk and it was able to successfully perform a check out and all is good now. There are of course downsides. Svk seems to have trouble with capitalization differentiation and it also seems to not like spaces in paths (those times I drop back to svn to fix those single instances). Also, much of the goodness of svk comes at the cost of drive space to mirror your repository and having to sync regularly. Despite its rough edges, it is now my source control client of choice and is on the whole a pleasure to work with.

Every once in a while I find a need for a tool that doesn’t yet exist. Or rather, a tool that doesn’t exist for Mac OS X that does things in the way that I want. My original motivation for writing Language Aid was that I wanted a program that provided Japanese text lookup functionality and I couldn’t find any. The other day I found myself once again craving a tool that I have frequently desired: a binary diff tool. For some reason I can’t find anything that will just do straight-up diffs of binary files. Every differ out there seems to be completely oriented around text. When running /usr/bin/diff on binary files it will just return that the files are indeed different and nothing more. Filemerge will attempt to interpret the files textually and show you what it thinks is different but the output is rarely useful. I recently found myself needing this functionality again and did another quick net survey for the imaginary tool in vain. I decided to whip up my own binary differ real quick (bdiff) and implement just the limited functionality that I currently desire. The thing about binary diffing is that without the assumptions on the meaning of the data (like with textual data) you really have few efficient ways to determine whether data has been changed or whether data has been inserted/deleted. This is quite the quandary and presents a more complicated situation than textual diffing when you present two files that are completely different. In my binary differ I have decided that if the two files have the same length then it chooses a heuristic that assumes that the files are variations of each other and do not have information inserted or deleted. If they aren’t of the same length then it chooses and a more general approach. I might improve it in the future but for now it serves my very simple need to just figure out what exact bytes are different from one file to another.

A few years ago I had a great idea for a business that I thought had great potential. The idea was cryptographic timestamping. A way to prove that certain documents or other pieces of information existed at a certain point in time. It would be a great way to fight plagiarism, establish disclosure or just prove that a certain document has existed from a specific point in time. It would be a relatively low overhead business, technically. All that you would need to do is to put up a couple of servers that would create/store signatures and maintain payment accounts. Customers themselves would be responsible to keep their documents safe but the service when presented with the document could verify it’s authenticity and the timestamp of its origin. Recently I thought about this idea again and started to look around to see if anybody has done anything similar. It looks like http://www.etimestamp.com has beaten me to the punch by about 8 years. The service looks very similar to what I had envisioned with methods for legal verification of the timestamp and everything. It looks to be a quality service with reasonable prices. I may have to take advantage of it sometime.

So one thing that I have been thinking about doing for a while is putting up a forum. Forums seem to be an easy way to allow people to openly solicit help and appear to be an essential ingredient in fostering a community around a product or site. The problem is that they also come with the ongoing responsibility of management, spam fighting and the like. I have decided that now the effort is worth it and have opened up the Aoren Forums! The logins between both the blog commenting and forum access are shared so you only have to sign up to one to get access to the other (in theory, there might still be some snags for a while).

It has been a while (Oct 2006) since the last release of Langauge Aid and it is high time for a revamp. Language Aid 1.1 is actually a fairly big upgrade from the previous version of 1.0.1. This is mainly because the nature of Language Aid is changing from that of being an exclusively Japanese oriented tool to one of a more general nature. The most requested feature for Language Aid by far has been something like… “Can you get Language Aid to support language _______?” To which I have had to previously answer that it does not :(. But with the release of version 1.1 now a lot of text processing functionality has been exported to plugins! This means that anyone with some programming experience can now write a plugin that will interface with any web service or lookup system that they want by using a straightforward SDK. The hope is that people who desire functionality for using Language Aid with other languages or services now have the power in their hands to make it happen. I would also like to foster a community around Language Aid plugins as well as expand the number and variety of plugins that are shipped with Language Aid. All in all, a very exciting release for me. However, there is a lot more good stuff coming in the future so stay tuned.

I am now pleased to announce the second of many tech oriented articles that will be placed here on the Blue Lotus Blog. This time it is about a problem in computer graphics that I have been working on for years called Order Independent Translucency. It is something so simple and basic that you might wonder why nobody has solved it. So have I. That is why I have decided to write about it and have included some example source code to go with it. In this article I outline the problem, discuss and implement the currently most promising solution and suggest a better hardware-based solution. Come on in and let us make you aware of a problem that you were happy to be oblivious to.

I am pleased to announce the first of many tech oriented articles that will be placed here on the Blue Lotus Blog. Neo Geo Cart Conversions applies the black art of hardware hacking to one of the best video game systems ever. But this isn’t a plain old mod, this hackjob lets you play previously unattainable (read unaffordable) games for realistic prices! Although it isn’t extremely difficult, it can be an expensive mistake if done incorrectly. Come learn all about the underground world of converting arcade Neo Geo games to work with their counterpart brethren in the home.