I must check later if I posted about this a long time ago but Becky! is the best email client I have come across. It is written in Japan but has full English menus and handles Japanese and of course English perfectly.
While searching for it’s download page I came across this page: Ruby Plugins for Becky!. I must try this out as I really want to write an anti-spam filter for Becky!
For the record: “Mapping Differences Between JIS X 0221 and Code Page 932“.
If you are trying to install Japanese Keyboard on English Windows XP the trick is to uncheck the “show compatible hardware” box when you do an update driver. By doing that you get all the choices of keyboards including Japanese.
I powered up my Notebook at Narita and was really happy to see that the airport’s wireless lan connection supported GRIC global roaming which is the roaming service that my ISP Global Online supports. I was ready to use the net for free but the GRIC system didn’t accept my password! What’s more the instructions for GRIC were only in Japanese which is not very friendly for those who can’t read it. After fiddling around for few minutes I signed up for 1 day access (for 1000yen!) with BizPortal which worked flawlessly.
The worst part is that you can’t even access GRICs homepage unless you can log on to figure out what is wrong.
I installed VIM on my notebook. I decided to try and switch over to vi(m) for most of my text editing tasks because it is free and because vi is sure to be available on all Unix machine that I have had to edit files on. There is nothing worse than editing a file, especially one that if you mess it up you can’t login again, with vi when you only know a handful of commands and it is likely that you are going to make a mess of the file through incompetance.
I have one problem with vim though. I installed on Japanese XP and I want to use the English menus. Vim is really smart and it is completely localized in Japanese. The help files indicate that is possible to select any language you like but I can’t seem to find the right command to change the menus to English. I write this in the hope that someone who knows how will tell me what voodoo is required to get vim to work on Japanese XP.
Later: I found that you just have to have an _vimrc in your home directory i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\YourName with the command “set langmenu=en” in it. The confusing thing was that I didn’t read the manual where it said that that the langmenu doesn’t work from Vim’s command line. You have to do some extra voodoo to change the menu’s dynamically or make the command run before the menus run.
Even Later: If you are using VIM on a Japanese system you’ll probably want to add set “iminsert=0″ in your _vimrc to avoid the Japanese IME being invoked by default when you insert text by default. I’m pretty sure that this would annoy most Japanese programmers too.
( The crazy thing is that I used vi from 1985-88 but have now forgotten most of the commands!)
While stumbling around the Microsoft Office site searching for the Powerpoint viewer I found a link to the English Language menu pack for Japanese Office Products. From what I gather you have to pay about a 1000yen for it but the fact that it is available is great!
I wonder what happened to Zachary Pessin. I used to bump into him in Yokohama and Tokyo occasionally and when I found his meishi today I wondered what he was up to…
I just made a mailing list dedicated to the book Remembering The Kanji by James W. Heisig.. Please join if you used, are using or are considering using this book to learn Kanji.
nPOP is a small Windows POP3 client that supports Japanese mail encodings written by a Japanese developer. There is an English version. It’s really useful for cleaning out your mail box of SPAM and reading mails as they come in.
Today we are debugging a problem with our search code. Everything works fine (thanks Victor) except Zenkaku Romaji. It appears that the search is creating case insenstive SQL by using Java’s toLower() on the query string and then using LOWER on the data column in SQL to complete the search query. This has one broken assumption that Java’s toLower() and, in the current case in question, Postgres’s LOWER produce the same result. They don’t! The answer it seems is to use ILIKE (Japanese Link).
This is easier said than done! Also I’m concerned about whether other databases support ILIKE or not.
Later: my trusty (Japanese) coworker after thinking about it mentions that if we use the database’s LOWER to lowercase both the query and data column then we will solve the problem. Doh!
