Mathieu Blondel

First, let me introduce EPWING, a dictionary and encyclopedia format which is quite popular in Japan but still remains almost unknown else where. Development of the format started during the 80s. In 1991 the EPWING Consortium was formed by Fujitsu, Sony, Iwanami and other Japanese IT and publishing companies. In 1996, EPWING was standardized as JIS (Japanese Industry Standard) X4081 and revised in 2001. The EPWING format exists in several versions including such features as sound, movies, compression, etc. and offers various search methods. Versions are backward compatible but not forward compatible.

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Just found out the trend search tool from BlogPulse. It allows the creation of graphs that plot “buzz” arround specific search terms in the blogosphere. It is especially useful to measure how a given event can correlate with a given trend on the blogosphere.

As an example, here’s a graph for the buzz arround the Mohammed cartoons. As the graph shows, all started back in late January and is now slowly beginning to calm down…

According to LinuxFR, people from the french Wiktionary project are in the process of adding the 35,000 entries from the 1935 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, which is now public domain. This is great! Aside from that, the french and english “wiktionaries” have already reached the 100,000 entries mark! This is quite impressive but we have to notice that “wikitionaries” are monolingual (definitions) and bilingual (translations into various target languages) at the same time. That’s why for example we can see portuguese words on the french wiktionary… I’m curious to know the advantages of doing that way…

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This release fixes a bug that prevented Fantasdic from running under Windows (thanks to Gabriele Renzi for telling me) and some user interface tweaks (thanks to John Spray for the patch).

Screenshot : Fantasdic under Windows

Download : fantasdic-1.0-beta1.1.tar.gz

I’m pleased to announce the first release of Fantasdic, a client for the DICT protocol (a dictionary network protocol, RFC 2229).

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I personally prefer not to use mail services like gmail and manage my mails on my own server. But I receive a lot of spams everyday which is a real pain. You can use any solution you want to hide your email address, those spammers always somehow manage to get through.

Until now, I’ve been using client-side spam filtering with Thunderbird which is a simple solution but has a number of drawbacks : it uses more bandwith and above all if you read your emails via a client on another computer or via a webmail, spams are not filtered. So a few days ago, I finally installed Bogofilter on my server which turned out to be very easy. I’ve chosen this solution for its statistical approach (bayesian filtering) and because it is said to be faster than SpamAssassin (Bogofilter is written in C, SpamAssassin in Perl).

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I have finally decided to yield to temptation and start my own journal!

I somehow felt the need to express myself and wanted some kind of log for my various activities on Internet. I think I’ll mainly write about computer science and chinese and japanese language among other things.

I’ve decided to write in English because, thanks to free sotfware, I know more and more people from all over the world and I would like them to be able to read me. I may also write in French sometimes or attempt to write in Japanese or Chinese in certain circumstances!

Hope that it will interest a few people!