I have just found out the Nihongobot Jabber robot. Nihongobot acts as a normal contact you can chat with. The only difference is that you can ask him to look up words for you in EDICT. This means that you can turn your Jabber client into a Japanese dictionary. Very clever idea !
Now what about a bridge Jabber <-> DICT ? It would allow to look up words on DICT servers such as dict.org or nihongobenkyo.org from gaim :-)
I probably should not have spent so much time on this with all the things I have to do lately but here we are: I have released WikipediaFS 0.3. With WikipediaFS, you can view and edit Wikipedia articles as if they were real files.
Highlights for this release :
- Compatible with new fuse-python API
- Rewritten from scratch
- Significant reliability and performances improvements
- HTTPS, HTTP authentication support (in addition to HTTP and proxy)
- Subpages support
- Automatically make directories for sites from the Wikimedia foundation
- Files now need the “.mw” extension!
Overall, I am very happy with this release!
I would like to thank Csaba Henk (fuse-python’s maintainer and author of fuse’s port to FreeBSD) for his prompt answers to my questions.
Sébastien Delafond uploaded this version to the Debian servers yesterday. By the way, yesterday I found out that WikipediaFS 0.2 had been downloaded almost 2000 times on sourceforge. Not bad ! :-)
The Google Summer of Code has not officially started yet but since with school it will not be easy to work on the project in May and June, I thought I would make good use of my one-week holidays and give away a little bit of my time to make progress on the project :-).
First and foremost, as I had never developed anything for Maemo, I had to run through the process of setting up my working environment. This can be summed up as the following three steps :
- doing the necessary to gain root privileges on the device
- install SSH in order to be able to control the device from a normal computer and move files from/to the device
- install scratchbox in order to develop and test programs from a normal computer.
All those steps were straightforward and well documented. Incidentally, I am very impressed by scratchbox which is a great piece of work and integration !
After a few hours of work, I got tomoe, the handwriting recognition engine, to work under scratchbox. I just had to remove the gucharmap dependency. Then I made Debian packages for tomoe and tomoe-gtk because it is the easiest way to test a program on the device. On the device indeed, tomoe runs well and it is very convenient to draw characters with the stylus. The only problem is that it is currently very slow : about four seconds are required on each stroke to display the updated list of character candidates… I see three ways of solving this problem:
- Since tomoe supports multiple backends (xml, mysql…), create a new backend with particular focus on performances.
- Identify the bottlenecks of the main backend and improve its performances.
- Disable the update of the character candidates on each stroke. This would be the ultimate solution in case the previous two solutions do not work. Update on each stroke is however very useful because you can understand if you have not drawn a stroke correctly as soon as you have drawn it.
As expected, the job for this summer will mainly have to do with performances and smooth integration.
Apart from that, the tomoe team seems to be quite active! Hu Zheng from Red Hat Beijing (?) and author of stardict, has contributed a stroke editor to help add support for more characters. He is in the process of adding 6000 Chinese characters. There are some plans on the list to add support for the missing Japanese characters as well. Good news!
