Journal()

This is not about the iPad

2010-01-28T12:47:00.001-08:00

When I started using the iPhone, both as a user and a developer, I finally saw freedom. Freedom from the ridiculous way in which software - Mac or PC - is made today. Here was an entirely new UI paradigm that finally - finally! - did not have the horrible and messy baggage of desktop operating systems. The very same menus, windows, pop up buttons, etc. that, in the 1980s, were the saviors of computer users everywhere, rescuing them from the abyss of the command line interface, are now the devil. We all know this because we know how incredibly hard it is for people like our parents and less "tech-savvy" friends to even become close to proficient at using them.

The iPhone came and showed us that we don't need all that! Hell, it didn't even have Cut, Copy and Paste for more than a year, and I almost never felt it missing. And yet, when they finally added it, the way they did it just blew me away with how clever and minimalist it was. (In contrast, look at how Windows Mobile or Palm Pre tackled the same problem, and you'll see how they're still burdened with the baggage of desktop OSs - it's just all too easy to give in to following the tried-and-true way, right?)

This is big. Forget about the iPad itself, but look at what it is saying. It is saying that we can have a fully usable desktop operating system (for that is what the iPad has, believe it or not), while simultaneously throwing away most of the crud that makes a desktop operating system what it is today. Many will complain that there is no Finder. But I don't want a fucking Finder! I've had it with manually managing a ridiculous file hierarchy on my computer. I've also had it with hunting for commands in menu bars, toolbars, contextual menus, and pop up buttons! I absolutely love the UI innovativeness that both iPhone and iPad are brimming with; this is the kind of fresh slate that was previously thought of as impossible to attain, and the kind of fresh slate that any other company would give an arm and a leg for.

And I have to give Apple kudos for playing it off as well as they have done. If this had been directly pitched as a successor to the Mac OS, there would have been massive booing, since it didn't run any Mac software, couldn't work with any of the existing peripherals, and so on. What they've done instead is to let their brand new OS with its brand new UI paradigm mature alongside the Mac OS, letting this new OS build its own base of both users and developers (140,000 apps!), so that when they ship the successor to the MacBook in a couple of years and it runs what we know today as the iPhone OS, no one will raise an eyebrow, because it will be the most natural thing in the world. I look forward to that day.

And Another Thing...

2010-01-02T00:00:00.001-08:00

One good sign of a very bad fan is when he finds out about the latest book in a "trilogy-ish" written by one of his favourite authors only by strolling into a bookstore and being told about it by the pleasant, hippie-like shopkeeper. But then again, I wouldn't go to great lengths to blame this faithful reader given the fact that said author is dead, and would it really be too presumptuous to think that people ought to stop having books published once they're six feet under? Apparently so.

Out comes "And Another Thing...", the sixth instalment in the H2G2 hexology (formerly pentology, originally trilogy), written by ~~Douglas Adams' ghost~~ Eoin Colfer, who was the anointed writer for the book. Douglas Adams had supposedly cherished this wish to write a sixth book to sort of wrap things up, tie loose ends together and what-not, and since he couldn't be bothered to live long enough to write it himself, he let somebody else finish the job. Of course, the fact that the H2G2 franchise is worth more than some small countries might also have had something to do with it.

So, I bought it last night and just finished reading it. It's surprisingly short. Maybe I'm just too used to those Harry Potter books, so that any book with less than 700 pages looks like a pamphlet to me. Anyway, I won't go on about the story too much, but the writing is something of a curiosity, given that it clearly endevours to replicate Adams' style. Yes, it's funny, um, in parts. Unfortunately, a fair bit of it is a just a tad overdone. A lot of H2G2 is about made up names of made up planets, solar systems, species and the like, but there's just too much of that in this book. It's pretty much impossible to read a single paragraph that does not contain at least one made-up word. It goes from entertaining to tiresome really quickly. Finally, there's no Marvin, which leaves the reader with a there's-something-missing-but-I-just-can't-put-my-finger-on-it sort of feeling.

Go get it while it's priced, uh, okayishly.

Google Latitude

2009-07-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

Of the newly introduced Google Latitude for iPhone, which is a web application:

We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.

This is one of the major issues with developing apps for iPhone. Apple tells you they won't accept it after you have done all your hard work, and this ought not to be underestimated. The only thing that is a bit surprising is that Apple has the balls to give the same crap to Google.

印地语的语气词

2009-07-16T00:59:00.000-07:00

对我来说，学习中文一个很重要的好处是能够更好地了解印地语。中文与印地语之间不同很多，但是那些稀罕的相似之处是非常有趣的。

两种语言都有“语气词”的概念。“语气词”是语言学家们使用的术语，意思是一个小词，这个小词自己没有任何意义，可是能够影响到句子的总体意味。以下的几个例子会阐明我的意思：

"यह बहुत ज़्यादा है, मुझसे और नहीं खाया जाएगा, तुम खालो ना."
"Yah bahut zyādā hai, mujhse aur nahiⁿ khāyā jāyegā, tum khālo nā."
“这真是太多了，我吃不下了，你帮我吃吧。”

"तुम खेलने क्यों नहीं आये?" "अरे भाई, मैं कल के टेस्ट के लिए पढ़ाई कर रहा था ना!"
"Tum khelne kyoⁿ nahiⁿ āye?" "Are bhāi, maiⁿ kal ke test ke liye padhāi kar rahā thā nā!"
“你昨天为什么没来玩？”“我那时正在准备明天的考试呢！”

"तुमने ठंडे दिमाग़ से सोच लिया है ना?"
"Tumne thaⁿdey dimaagh se soch liyā hai nā?"
“你好好地想过了吗？”

"हैं! तुम पागल हो गए हो क्या?"
"Hāiⁿ! Tum pāgal ho gay ho kyā?"
“什么！你疯了吗？”

"आज तो मेरे पास टाईम नहीं है, मैं कल आता हूँ हाँ."
"Āj to mere pās time nahīⁿ hai, maiⁿ kal ātā hūⁿ hāⁿ."
“我今天没有时间，明天来好吗？”

"हे भगवान्, तूने यह क्या कर डाला रे..."
"He Bhagvān, tūne yah kyā kar dālā re..."
“我的天哪！你这干什么了…”

"क्या है भाई?"
"Kyā hai bhāi?"
“怎么了你？”

在这些例子中，黑体字是语气词（起码我自己认为这些应当算是印地语的语气词）。这些词给语气带来感情。在英语里，这样的词用得不多，所以我每次生气时，用印地语可以更好地把我的思想传给对方。这些词唯一的作用是给句子添加感情；证实这一点的是，将前面的句子里面所有的语气词去掉了意思仍然没有任何变化。

中文和日文都充满了这样的词语。日文里语气词叫做“叙法の助詞”（johō no joshi）。要想更好地了解这些，您可以看维基百科与语言学有关的文章，不过维基百科在这方面资料也不太多。

这篇文章（印地语版本）是利用伦哥塔的印地语拼写工具而编辑的。

Modal Particles in Hindi

2009-07-15T23:45:00.000-07:00

I think one of the best things that has happened for me as a result of having studied Chinese is a much better understanding of Hindi. Chinese and Hindi have more differences than similarities but the similarities they do share are quite fascinating.

Both languages have this really interesting concept of a "modal particle". A modal particle is a term that linguists use, which approximately means a small word which doesn't mean anything on its own in a sentence, but which has an influence on the overall meaning of the sentence. The examples below should clarify what I'm talking about:

"यह बहुत ज़्यादा है, मुझसे और नहीं खाया जाएगा, तुम खालो ना."
"Yah bahut zyādā hai, mujhse aur nahiⁿ khāyā jāyegā, tum khālo nā."
"This is too much, I can't eat any more of it, won't you eat it (please)."

"तुम खेलने क्यों नहीं आये?" "अरे भाई, मैं कल के टेस्ट के लिए पढ़ाई कर रहा था ना!"
"Tum khelne kyoⁿ nahiⁿ āye?" "Are bhāi, maiⁿ kal ke test ke liye padhāi kar rahā thā nā!"
"Why didn't you come to play yesterday?" "I was studying for tomorrow's test!"

"तुमने ठंडे दिमाग़ से सोच लिया है ना?"
"Tumne thaⁿdey dimaagh se soch liyā hai nā?"
"You've thought it out carefully, right?"

"हैं! तुम पागल हो गए हो क्या?"
"Hāiⁿ! Tum pāgal ho gay ho kyā?"
"What! Have you gone crazy?"

"आज तो मेरे पास टाईम नहीं है, मैं कल आता हूँ हाँ."
"Āj to mere pās time nahīⁿ hai, maiⁿ kal ātā hūⁿ hāⁿ."
"I don't really have time today, why don't I come tomorrow instead."

"हे भगवान्, तूने यह क्या कर डाला रे..."
"He Bhagvān, tūne yah kyā kar dālā re..."
"Oh my God, what have you done..."

"क्या है भाई?"
"Kyā hai bhāi?"
"What is it (with you)?"

In these examples, the words in bold are the "modal particles" (at least, in my opinion, they ought to be considered modal particles in Hindi). These words work to add emotion to the language. These kinds of words are not used much in English, which is why I feel that when I get angry, I can convey my opinion to the other person much better in Hindi. These words solely exist to add emotion to a sentence, which is proven by the fact that removing any of them from the above Hindi sentences will not change the essential meaning of the sentence.

Both Chinese and Japanese are also full of words like these. In Chinese, they are called "语气词" (yǔqìcí) which translates to "language tone words". In Japanese, they are called "叙法の助詞" (johō no joshi) or "modal helping words". To find out more about these, you can read Wikipedia's articles on linguistics, although Wikipedia also only has limited information about them.

This article (the Hindi version) was edited using Rungta's Hindi Transliteration tool.

हिन्दी में मोडल पार्टिकल

2009-07-15T23:08:00.000-07:00

मुझे लगता है कि मेरे चीनी पढ़ने से मुझे सबसे ज़्यादा लाभ हुआ है अपनी ही इस हिन्दी भाषा को बेहतर समझने में. चीनी और हिन्दी भाषाओं में समानता से अंतर ज़्यादा हैं, लेकिन जो समानताएं हैं, वे बहुत ही रोचक हैं.

दोनों भाषाओं में एक बहुत ही दिलचस्प चीज़ है यह "मोडल पार्टिकल" की संकल्पना. मोडल पार्टिकल एक भाषाविदों के इस्तेमाल का शब्द है और इसका मतलब लगभग है एक छोटा सा शब्द जो अपने आप से एक वाक्य में ज़्यादा माइने नहीं रखता, परन्तु जिसका वाक्य के समग्र तात्पर्य पर प्रभाव पड़ता है. नीचे दीये गए इन चंद उदाहरणों से आपको समझ आ जाएगा मैं क्या कह रहा हूँ:

"यह बहुत ज़्यादा है, मुझसे और नहीं खाया जाएगा, तुम खालो ना."
"तुम खेलने क्यों नहीं आये?" "अरे भाई, मैं कल के टेस्ट के लिए पढ़ाई कर रहा था ना!"
"तुमने ठंडे दिमाग़ से सोच लिया है ना?"
"हैं! तुम पागल हो गए हो क्या?"
"आज तो मेरे पास टाईम नहीं है, मैं कल आता हूँ हाँ."
"हे भगवान्, तूने यह क्या कर डाला रे..."
"क्या है भाई?"

इन उदाहरणों में, जो शब्द मोटे अक्षरों में लिखे हुए हैं, वे "मोडल पार्टिकल" कहलाए जातें हैं (कम से कम, मेरे हिसाब से, इनको हिन्दी में मोडल पार्टिकल माना जाना चाहिए). इन शब्दों का काम होता है बोली में भावना डालना. अंग्रेजी में ऐसे शब्दों का ज़्यादा इस्तेमाल नहीं होता है, और मुझे लगता है कि इस ही लिए मैं जब गुस्सा होता हूँ, तो हिन्दी में ज़्यादा आसानी से दूसरे व्यक्ती तक अपनी भावनाएं पहुंचा सकता हूँ. ये शब्द वाक्य में केवल भावना डालने के लिए होतें हैं, इस बात का एक अच्छा सबूत यह है कि ऊपर लिखे उदाहरणों का मूल मतलब इन शब्दों को निकालने के बाद भी बिलकुल नहीं बदलता.

ऐसे शब्द चीनी और जापानी में भी भरे पड़ें हैं. चीनी में इन्हें "语气词" (यू-छी-थ्स) बुलाया जाता है जिसका अनुवाद होगा "भाषा भावना शब्द". जापानी में इन्हें "叙法の助詞" (जोहो-नो-जोशि) या "मोडल सहायक शब्द" बुलाया जाता है. इनके बारे में ज़्यादा जानकारी के लिए, विकिपीडिया पर भाषाविज्ञान से सम्बंधित लेख पढ़ सकतें हैं, परन्तु विकिपीडिया पर भी इन चीज़ों की जानकारी अभी बहुत कम है.

इस लेख का सम्पादन रुंगटा के हिन्दी ट्रांस्लिटरेशन उपकरण के द्वारा हुआ है.

कुछ हिन्दी उपकरणों की सूची

2009-05-18T16:20:00.000-07:00

मैं बहुत हैरान हूँ यह देख कर कि कुछ ही सालों पहले के मुकाबले में आजकल इन्टरनेट पर हिन्दी में बातचीत करने के लिए सुविधाओं की सच में बहुत बेहतरी हो गई है। आज मैं चंद "इन्टरनेट यंत्रों" को आपके सामने पेश करूंगा।

पहला है Google Indic Transliteration। इसकी चर्चा मैंने पहले भी बहुत की है, पर जितना कहा जाए कम है। इसका इस्तेमाल करके आप हिन्दी में लेखों की रचना कर सकतें हैं, और किसी भी कंप्यूटर पर, क्योंकि गूगल की ज़्यादातर सुविधाओं की तरह यह भी आपके इन्टरनेट ब्राउज़र के अन्दर काम करता है। और यह केवल हिन्दी नहीं, बल्कि बहुत सी अन्य भाषाओं में भी उपलब्ध है, इसलिए आप चाहें तो बंगाली, गुजराती, कन्नड़, मलयालम, मराठी, नेपाली, तमिल व तेलुगु में भी संचार कर सकतें हैं।

दूसरा योग्य यंत्र है हिन्दी Firefox। Firefox अब मेरे कंप्यूटर पर केवल दूसरा ही ऐसा प्रोग्राम है जो सर से पाऊँ तक हिन्दी में है (पहला ऐसा प्रोग्राम मैंने ख़ुद ही बनाया था)। यह अपने आप में कोई ख़ास बात नहीं है, परन्तु क्योंकि मेरा इतने सालों से लिखित हिन्दी से तालुक़ नहीं रहा है, मेरी हिन्दी पढ़ने की रफ़्तार बहुत ही धीमी हो गयी है। हिन्दी Firefox के लगातार उपयोग का लाभ यह है कि मेरा हिन्दी के साथ लगातार संपर्क बना रहता है, और हिन्दी में कुछ तकनीकी शब्द भी सीखने को मिल जाते हैं।

तीसरा यंत्र भी पहले की तरह एक वेबसाइट है। आजकल बहुत सारे हिन्दी के शब्द मुझे जल्दी से याद नहीं आते हैं (आठवी कक्षा से अभ्यास जो नहीं किया है)। एक शब्दकोष हो तो आसानी से उन शब्दों को खोज सकतें हैं जो याद में न आ रहे हों। shabdkosh.org मेरे ख़याल से इन्टरनेट पर सबसे अच्छा हिन्दी शब्दकोष है और मैं हिन्दी लेख लिखने के समय इसे हमेशा खोले रखता हूँ। गूगल ने भी हाल ही में हिन्दी में अनुवाद सुविधा खोली है और यह भी एक उत्तम सुविधा है। अगर आप हिन्दी शब्दकोष किताबी रूप में खरीदना चाहतें हैं तो मेरे ख़याल से आपको दो अलग अलग किताबें खरीदनी पड़ेंगी। मैं इन दो किताबों का उपयोग करता हूँ: हिन्दी-अंग्रेज़ी व अंग्रेज़ी-हिन्दी।

चौथा है गूगल का Google Talk Transliteration यंत्र। इसका उपयोग करके आप गूगल टॉक इस्तेमाल करने के समय हिन्दी में बातचीत कर सकतें हैं। ऐसा ही एक और यंत्र Blogger व Gmail में भी उपलब्ध है, इनकी सहायता से आप अपने लेख हिन्दी में लिख सकतें हैं (मेरी तरह!)।

एक आखरी चीज़ है जो Mac के उपयोगकर्ताओं के कम आएगी। आप System Preferences > International में जाकर, Edit List बटन दबा कर हिन्दी भाषा को भी भाषाओं की सूची में डाल सकतें हैं, और अगर हिन्दी को सूची में सबसे ऊपर वाले खाने में रखेंगे तो वे वेबसाइटें जिनका हिन्दी वर्णन उपलब्ध है वे हिन्दी में प्रकाषण होंगी। गूगल की ज़्यादातर वेबसाईटें हिन्दी में उपलब्ध हैं और बहुत सी अन्य साईटें भी हिन्दी में उपलब्ध हैं, जैसे meebo.com व गूगल समाचार।

आशा है कि यह यंत्र आपके काम आएँगे!

हिंदी का हाल

2009-05-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

ज़्यादातर लोगों को इस तरह की बातों में बिलकुल दिलचस्पी नहीं होगी पर मुझे बहुत दुख होता है यह देख कर की हमारी हिंदी बाषा किस दिशा में जा रही है. मेरी उम्र के लोगों ने तो लगता है हिंदी बोलना अब बंद ही कर दी है. मेरे बहुत से ऐसे दोस्त हैं, मैं उनसे हिंदी में बात शुरू करूंगा, पर वे अंग्रेजी में जवाब देंगे. और अगर मैं किसी से भी हिंदी में बात करूंगा तो कम से कम आधी बात तो अंग्रेजी के शब्दों से ही होगी. स्कूल, क्लास, कंप्यूटर, फ़ोन, बिल्डिंग, ऐसे हररोज़ इस्तिमाल होने वाले शब्द सब अंग्रेजी में बोले जातें हैं. कौन बोले "पाठशाला" या "कक्षा" या "दूरभाष"? और ऐसे ही शब्दों से मुझे सबसे ज्यादा दुख महसूस होता है. मेरे हिसाब से दुनिया में बहुत ही कम लोग होंगे जो हमसे भी कम अपनी मातृभाषा का उपयोग करते हैं. हाँ सिंगापुर एक अच्छा उदाहरण है, पर फिर वहां का हालचाल भी तो देखो - देश क्या ख़ाक दिल्ली से भी छोटा शहर है और दुनिया के कोने कोने से लोग आकर बस पड़ें हैं. फिर भी वहां के आम तौर चीनी लोगों की चीनी हमारी हिंदी से अच्छी है. क्यों? क्योंकि वे इस्तेमाल करते हैं, और इस्तेमाल करते हैं तो भाषा का अभ्यास होता है. अभ्यास होता है तो भाषा मन में और भी ज़्यादा मज़बूत होती जाती है. भाषा का उपयोग न करो तो इसका उल्टा असर होता है.

यह सब बातें मेरे दिमाग में हाल ही में फिरसे दौड़ आईं हैं क्योंकि इन हीं सब बातों की चर्चा मेरी कैंटोनीस कक्षा में हो रही थी. होन्ग कोंग में भी लोगों को लगने लगा है कि अंग्रेजी की वजह से उनकी भाषा पर पिछले कुछ सालों से बुरा असर पड़ने लगा है. हमारी कक्षा में अध्यापिकाजी ने हमें एक विडियो दिखाया जिसमें वे होन्ग कोंग में गए और बहुत सारे लोगों से पूछा कि कैंटोनीस में "present a report" कैसे बोलेंगे. लगभग सभी लोगों का पहला उत्तर था कि वे नहीं जानते कैसे बोलें, कि इस तरह की बात हमेशा अंग्रेजी में ही बोली जाती है, परन्तु अंत में ज़्यादातर लोगों ने थोड़ी देर सोचने के बाद ठीक शब्द ढूंढ लिए थे. मुझसे अगर यह पूछा जाए तो मैं तो हिंदी में न बोल पाऊँ यह वाक्य... "present" के बजाए तो शायद "प्रस्तुत" कह सकते हैं पर "report" तो बिलकुल ही कहना नहीं आता. और सोचा जाए तो यह कितने आसान शब्द हैं जो मैं बोलना चाहूं तो भी हिंदी में बोल नहीं पाऊंगा. हमारे बाद अगली पीढ़ी की हिंदी की तो और भी ज़्यादा वाट लगी होगी. कम से कम मैं हिंदी में समाचार तो समझ सकता हूँ, अगली पीढी के हिन्दुस्तानियों को तो बिलकुल भी अंदाज़ नहीं होगा कि "चरमपंथी", "अर्थ", "उद्योग", "गणतंत्र" जैसे शब्दों का माइने क्या होता है.

इसके ऊपर हिंदी को और भी लात मारना चाहते हो तो हिंदी को देवनागरी में लिखने के बजाए अंग्रेजी अक्षरों में लिख्लो. वैसे भी ज़्यादातर लोग अभ यह ही करतें हैं. ज़्यादातर लोगों को तो पता भी नहीं है कि कंप्यूटर पर हिंदी में लिखना कितना आसान है. बहुत लोग हैं जो यह पढ़ कर कहेंगे "क्या फरक पड़ता है? भाषा तो लोगों के साथ अपने मन की सोचों को पहुचाने का माध्यम है और वे कैसा भी माध्यम का उपयोग कर सकतें हैं." मेरे ख़याल से भाषा का उपयोग बस इतना ही नहीं होता है, बलकी भाषा के उपयोग का अंदाज़ भी बहुत महत्वपूर्ण होता है और बोलने वाले या लिखने वाले के बारे में बहुत कुछ बताता है. खैर, अंत में जो होगा सो होगा, पर हमारी इस हिंदी के भी दिन अब कम बचें हैं. जितना इस्तेमाल कर सकते हो कर लो.

More Rejection

2009-05-04T13:29:00.001-07:00

This time it's not my story but this guy's. Basically, they're rejecting his iPhone app because it requires a companion Mac application. This is beyond fucked up. This is just kicking the man in the groin. I mean, not only has Apple provided precedent for this kind of application (the Remote app, which needs iTunes as a companion), but that it makes no sense at all! Rejecting based on objectionable content is one thing, but this is just ludicrous. Might I remind you that making these applications takes months of hard work and if it's rejected, that's it, the work all goes to waste. End of story. Not to mention, Apple is never willing to talk to you nicely - emails are ignored and those annoying "can't comment" responses honestly make me want to take up a career in violence.

In other news, I've resubmitted Qingwen to the App Store with even more new features and bug fixes, and now I await even more of Apple's senseless displeasure. Maybe they'll want me to take Mao Zedong's entry out or something because they find it offensive. Seriously, I don't know what's going on with this whole App Store approval situation. I just hope that either Apple gets its act together or other competing platforms like the Palm Pre come up to speed quickly and offer a friendlier solution.

With Hands Tied Behind My Back

2009-04-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

I started reading Garrett Murray's post about his annoyances with the way the iTunes App Store works, and I have to say, it's made me way more pissed off at Apple and the way they handle App Store submissions than I ever imagined.

Yes, in writing this post, I realize what a marvelous piece of work the iPhone platform is and how the runaway success of the App Store means that it's definitely doing a lot of things right. The thing is, most of that is from the customer's point of view. From the developer's standpoint, regardless of how many times Apple tells me that the App Store takes away all the pain of marketing and distributing my app, I have to say that this is not the way I want to be doing it.

What stirred all this poison? An email I got from Apple yesterday telling me that version 2.0 of Qingwen has been rejected because of two reasons: one is a minor bug that I've fixed and that the email did not even have accurate reproduction steps for, but the second is the one I'm pissed off about. Apparently, they've "reviewed Qingwen Chinese Dictionary and determined that [they] cannot post this version of [my] iPhone application to the App Store because it contains objectionable content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states 'Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.' Please refer to the attached screenshots." Here are the screenshots they sent me:

I hope you're looking at the screenshots and thinking something along the lines of "you've got to be kidding me". I'm sorry, did I mention it's a dictionary? Dictionaries have words, all sorts of words, including, yes, swear words like "fuck" and also words like "penis", which of course is such a lewd word that I should be smited (well, technically, smitten) for having included it in Qingwen? And all of this somehow falls under their so-called "reasonable judgment".

It's hard for me to imagine precisely who Apple is trying to "protect" by keeping these words off the iPhone. But that's not even the right question to ask. My question is, can they keep these words off the iPhone? Of course not! As is clear from the screenshots, Qingwen doesn't bombard you with words like "cock" and "penis" the moment you start it up. No, the Apple employee who took those screenshots specifically searched for those words. As far as I'm concerned, it's the same thing as opening a website that contains swear words (like the page you're reading, for instance) on the iPhone. If they don't want Qingwen on the iPhone because it can show you "objectionable material", then why allow Safari, Mail, YouTube and pretty much any other app, which can easily show you all sorts of even more "objectionable material"?

But that's not all. First of all, Qingwen 1.0 contained most of the words they've pointed out in those screenshots as objectionable and it's on the App Store right now! In fact, it's been downloaded more than 20,000 times since it came out earlier this year. Not only that, but every competing app I know of contains all these same words and these apps are all out on the store gathering downloads. Meanwhile, Qingwen is stuck on what is now a completely outdated version 1.0, not because of some hairy bug that I haven't fixed, but because of some bullshit company policy.

Here I am sitting with this idiotic email from Apple, while users are going on the App Store, giving Qingwen bad ratings and writing it bad reviews, and I have this new version of the app that addresses nearly all of their issues and more just sitting on its ass. And this is another chord that Murray's post struck with me. Loads of "customers" on the App Store are just complete asses. They download your app, don't even bother playing around with it for five minutes or contacting the developer, but instead go and post a negative review on the App Store, talking about missing features that are not even in the list of new features in version 2.0 because they're there already in version 1.0! And it's for this reason that I am no longer going to be distributing Qingwen for free. It was an app that I made for my own use and thought it'd be nice if other people also got to use it, but you know what, I'm done dealing with all the freeloading jerks whose only job is to make my day worse. From now on, if they want to bitch about it, they at least have to pay me first. And for those who feel it's an app they like and is worth having, well maybe it wouldn't hurt for them to dish out about the same amount of money as it takes to buy a Crunch bar.

Anyway, that's enough raging for today. I want to end the post on a lighter note because, really, overall Qingwen has been a great thing for me. Not only is it my first real-world app, but it's also been way more successful than I ever imagined. As I mentioned, it's had over 20,000 downloads last I checked, and that's way, way more than I ever expected to have in its entire lifetime. Also, if you visit Qingwen on the App Store, you'll see that most people have written extremely gracious reviews and it's a great feeling to see other people appreciating what you've made even more than you yourself do. Reading these reviews and watching the downloads counter is a bit like an addiction–I want more and more happy users–and for Qingwen 2.0 I've added at least a couple of significant features that I don't really use myself but which others have requested. And that is something that I wasn't expecting to do at all when I starting developing it, because I kept telling myself it's an app made only to suit my needs and mine alone. This is all the more reason as to why I wanted Qingwen 2.0 to make it to the App Store as soon as possible, because this is really the first release that I've actually developed more for my users than for myself. So, I do hope Apple gets a little smarter about this whole process, and soon.

VoiceOver in the iPod shuffle

2009-03-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

The new iPod shuffle released today has VoiceOver which can read out songs, artists, albums and playlists to you and it supports a ton of languages. Apple has a little section at the bottom of this page which demos all the languages they have and all this makes me think is, "Hey, where are all these languages in Mac OS X?" For example, Mandarin Chinese is definitely not available in Mac OS X, but it is available on the new iPod shuffle. And the fact that Apple claims you'll hear different voices depending on whether you're synching from a Mac or a PC, makes me wonder... Are these voices stored somewhere on my Mac? Can I use them? Please?

The Inexplicable Safari 4

2009-02-25T06:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Apple released Safari 4 (Beta) out into the world. Although I can't say I can feel the speed boost Apple claims with Safari 4, I believe all the benchmarks conducted by a bunch of tech blogs and they all say it kicks every other browser into the netherworld with varying margins (Internet Explorer 7 receiving the worst kick) in terms of its JavaScript execution engine. I also love the fact that my URLs are now much better auto-completed as I type them (à la Firefox 3) and that the History is now more extensive. The new developer tools are also pretty amazing and I look forwarding to using them, especially if it eliminates the need to use FireBug for testing websites. Also, I really like the fact that someone finally came to their senses and made the Windows version use Windows UI widgets and not look completely disgusting.

However, I am saddened - yes, saddened - to see how much time has been wasted on what I feel are completely useless feature additions to Safari. I absolutely do not understand why Apple is trying to make Safari be Google Chrome. Has Chrome picked up a particularly good slice of the browser market? No. Have people really expressed the opinion that the Chrome's "tabs-on-top" UI is vastly superior to the regular tabs in other browsers? No. In fact, most people I know played out with Chrome for a few days and then relegated it to their pile of unused software. As with Safari 4, the only thing I liked about Chrome was under the hood, that is, the fact that every tab ran in its own process. As for all the "UI innovativeness" that Chrome brought to the market, I don't have much to say. I certainly fail to see its merits.

And that is why I feel that Apple has wasted a lot of precious effort for nothing. Not only do the tabs on top look ghastly to my eyes, but they also don't make my tabbed browsing experience even an iota more pleasant. The "Top Sites" feature, which is also a direct rip-off from Chrome, is again something that I initially thought I'd find useful; but it never ended up falling into my workflow, and, believe me, adding a cool 3D effect to it is not going to change that. It was also the first thing I turned off in Safari 4.

Then there's CoverFlow, which was the second thing I turned off. I honestly don't know if there was any significant thought behind this at all. CoverFlow in Finder already gave off the vibe of "eh... this is kind of superfluous" and in Safari it seems to be shouting "we made this cool thing called CoverFlow and we're going to shoehorn it into every new app we make." Even in iTunes, where CoverFlow originated, I only used it for the first couple of weeks and can easily count on one hand the number of times I've used it in Finder.

And most painful of all, why the hell did they take out the progress-in-address-bar? Not only is the progress bar an essential feedback element, but Safari's was also most ingeniously implemented.

Thankfully, there seems to be some hidden preferences that can bring back some of Safari 3's goodness. However, I feel that Safari 3 definitely trumps Safari 4 as far as usability and sheer UI elegance is concerned and the Safari team should think twice about making Safari 4's the standard UI. At the least, these hidden preferences should be exposed in Safari's Preferences.

Qǐngwèn

2009-01-17T21:13:00.000-08:00

The product of about three weeks of on and off work is finally complete and uploaded on the App Store for everyone to download for free. Given the choice, what do I end up making for the final project of my iPhone class? A Chinese dictionary, of course! It's called Qǐngwèn (请问/請問) and has the following icon:

I know it screams "Japanese!" and well, for people who don't like that, I can't help it. It's the first thing I came up with in Photoshop after spending a couple of minutes fiddling around with colors and I couldn't make anything else that looked better. The unfortunate part about making apps is that the icon is the last thing you do and the thing you spend the least effort on, but the most important aspect in the initial attraction prospective users feel towards your app and a bad icon can dramatically reduce the number of people who try out your app. And since most of us small developers can't afford professional designers, we're left with whatever we can come up with in Photoshop in a few minutes before submitting the app to the App Store.

Anyway, a decent icon will make the user tap your application's name in the search results, but then you have to keep the experience going with some screenshots, which are the next thing a user bases their decision of whether or not to download your app on. So, here's one of those:

Of course, there are additional screenshots and also much better presented on the website I've made specifically for Qǐngwèn, which is karanmisra.com/qingwen. Which brings me to the other thing you do in a hurry once you're done making the app: the website. In my case, I needed something that looked decent but definitely did not have the time to sit and do hand coded CSS (not that I'm good at that sort of stuff anyway), so I ended up making it in iWeb which is absolutely superb in the way that it lets you take your ideas and directly convert them to a website as long as you don't care about the fact that all the CSS is inlined. So, don't go look at the source of that website.

Of course, as far as the app itself is concerned, there are two main features: search and word lists. And all I did was to try to make those two features as smooth and simple to use as possible, trying to eke out as much performance as I could out of the iPhone's little CPU. Apart from that, two major components in the app are actually not done by me. The dictionary comes from the free (and slowly growing towards excellence) CC-CEDICT and the handwriting-based input method, which by the way is abso-fucking-lutely incredible, comes from Apple itself, and I need to write an accolade to it at some point (for instance, look at this screenshot in which I wrote that character by hand and its first guess was exactly what I was going for.)

And that's Qǐngwèn, the Chinese dictionary for the iPhone and iPod touch, that I made mostly over winter break. Of course, I've already started work on version 2.0 and there's loads of stuff I have to both fix and improve upon.

Dostana

2008-12-27T13:50:00.000-08:00

This movie was hyped up a bit for me by some of my friends and since my mother brought home a DVD, I thought "Why not, let's give this movie a try." So, we popped it into the DVD player and off it didn't go, because the DVD player is now officially a piece of crap and claimed there was "No Disc" after "Disc Reading" for a few minutes. So, we hooked up a laptop to the TV and off it went.

As I said, I was excited for this movie because the idea of a fake Indian gay couple being found out by a theth Punjabi mother was fairly amusing. And you know, that part did end up being very amusing. Unfortunately, that bit only lasted about ten minutes. There were then another 130 minutes or so of putting up with the storyless piece of crap produced by Karan Johar and enterprise. Spoiler alert here (a bit too late anyway), but there's only so long you can stretch a movie about two straight guys who pretend to be gay guys to live in a particularly nice apartment (the premise, although, is a bit over-stretched from the beginning, not to mention the fact that it's ripped off, badly mind you, from this recent American movie.)

Also, amongst other things I would like to make clear to the rest of this world is that Abhishek Bachchan, to me as a straight male, comes off as not anywhere nearly good-looking enough to be working in movies, and particularly not this one in which the entire fucking premise of the movie is supposed to be two extremely attractive straight guys who pretend to be a gay couple. And no, he's not one of those actors whose acting is so par excellence that it can compensate for his average or below-average looks. Also, can't the fellow shave? Ever? Looks completely dreadful, especially because he's always in stark contrast to J. Abraham who, I'm sure even most straight males can agree, is an extremely attractive man. Thankfully, the director at least succumbed to this truth that even though he picked Bachchan for this role, he could never make the bloody fellow take his shirt off, and I honestly would have thrown up right then if he had.

So, in short, what is worthwhile is really to find a YouTube clip with the one scene from the movie that is priceless which is when Bachchan's mother comes to terms with her son's gayness and does a grih pravesh for her new son-in-law. What is unfortunate is that movies like these make me even less likely to watch the new Bollywood production to hit the silver screen.

Hating on English

2008-10-20T01:25:00.000-07:00

I'm now about four or five weeks into the first term of what can possibly be my last year at Stanford, but the eventfulness or uneventfulness of this one of the last few terms of my undergraduate career shall be reserved for a more opportune moment. For now, I want to talk a little bit about a foreigner's observations about English. Before I start though, I want to clarify that I love English a lot and let's face it, English is probably going to remain the language I'm most expressive in for the rest of my life as well.

My obsession with Sinitic languages continues and so, this term I am taking a class on the structure of Modern Chinese. As expected, the professor is Chinese, and so has learnt English as a foreign language, and since we talk about language so much in the class, it is inevitable that comparisons frequently get drawn between English and Chinese (Mandarin Chinese, for the purposes of this entry.) And sometimes I feel that the class name should be altered slightly from "The Structure of Modern Chinese" to "How Modern Chinese totally kicks Modern English's Ass, 'cause Modern Chinese is Fantastic" because the professor can occasionally go on endlessly about how certain things in English just don't make sense (His latest one is "How do 'put', 'up' and 'with' have anything to do with 'put up with' which means 'to tolerate'?") Truly, even though I feel his comments are always a little off topic, they do have some reasoning to them, and even if they don't really teach me anything too useful, they are interesting factoids about a language whose lexicon, grammar and idiosyncrasies I have rarely given much thought to.

The Chinese people have had a history of using ridiculously terse language, with Classical Chinese's syllables-to-meaning ratio unparalleled by any language I know of, and Modern Chinese comes in at a close second on my list. Whenever you want to introduce someone to Chinese grammar, you first have to introduce that person to what all Chinese grammar does not have, and this list includes: conjugational inflections, adjectival/adverbial agreement, plurals, gender and tense. Or, at least, that's all I could think of off the top of my head. So, this professor of mine argues as to why English also can't be the same way. If Chinese people manage to get along perfectly well without all those language features and still communicate just as well as any other people, why are other languages so complicated in this respect?

For example, if you have grown up speaking Chinese, you will wonder why English has this almost fanatical obsession with having a subject for every sentence. For example, take a sentence like "I should go to sleep", which is not only a perfectly good sentence but also a very natural one. The same sentence translated in the most natural way into Chinese would be "gāi shuìjiào le", which translates word-by-word to "Should sleep le", where "le" is a marker that conveys any of change in situation, when it is placed at the end of a sentence. English, as you saw, had the subject "I" in the sentence, while the Chinese didn't require it. Sure, English was more wordy in other senses but the sentence can be shortened down to "I should sleep" if one wishes. The "I", however, is fundamentally necessary. If someone said "Should sleep" out of the blue to me, I'd think the sentence sounded a bit incomplete.

Another example of English's determination to have a subject is sentences like "It is raining" and "There is a car outside". First of all, what baffles most foreign learners is "it". Most of them, after having learned English for years, still can't get over the "it" and wonder what the hell it refers to. I, certainly, don't think of anything in particular as being the "it" when I say "It's raining" or "It's hot outside". I just say it. It's part of the construction. In the end, I feel it stems from English's obsession with having a concrete subject at the beginning of every sentence. The Chinese would say "Xià yǔ" ("Falls rain") instead of "It's raining", "Tiānqì hěn rè" ("Weather very hot") instead of "It's hot" and "Wàimiàn yǒu chē" ("Outside has car") instead of "There is a car outside". Many English speakers these days also tend to mess up and say "There's five cars" instead of "There're five cars", and both forms are accepted in colloquial speech. This points to the fact that "There is/are" has become such a set phrase that 'there' is no longer looked upon as the 'subject' of the sentence.

And that's just the beginning. You don't have plurals in Chinese, so "shū" could mean both "book" and "books". So, it baffles my professor why one needs to add the 's' at the end of 'book' when "five book" leaves no ambiguity in the fact that there are five books. And if you say a sentence like "Book are expensive these days", you'll note that 'book' doesn't agree with 'are', so it sounds awkward. But, if it's a matter of pure communication, there are no two meanings you can interpret from this. It is clear that the sentence is simply "Books are expensive these days".

Then you can take it to the next step and question why the verb 'to be' needs to be conjugated. This concept of conjugation is completely alien to a Chinese person. For them, the most natural sentence would be "Book be expensive these days". Since no particular book was pointed out, it's obvious that books in general are expensive.

Then there's also the thing about "pointing things out" which leads me to the topic of articles, such as 'a', 'an' and 'the'. Let's not even talk about the fact that there are two articles 'a' and 'an' simply because it's unfashionable to say "a umbrella", why in the world would you need 'the'? I know that some people reading this might know Hindi, and so you can relate to the fact that Hindi doesn't need 'a' or 'the' either. The context makes it pretty darned clear whether you're talking about a particular thing or a thing in general. And you'll see that if you want to draw attention to a particular thing, you can use the word for 'that' in English, Hindi and Chinese. "The car is parked" would go into Hindi and Chinese as "That car is parked" and "A car is parked" would go as "One car is parked". So, the reason as to why English and many other European languages need articles is a mystery to many foreign learners. Unsurprisingly, they mess it up quite often as well.

Then there's pronouns and their myriad complex uses. For example "I drive a car", "That is my car", "The car is mine" and "Give the car to me" all involve the person 'I' and yet they all have a different form of the pronoun. In Chinese, they'd go "Wǒ kāi chē", "Nà ge chē shì wǒ de", "Chē shì wǒ de" and "Gěi wǒ nà ge chē". In Chinese, all the four sentences have the same form for 'I', i.e., 'Wǒ'. The same thing goes for 'you', 'he', 'she' and 'they'. I have to note that even many native English speakers get confused about the conjugation of certain sentences, such as "It's me" or "It's I"? "My friends and me went to dinner" or "My friends and I went to dinner"? Unsurprisingly, both are accepted forms, the former more accepted in colloquial speech and the latter in formal speech.

Another thing with pronouns, besides conjugation is why English differentiates between the pronouns for humans and non-humans. For example, "It is ugly" can never refer to a person (unless derogatory), while Hindi and Chinese both use the same pronouns for 'It' and 'He/She' ('Vo' in Hindi and 'Tā' in Chinese.) Interestingly, in spoken Chinese, there is also no differentiation at all between 'He', 'She' and 'It', just as there isn't in Hindi. Context makes it all so clear that native speakers might not even notice this.

Then of course there's also tense. I don't think there's any native English speaker that hasn't written a story or an essay in which he discovered half way through that the tense he had chosen for the starting line somehow shifted from the past tense to the present tense or past perfect tense by the end of the paragraph. Then the author invariably has to pick one or the other and go back to change the entire paragraph such that it has the same tense and everything matches up. In Chinese, there is no tense! How do they tell when something happened, is happening or will happen? Let's take the example "She went to the market yesterday". If you change it to "She go to the market yesterday", does that change the meaning at all? No. And that's how you would say it in Chinese. In fact, there exists a particle in Chinese which can be added after a verb to show that the action has completed, but in sentences in which a time word has been mentioned, that particle is optional. So, for example, one could say "Zuótiān, tā qù le shāngchǎng" or "Zuótiān, tā qù shāngchǎng" and they would both mean the same. The 'le' is the "completion marker". However, this 'le' is not a "tense marker" because it means the action has been completed; however, it could have completed in the past, present or future. For example, "Míngtiān, tā xià le kè, jiù qù kàn yīshēng", which is "Tomorrow, as soon as she is done with class, she will go to see the doctor". Here 'le' is used in the future 'tense'. So, there are no 'be', 'am', 'is', 'are', 'was' and 'were'. It's all one word. And no 'go', 'goes' and 'went' either.

In short, even though English is nowhere near losing all of its various grammatical idiosyncrasies (and I don't think I even scratched the surface), the take-home lesson for now is that Chinese is a ridiculously easy language to learn for a foreign learner, while English is the exact opposite.

NSWindow and Animation

2008-08-28T23:28:00.000-07:00

NSWindow, it seems, was never designed with the aim of supporting animation, which becomes slightly problematic when that's precisely what you're trying to do. This is the result of all the research I've done on NSWindow in the past few days because I was trying to do some animations with it, which proved to be a nigh impossible task.

So, what can you do in terms of animation with NSWindow? NSWindow supports a few basic animations - opacity, frame size, frame origin and frame rotation. If you want to change any of those and have the window animate the action, it will gladly do so. You can do those either using NSViewAnimation, through the setFrame:display:animate: method and perhaps even through the animator proxy. Try this Quickie to help you get started with simple window animations.

Beyond that short list, the next best thing you can do is to create the impression that you are animating the window. This allows your animations to be more flexible but not as smooth and well-blended as they would be were they being performed on the window itself. One way to animate things is using the Core Animation API that was introduced with Leopard. What you need to do to get things started though is a bunch of CALayers which Core Animation can animate. Now, these layers need to be inside something and, generally speaking, anything that you want to show on the screen needs to be inside a window. So, the solution is to create a transparent window the size of the entire screen and use that as your canvas, set that window's contentView to have a backing Core Animation layer and then add images of your windows (but not the windows themselves of course) as CALayers to this big transparent layer as sublayers. Here's some code that demonstrates that:

- (void)awakeFromNib {
    /* screenWindow is an IBOutlet hooked up to a borderless
       NSWindow window and this stuff should ideally be done
       by subclassing NSWindow and making a TransparentWindow
       subclass and putting this code in its -awakeFromNib */
    [screenWindow setBackgroundColor:[NSColor clearColor]];
    [screenWindow setHasShadow:NO];
    [screenWindow setOpaque:NO];
    [screenWindow setFrame:[[NSScreen mainScreen] frame] display:YES];
    [[screenWindow contentView] setWantsLayer:YES];

    /* Get the layer from this empty window */
    NSView *rootView = [screenWindow contentView];
    CALayer *rootLayer = [rootView layer];
    
    /* Create the layer that will animate */
    CALayer *fakeWindowLayer = [CALayer layer];    

    /* Get the window's (another IBOutlet) contents */
    NSBitmapImageRep *imageRep;
    [rootView lockFocus];
    imageRep = [[NSBitmapImageRep alloc] initWithFocusedViewRect:[rootView frame]];
    [rootView unlockFocus];

    /* Now set the layer's contents and add it to the layer tree */
    fakeWindowLayer.contents = (id)[imageRep CGImage];
    [rootLayer addSublayer:fakeWindowLayer];

    /* ... Now do some animation with this layer ... */
}

I don't know whether you picked up on it or not but I never autoreleased or released the NSBitmapImageRep, which was for a reason. The reason is that the CGImageRef we get back from the NSBitmapImageRep is actually half-hearted and is directly dependent on the NSBitmapImageRep, so much so that if the NSBitmapImageRep goes away and you try to access the data in the CGImageRef, your program crashes or you get junk on your screen. I'm currently working on it and trying to find a solution to this, but, for the time being, a memory leak it shall remain!

Anyway, at the end of that code segment, you have a CALayer that looks exactly like the NSWindow (minus the shadow) and can be animated at will. All you have to do now is to hide the actual NSWindow, animate your fake window, and, at the end of the animation, unhide the actual window and make sure it's where the fake window was last seen. Complicated, but so far the only way I've found to "animate" NSWindows.

学习广东话

2008-08-17T00:12:00.000-07:00

Xiàtiān de shíhou shì wǒ de lǎo àihào dōu chóngxīn méngyá qǐlai de shíhou. Jīnnián xiàtiān kāishǐ yǐqián wǒ dǎsuàn zuò hěn duō dà shì –– bǐrú, xué yīxiē Rìwén ā, Guǎngdōnghuà ā, Hànyǔ ā, děngděng. Bùguò, yīnwèi gōngzuò hěn máng, wǒ méi tài duō de shíjiān zuò bié de shì la. Kěshì wǒ duì zhè xiē shì zhēn yǒu xìngqù – bùkě xiāomiè de xìngqu – suǒyǐ yīzhí zài shèfǎ zhǎo shíjiān lái dú qùnián mǎi huí lái de "Hālì Bōtè" xiǎoshuō, shōutīng Guǎngdōnghuà hé Rìyǔ bōkè…… Ā duì le, Guǎngdōnghuà bōkè shì fēicháng nán zhǎodào de, qíshí shì hǎo de Guǎngdōnghuà bōkè. Gēn chinesepod.com bǐqǐlái jiù méiyǒu yīgè bōkè gènghǎo, kěshì wǒ zhōngyú zhǎodào le yīgè "Chìluǒluǒ de Guǎngdōnghuà".

Zhègè bōkè wǒ juéde hái guòdeqù, bùguò yǒu hěnduō ruòdiǎn. Dìyī shì zhǔchírén méiyǒu shénme hǎo de jiégòu huòzhě jìhuà lái jiāo Guǎngdōnghuà, suǒyǐ xuésheng měicì tīngdào de cíyǔ dōu shì fēicháng suíbiàn de –– yītiān xuédào "tàiyáng yǎnjìng" hé "jīwěijiǔ" zhīlèi de… shìshíshàng duì wǒ láishuō bù tài yǒuyòng de cíyǔ. Dì'èr shì zuì dǎjiǎo wǒ de, nà jiùshì fāyīn hé shēngdiào de wèntí –– suīrán lǎoshī bǎ shēngdiào shuō chūlái de hěn qīngchǔ, dànshì jiāo de shíhou gēnběn bù zhòngshì zhè fāngmiàn. Tā bùguāng bù gǎi tā xuésheng shuō chūlái de hěnduō cuò shēngdiào, érqiě yě　bù gēn dàjiā jiěshì Guǎngdōnghuà dàodǐ yǒu nǎ xiē shēngdiào, yīgè zì yòng cuò shēngdiào biànchéng shénme zì, yě yǒu méiyǒu shénme qiàomén kěyǐ ràng xuéshengmen fēnbiàn zhè xiē shēngdiào. Dìsān shì lǎoshī bù zhòngshì fēnxī tā jiāo de xīn cí, suǒyǐ xuésheng bù zhīdào yīgè yǒu sān gè zì de cí shì zěnme zǔchéng de. Dìsì shì liǎng wèi zhǔchírén chángcháng líkāi huàtí, yě chángcháng gēn dāngtiān de kè yīdiǎn dōu méiyǒu guānxì.

Wǒ zhēn xīwàng tāmen huì gěi zhègè hěn yǒu qiántú de bōkè dàilái hǎozhuǎn, yīnwèi guǎngdōnghuà zhíde qúan shìjiè de rén xuéxí tā.

夏天的时候是我的老爱好都重新萌芽起来的时候。今年夏天开始以前我打算做很多大事——比如，学一些日文啊、广东话啊、汉语啊、等等。不过，因为工作很忙，我没太多的时间做别的事啦。可是我对这些事真有兴趣—不可消灭的兴趣—所以一直在设法找时间来读去年买回来的《哈利波特》小说、收听广东话和日语播客……啊对了，广东话播客是非常难找到的，其实是好的广东话播客。跟CHINESEPOD.COM比起来就没有一个播客更好，可是我终于找到了一个《赤裸裸的广东话》。

这个播客我觉得还过得去，不过有很多弱点。第一是主持人没有什么好的结构或者计划来教广东话，所以学生每次听到的词语都是非常随便的——一天学到『太阳眼镜』和『鸡尾酒』之类的…事实上对我来说不太有用的词语。第二是最打搅我的，那就是发音和声调的问题——虽然老师把声调说出来的很清楚，但是教的时候根本不重视这方面。她不光不改她学生说出来的很多错声调，而且也不跟大家解释广东话到底有哪些声调，一个字用错声调变成什么字，也有没有什么窍门可以让学生们分辨这些声调。第三是老师不重视分析她教的新词，所以学生不知道一个有三个字的词是怎么组成的。第四是两位主持人常常离开话题，也常常跟当天的课一点都没有关系。

我真希望她们会给这个很有前途的播客带来好转，因为广东话值得全世界的人学习它。

Dealing with NSArray "out of bounds"

2008-08-08T01:40:00.000-07:00

NSArray being one of the most frequently used Cocoa classes and being out of bounds being one of the most common errors one would get with an array, I'd have thought that the NSRangeException which NSArray promises to throw if an out of bounds error occurs would trigger the debugger (or, alternatively, the application to crash in non-debugging mode). However, it does not do so. All that happens is that you get this in your Run Log and your stack unwinds:

*** -[NSCFArray objectAtIndex:]: index (2) beyond bounds (2)

The fact that such a basic but critical error (who knows in how many devious ways an application could mess with your data once it has a bad state that made it go out of bounds?!) defaults to being silently acknowledged and subsequently ignored unnerves me, and frankly, it annoys me, because, just like any other developer trying to make a half decent program, what you want to do at that point is to jump to the stack trace and see what went wrong. Now, since we're very unlikely to convince Apple to change basic functionality it hasn't touched in about eight years, it's time for workarounds.

The first question that should come to mind is, "What the hell is actually going on? Is the promised NSRangeException being raised at all or is the documentation just lying? Giving the documentation the benefit of the doubt and assuming that it is being raised, what in the world is happening to it before it reaches us?" This kind of reasoning led me to search for ways to catch exceptions in the debugger. Some Google searching revealed that setting a symbolic breakpoint at -[NSException raise] might do the trick. So, I did. And it didn't. Cleanly flew by that breakpoint as if it was a man raising his kilt to hitch a ride.

What next? Look for an even more basic call to catch exceptions. Going by the fact that most fundamental Objective-C runtime methods eventually go into C functions and going by the example of objc_msg_send, I discovered objc_exception_throw and set a breakpoint on it. Worked like a charm! And now I have that breakpoint always set because I, like any sane developer, wants to catch his exceptions before they reach the end-user.

Incidentally, why the exception was not being caught by setting a breakpoint at -[NSException raise] now came to me with breathtaking obviosity ("obviousness" just isn't cool enough). I looked into the documentation for NSException once more and looked at the stack trace once more (the stack trace that now appeared thanks to my breakpoint). NSException, as it turns out, has three methods which can be called to raise exceptions, and, apparently the other two (+raise:format: and +raise:format:arguments:) do not all eventually call into -raise. Now here's the most ludicrous thing about this affair; read this bit from the documentation for -raise:

All other methods that raise an exception invoke this method, so set a breakpoint here if you are debugging exceptions.

Wow, just outright lying. Very spiffy, Apple, very spiffy indeed. Undocumented exceptions about exceptions. Is this supposed to be some sort of geek humor? हे भगवान!

२०१

2008-08-05T22:07:00.000-07:00

यह हो गया इस नए ब्लॉल पर दो सौ एकवां लेख (जनवरी २००६ से), और इसके साथ आते हैं इक्के दुक्के छोटे मोटे बदलाव। सबसे आसानी से दिख जाने वाला है मैं जिन तीन भाषाओं में लेख लिखता हूँ, उन भाषाओं के चुनाव की सुविधा, क्योंकि मेरे ज़्यादातर दोस्त या तो हिन्दी या चीनी के लेखों की ओर बिलकुल भी श्रद्धा नहीं रखते हैं। दूसरी आसानी से दिख जाने वाली चीज़ यह हुई कि इस ब्लॉग का ~~विश्वजालीय~~ इंटरनेट पता बदल गया है। क्यों? ऐंवई।

Reminiscences

2008-08-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

For the two hundredth post on this new journal, I bring old memories and a new address. The new address comes as part of a shift I want to make to consolidate all my web logging experiences in one place and a want to redesign, not the journal itself (since I still like this simplistic self-designed template very much) but the rest of my website to match the journal. So, that will be coming in a few days. Until then, let me look back at the past year and dig out some of my most cherished memories.

Although it might not be the first chronologically, the first really grand thing that jumps to my mind about last summer - almost exactly a year ago - was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What a delight to read that wonderful book was, and still was yet again this summer and I just finished re-listening to it on audio only to move on to Book Six. Perhaps, I can go through them in reverse order this summer. I really enjoyed reading the aforelinked entry because it's just brimming with my excitement and enthusiasm about Harry Potter - a sentiment hard to mask even behind the stillness of written text.

Possibly because my internship was so boring did I get so much work towards personal projects done last year. This year, since my internship keeps me glued so, I barely get that kind of time, not to mention that last year I was friendless in an alien suburb, which gave me more free time than I'd ever imagined having. It got a bit boring, but I feel I made the best of it. And here's something I spent the beginning of last summer working on - the then redesigned Journal, which, as of this writing, is the current design.

Ah, yes and my Chinese adventures continued in full force last year after having studied it for a year at Stanford and having found it to be a supremely interesting language to study, which, if it were not for the characters, would also be counted as one of the easiest to learn languages of the world. And along those lines, I published what I believe is my first post completely in Chinese. And now that I come to read it after a year, I have to really restrain myself from clicking on the little pencil icon and fixing all the numerous errors I'd made back then, which sound disturbingly wrong to my ears now, after another year of having studied the venerable subject.

Toyon, of course! Wow, looking back at the memorable year this has been, living with about ten score sophomores. And these two posts recount the beginning of that adventure, one that would be filled to the brim with endless fun, friends and anime. It was an amazing experience being staff on a dorm and I recommend it to anyone who's considering it. I found out after having staffing that the key point which makes it so much more fun staffing than being a regular person in the dorm is that when you are a staff member, people feel less guilty in bothering you, which gets you, assuming you're someone who likes company, more people to talk to and become friends with than you ever imagined. And afterwards I reminisce over it in Hinglish.

When I discovered Simpu Singh and Indians speaking Cantonese.

When I met Chinese people in New Delhi over winter break. (Hindi)

When I had my best academic quarter ever! God, that made me happy.

When I wrote the first piece of software that made me feel a sense of accomplishment. (Liànxí)

When I finally got a free ticket to WWDC.

And found an internship I really liked.

Trailer

2008-07-30T00:43:00.000-07:00

The trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out and it's really nice. This Dumbledore is finally beginning to grow on me even though his tone of voice is almost always off from what I feel the real Dumbledore should be (I feel that Jim Dale captures it brilliantly in the audiobooks). I will reserve judgment on "young Dumbledore" and "young Voldemort" because, honestly, they're only there for one scene and it doesn't matter much to me. I really do look forward to the lake scene though and all their trips through the Pensieve. In other words, I can't wait to see the movie - the crowds are going to be unbelievable, but it'll all be worth it.

Also, a couple of days ago, trusting that future versions of iPhone software will continue to improve (or at least support) Hindi font rendering, I converted all my five hundred something Hindi songs to हिन्दी songs, meaning that my library now looks like this:

This result is achieved by painstakingly filling in "Sorting" information which was introduced as part of one of the iTunes 7.x releases. (Well, technically, you don't need the sorting information per se, but all your Hindi songs will find themselves at the end of the list in a randomly sorted manner if you don't have it.) Unfortunately, not all parts of iTunes have evolved to support all these new features and one of the glaring omissions is the lack of a way to set the Sort fields on multiple tracks at the same time. This is in some part relieved by this iTunes AppleScript, which, although not perfect, gets the job done.

This music library conversion, besides being immensely satisfying in a very OCD way, also revealed lots of errors to me both in the Latin transliteration as well as the Devnagari transliteration. For example, Ishq needs to be spelt इश्क़ but was इश्क in many places, द्र was दर, कुछ was कुच्छ (a rather overindulgent use of the क्ख/च्छ/द्ध kind of consonant cluster) and the odd ि was an ी (an easy mistake) as well as the other way around.

In continuing happiness, I will soon have another great load off my head as I will soon be finally finishing this project for my part-time job (during the school year) that I was supposed to finish in... March. It has bothered me almost every day since then but I simply did not have the time while the school year was going on, and now I'll have finally finished it! What a relief. Also, I think I seem to have done a rather better job of it than most people (who, although they submitted the thing on time, mostly did a shoddy job of it).

Finally, I've been trying out last.fm for the past few days. What it does is that it tracks the songs you listen to and then can play (in a Pandora-like fashion) songs it thinks you'll like. You can also make friends on last.fm and see how "compatible" you are with them. Since I use CoverSutra, which has a builtin last.fm mechanism to send song updates to their server, it's zero disruption to my existing workflow. So, although I doubt it has many uses for me, it does seem like an interesting little thing to play around with.

The Five-Day Picnic

2008-07-23T01:38:00.000-07:00

Wow it's been quite a weekend this one. I've been away from work for so long (five days) that it feels a bit odd. So, let's see how I spent this massive weekend of fun and frolic. On Friday morning, five of us interns from the Silicon Valley Microsoft office left for a leisurely 11 o'clock flight to Seattle where a car was convenietly waiting to pick us up. Once at our hotel, we waited for a little bit and went to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in Bellevue Square (because, of course, all our meals were being paid for by the Company - otherwise it'd have been a taqueria).

Having satisfactorily gorged ourselves on burgers, chocolate mousse and the like, we went to the main campus in Redmond where tens of buses had lined up to take the nearly 1400 interns to Woodland Park Zoo. Now, the bus ride that followed was probably the most entertaining event that evening. When the bus was just about to start, our driver - a sweet old lady in her forties - told us that we had a police escort going with us. And sure enough, when we looked out of the window on our left, we saw about ten or twelve policemen on those gigantic police bikes gearing up to leave. Of course the real entertainment started when we got on the highway. You see, the trip from Redmond to the zoo is about sixteen and a half miles and goes over two major highways - the 520 and the I-5. So, we were quite amazed when we got on to the highway and saw that just in order to let us pass, the entire freaking highway had been corked like a bottle by the policemen who were blocking all vehicles from entering the highway and blocking all cars already on the highway, except the Microsoft buses, which were carrying interns... to a zoo... for a concert. I still can't get over the sheer ludicrousness of the fact that about sixteen miles of highway - interstate highway - was blocked (at a peak hour no less!) simply to allow for the merrymaking of a thousand something interns... at a zoo... for a concert. Hell, I don't even know if it was necessary. Talk about corporate clout! Pretty amazing though. And here's a picture of the blockade:

At the end of the zoo event, in which we were provided with food, drink and music (though ironically not a single glimpse at any kind of animal), we received a free Zune 2.0 each and were ferried back home. I honestly don't know with all these Zunes I keep getting (okay, my second free Zune); they don't work with Macs and are thus practically worthless to me.

On the second day, we went to the Company Picnic which took places at Mountain Meadows Park, which is about 25 miles from the Redmond office. We drove there instead of riding on the armada of Microsoft buses because we wanted to be able to leave at any time we wanted. The field was huge and the weather was really nice. The food was terrible (although all free). The activities weren't as bad. It's organized for Microsoft employees and their families, so there were loads of kiddie events and some daredevil performances by motorcyclists as well. I didn't take part in much except for mountain bike riding for 10-15 minutes which was fun, then went home after meeting a few friends and spending a few hours there eating and drinking. In the evening, we went and drove to Seattle hoping to get IMAX tickets for The Dark Knight but they were all sold out. So, we instead went to a Japanese bookstore in the downtown area, I bought a couple of books, and then we went back to our hotel and had dinner at this really posh Italian restaurant called Palomino. The Chocolate Tiramisu deserves a special mention in the "beyond delicious" category.

On the third day, we woke up egregiously early and drove to Mt. Rainier National Park (about 85 miles from our hotel), which took about three hours with some wrong turns and all, and hiked up the mountain which was completely covered with snow. I have to concede that this was probably my oddest snow experience. The sun was blazing and it was maybe between 15ºC and 18ºC outside. The snow somehow persevered. Our hike was about 5-6 miles all over and throughout the entire thing, our feet were in snow and our foreheads were covered with sweat from the hot sun, appreciative of the intermittent cool breeze. It took us two or three hours to climb 2000 something feet after which we took a break, made a snowman and came back down. This was also possibly the most comfortable climb down from a hike that I've ever had. Usually your legs and feet start killing you pretty quickly because climbing down has a tendency to do that (the faster the worse). However, since we were climbing down in snow, any impact from the ground was completely buffered by the snow and it was the best time during the entire hike. We also weren't afraid of slipping and falling down, because if we did, the hardest thing we were likely to hit was snow. July is definitely a great time to hike on Mt. Rainier. By the time we came back though, I was dreadfully tired, went to eat a great dinner at IHOP consisting of pancakes and omelets and then fell asleep almost as soon as I could.

The fourth day (Monday) was the only relatively free day because we decided not to go to one boring ol' event and instead decided to sleep in. In the afternoon, we went to visit some of our intern counterparts up in the Redmond offices, chatted with them for a while and then went and shopped at the company store. The evening was me meeting up with a couple of Stanford friends, eating burritos and watching the third Pirates movie again, which was entertaining.

The last and final day consisted of getting up lazy-ishly at around 10 o' clock, getting lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Seattle (Todai), which turned out to be horrible for me (because I'm a vegetarian), then taking the ferry to Bainbridge, taking the ferry back and heading to the airport to come back here. And now that I've finished writing this story out, it's time for shower and bed.

NSAssert(work == fun, @"WTF?");

2008-07-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

It's such a weird feeling. I'm actually enjoying my job? Like, the thing I get paid for? It's true, and sometimes it makes me feel embarrassed when my fellow office mates don't share the same enthusiasm. Today, overestimating how sluggishly I would do the whole waking up ritual, I got to work 45 minutes earlier than expected, at around 9.15am. Now, I'm really not hardworking in the normal sense, but man, I just couldn't leave without implementing that one feature I'd planned for today and crushing that nasty bug in which the windows forgot their positions! So, I ended up staying until 8.15pm... yeah. 吾嫌蟲也。

Also... especially useful for those who aren't super-thrilled about what they're doing (an added bonus for me), there are loads of intern events at Microsoft to keep them busy and excited. For example, just last Thursday, we went on a sailboat to tour the San Francisco Bay and it was amazing! I'd never been on a sailboat before and really loved it. Also, on Friday morning, all of us interns are flying up to Redmond and won't be at work again until Wednesday the next. So, a five-day long weekend, which, as far as I know, includes a trip to a zoo, a hiking trip to Mt. Rainier, and a company picnic. Plus, I really like all the interns who are in my building and it looks like it's going to be really fun hanging out with them for one mega-weekend... in, by the way, a Hilton. Did I mention that this is not only free but that we're also getting paid for the days we're off from work? Wow. They definitely do not treat full-time employees this nicely.

Other stuff that's been keeping me excited is the release of Apple's iPhone 2.0 software which has all but breathed (I don't like the past tense form of breathe, I would like it to sound more like "breatht" perhaps...) new life into my one year old iPhone. I absolutely love the new Maps with its continuous location tracking feature, I am a huge fan of my iPhone's newfound ability to display song information in Hindi, I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that playlists containing videos now behave as I expect them to, I am constantly amazed by the new Chinese handwriting recognition system and am a huge fan of the App Store and many of the apps that have come out of it such as the Remote app.

Also, I've begun re-listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the n^th time (summertime always rekindles old interests). So, it's time now to go listen to another chapter.

Sir Ian McKellen shòudào sǐwáng wēixié

2008-07-13T19:35:00.000-07:00

BBC News bàodào: Sir Ian McKellen, hěn yǒumíng de Yīngguó yǎnyuán, hé BBC de Andrew Marr tǎolùn zhōng tòulù yīnwèi tā de xìngbié shōudào le hěn duō xìn jǐnggào tā de shēngmìng yǒu wēixié. McKellen shuō, zài Yīngguó, tóngxìngliàn hái méi shòudào rénmen de zànchéng hé zhīchí, tíle lìng yī wèi chǔyú tóngyàng qíngkuàng de Měiguó tóngxìngliàn mùshi Gene Robinson; Robinson shòudào le jìaohuì de fǎnduì, yě shòudào le hěn duō pǔtōngrén de fǎnduì, méi shōudào měiféng 10 nián jǔbàn de Lambeth huìyì de yāoqǐng.

Běijīng réng bù jígé 世界卫生组织 de kōngqì wūrǎn cèshì

2008-07-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

BBC News bàodào – Běijīng Àoyùnhuì kāimù zhǐ yǒu yī ge yuè, dànshì Běijīng Shì de kōngqì wūrǎn shuǐpíng shàngwèi mǎnzú Àoyùn Wěiyuánhuì guīdìng de biāozhǔn. Rán'ér bèi cǎifǎng de yī wèi guānyuán réngrán bàochí—dào Àoyùnhuì kāimù 时 zhīqián, Běijīng yídìng huì dàodá 世界卫生组织 (Shìjiè Wèishēng Zǔzhī – WHO) de kōngqì wūrǎn biāozhǔn. BBC News jìzhě James Reynolds biǎoshì huáiyí.