I went to the museum for the Windows 7 launch a few days earlier, but I didn’t explore the museum itself. I just went in for the event and left afterwards, but took note that this was probably something Ed would enjoy (he is a history buff).

We went back over the weekend, and scored a few “big ticket” passes. The big ticket passes let us on board all the ships they have on display – HMAS Onslow (1968), HMAS Vampire (1959), The James Craig (1874), and The HMB Endeavor (1768). (If you have the chance, I recommend a visit.)

Does this have anything to do with software?

I was astounded by the craftsmanship, and amazing hackery that went in to these ships. Not just the ships, but everything from the sinks to the bookshelves to the plate racks. Additionally, the scale of these projects and the building upon of past knowledge was humbling. I also realised that, in general, to do great, large scale things requires great wealth – and apparently a cat of nine tails.

Standing on one of those ships and looking at the dual purpose… everything… was amazing. Everything was thought out. Everything had a purpose. Nothing appeared to be thrown in at the last minute on a whim. If something was done wrong, everyone on board could die. The shear magnitude of these projects, the number of people involved and the cross disciple input it would take to build – let alone invent – one of these ships was simply amazing.

The ones that really got me where the old ones. The 1768 wooden hull ship – the HMB Endeavor – was spectacular. This ship was built with things that mostly don’t exist, navigated with devices that are obsolete and using math that isn’t likely taught anymore.

This is an example of true engineering and hackery. A thing of beauty. And when the power goes out – it still works.

However software and computers are quite new. Designing and building system is often rushed, and the process is not respected. “Do it cheaper, do it faster” is the motto. Quality, for budgetary reasons, is an often an after thought. Yet I can’t help but think we are the ones at the beginning. We are the pre 1768 Endeavors. I wonder if these ships were designed and built with the “do it faster do it cheaper” mentality.

Ships were used to discover new lands and new routes, and software is used to discover new knowledge, understanding, human potential – and, yeah, twitter.

No one will die if web software goes bad, but it will never be as pretty or stable as a tall ship until the process is given a healthy dose of respect – and probably a few hundred years of trial and error.

All pointless rambling aside, if you get a chance, go outside to a museum. There is an amazing amount of unexpected inspiration.

Here is what the new Word of the Day widget looks like:

You can download the new widget from my Chinese Word of the Day site.

Own it today!

• Fixed the Mac OS X widget to allow for multiple lines of English text on the back side
• Added an initial HSK filter so the words the service sends out are not quite so obscure
• Added several English words to the definition list.  So you’ll see “woman; female; daughter” not just “daughter”
• Updated to the latest version of http://cc-cedict.org/wiki
• Doubled the word of the day to 2 words per day (which makes “word of the day” seem kind of silly, but eh.)

The twitter post now looks like this to indicate the HSK level of the word:

今天的单词: 女 (女) nǚ — woman; female; daughter HSK(1)

And the OS X widget looks like this:

You’ll need to download the latest widget to get some of these improvements.  You can get the new widget here: http://cn.robrohan.com.

I have not updated the Google gadget because Google changed the format or something and I’ll have to write a new gadget.  The HSK filter will still work (so the words wont be as weird), but you wont know if the word is level 1,2,3 or 4.

Happy studying

Min’s descriptions on these videos are the bees knees.

Register now – I highly doubt you’ll be sad you did.

I got tired of typing in a months worth of words, and started doing a weeks worth, then a few days, then I stopped for a month, then I did a month again… basically the service was pretty inconsistent. I’ve had “automate the thing” on my list of things to do for a while, and I finally got around to doing it last night.

I scrapped wordpress and wrote up my own simple custom thing. I did a nifty new design (well, I like it). I also added twitter integration so if you want to get a Chinese word of the day via twitter you can do that too. You can now get a word of the day in any or all of the following ways:

1) The traditional Mac OS X dashboard widget.

2) A Google Gadget (for iGoogle or the windows desktop using the google side bar thing)

3) By following 小词典 on twitter (there will likely be some sort of fancy integration with the Xiao CiDian iphone app in the future hint hint)

4) Visiting http://cn.robrohan.com from your iPhone or Android based phone (you’ll get a special UI, and can add it to your home screen)

5) Or you can just subscribe to the RSS feed directly in your favourite RSS reader.

The best part is the whole thing is now automated so there shouldn’t be anymore days with no new words (pending server outages and what not).

I’ve had a couple people email me concerned that the words have been trickling out slower than usual… I hope this fixes the problem ^_^.

Another small update to the Regex Widget. A bug reported by Niels Castle led to a new feature and an, arguable, bug fix.

The new feature is Multiline support. When you tick the mutliline check box it allows the “beginning of line” (^) and “end of line” ($) parts of a regex to work. See the screen shot for an example:

The other bug fix / feature is: you can now leave off the start and end “/” when working a regular expression. So you can use either the form “/[0-3]+/” or just “[0-3]+” – both should behave the same.

You can download the new version from my widget page.

As you might already know, the rumor is true. The new iPhone 2.0 software will add Chinese input. Supposedly supporting both pīnyīn and drawing the characters with your finger. From what I’ve gathered at the keynote, you don’t have to be running a Chinese version of the software – it works with the English version as well.

I am really excited about this addition because it will allow me to lookup words on both dict.cn and nciku.com (my favorite online dictionaries) from my mobile device. Essentially, the update will turn my phone into a mobile dictionary.

July 11th is somewhat far off though, and for the meantime I’ve been looking for an alternative dictionary.

If you happen to use an iPhone and are studying Chinese (what are the odds), I found a simple dictionary, called TigerNT, that isn’t flashy, but gets the job done. In fact, it fills a need the others don’t in that it allows you to lookup words by pīnyīn using a “normal” keyboard.

To lookup a word put the tone number at the end of the word. So, for example, if you wanted to lookup 月 instead of typing yuè, you would put yue4. The number always goes at the end of the word regardless of actual tone placement. So “j1ing” is incorrect but “jing1″ is correct.

The down side is, of course, you have to know how to pronounce a character before you can look it up. However, if you’re reading books that have both pīnyīn and characters, or if you know the word but forget the correct tone, it is a helpful resource.

Also, somewhat related, my Chinese word of the day site (brought to you by chinesefirststep.com) is now viewable as an iPhone / Android application. In addition to being a dashboard widget, a gadget, and embed-able on your own site you can now use it with your modern mobile device by just going to the page.

One of the things that made Hypercard so cool was its very simple scripting language. It put the ability to write code into the hands of the “user”. A mere mortal can throw together a simple application to solve a niche need very easily.

An example of some code looks like:

put "My text" into the first field of the first card

I’ve been working with some really smart cookies at a company called CodeFlare, and we’ve just release the first beta of TileStack.com. TileStack.com lets you run old Hypercard stacks online, and it also has an online editor to create new stacks.

Here is a short movie showing a quick walk through (it looks better fullscreen):

I personally think this has huge potential (obviously). The idea of user generated code has so many possibilities.

Sign up for a beta invite if you are interested, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter :)

In the recent update to the widget, version 1.6, there was still a slight bug with the HTML rendering. If your match result had more than one tag in the result, the first one would render correctly, but the rest still had problems (I forgot a “g”).

I had the bug bite me quite quickly after the release, but thanks to Ryan for also pointing out the oversight.

You can download the new version of the widget on my widgets page.

With the newly made up [Inter]National Regular Expression Day coming up on June 1st, this release is quite timely.

Happy Regexing