Introducing Kotoba
Kotoba is very much a work-in-progress Japanese vocabulary system for students learning Japanese. While there are a lot of other pieces of...
Kotoba using ActiveScaffold
As of this evening I have re-done Kotoba using ActiveScaffold. I have also updated the application to use Rails version 2.2. All in all, I...
Kotoba Gains Authentication
Kotoba‘s user authentication and registration are functionally complete. This includes account creation confirmation using a key that is...
Stopping Spammers
In my first implementation of password reset, a user just entered their email address and they were sent a new password. Unfortunately, this...
Going Legit
What web 2.0 is not legit if it doesn’t have a PayPal Donate button somewhere on it? Answer: none. And Kotoba is no different. So donate if...
Importing JMdict
Well, it seems progress toward getting Kotoba to its base-line functionality is nearer than farther away as of this weekend with the ability...
Degraded Performance Resolved
Two days ago I ran into an issue with ActiveScaffold (AS) and Kotoba whereby performance was degraded as the number of words in the database...
Kotoba goes I18n and L10n
Internationalization, aka I18n for those l33t (elite) readers out there, is the process of removing any specific language references from...
We got CRUD!
For those not familiar with the term CRUD, it stands for “create”, “retrieve” “update” and “delete”. Basically, these are the four (4) basic...
ActiveScaffold, Meet RecordSelect
A natural consequence of managing many-to-many relationships is the need to provide usable controls to select items. With the JMdict alone...
Cross References, ho!
What is a dictionary if you cannot discover relationships between words? Well, not much in my opinion. In order to better let to find...
Phase I Complete
Well, I think we can safely say we have reached our first milestone with Kotoba: importation of JMDict. Yeah! We now have over 130,000...
Multi-byte Strikes Again
Multi-byte support, while by-and-large a now a well-supported stable of modern programming languages, is still something that trip up a...
Phase II Complete
It took me a bit of wrangling, but I believe Phase II of the project is now complete! It too me three different UI approaches to managing...
Kotoba is Fav’conified
Sometimes it is the little things that can make you smile. Case is point is Kotoba‘s new favicon. I wanted something that was clean and...
Create Icons Easily
Want to quickly create icons quickly that all follow a similar size, coloring, and text? Then check out http://www.rss-icon.com/icon.php We...
Integration Testing with Selenium
Testing. Testing. Testing. There any number of ways to qualify testing in software. Unit testing. Functional testing. Systems testing....
Caching RSS Feeds
We recently incorporated RSS feeds into Kotoba. I noted while implementing my solution that there are some tutorials [1, 2] out there that...
SVNと文字化け
I recently ran into an issue with installing subversion 1.5.6 via MacPort. Namely, I ended up with incorrect encoding of characters (文字化け as...
Managing Externals with Piston
One thing that I like to do is ensure I am using the best practices I can even (especially) in my personal projects. Kotoba is no different....
A Moment’s Word
In order to help introduce ourselves to new words sometimes it is best to find them serendipitously. While serendipity by not definition is...
Kotoba_app’s First Words
Some of you may have noticed that kotoba_app is now speaking! While the first fits and starts included my heavy-handed hand in the...
Kotoba Making Friends
Kotoba wants to be your friend! In what will be an interesting experiment in social networking, Kotoba now befriends other Twitter users who...
How Do You Spell β?
In an attempt to help clarify where Kotoba is at, we have appropriately adorned Kotoba with a β (beta) moniker to help ensure everyone knows...
Sexy Models
Well, maybe sexy is too strong a word for most people. But if you are like me, then data modeling is sexy. And if that is the case then...
MySQL + UTF-8 = Not So Obvious
Back in the day of MySQL 4, UTF-8 was a relatively straight-forward thing. You declared the charset to be utf-8 and behold! so it was....
Houston, we have 漢字 文字 Characters!
Kotoba achieved another important milestone this evening. Characters! As alluded to in previous posts, my work has been focused on...
Vocabulary Lists are now Study Lists
In an attempt to generalize ourselves, we have moved vocabulary lists to study lists. This is in recognition that our vocabulary lists can...
Have a word for a word?
It is now possible to add comments to words and characters on Kotoba. This feature allows you to write your own comments about a specific...
UI Refinements
There are now a few more refinements to Kotoba’s interface. Of some note is that the character filter is now available from the characters...
Kotoba Goes Radical
Kotoba’s base set of information is nearing another milestone: radicals （部首【ぶしゅ】or ‘bushu‘）. Radicals are the base components that can be...
Kotoba Tweets Kanji Based on JLPT, Frequency
Kotoba will now be tweeting a few more kanji every day with the aim of better aiding Japanese learners. In particular, Kotoba will begin to...