Friday, March 18, 2005Pinyin and ZhuyinI was reading a thread on supremeboba about pinyin vs. zhuyin and followed the wikipedia on the two subjects. Really interesting that zhuyin, which I learned as a child, was only around formally since 1913! It must have been incredibly difficult to learn pronunciation without a phonetic alphabet!! There was a similar page on pinyin, which I learned in high school. When I was learning pinyin, I found that it was an excellent way of teaching Mandarin to literate English speakers. When reading Chinese with pinyin, I was able to pronounce new vocabulary a *lot* faster than zhuyin. Looking back in my adolescence, I realize that I made some mistakes when it came to spending time on Saturday in Chinese school. At the time, playing video games at the neighboring 7-11 seemed so much more appealing and useful. But now that I'm 25, I find it pretty sad being an illiterate Chinese adult. Truth be told, I can read maybe 1/3rd of a newspaper and nearly all of a Chinese menu, but that's definitely not grade school/high school proficiency. If I were to do it all again? I'd probably still play the video games. Why? Cause Chinese school was lame. The thing that *really* bugged/bugs me about the way Chinese school works in the Bay Area is that it focuses too much on giving crap homework and assignments that are related to being able to write Chinese. I really didn't like the stroke order type of stuff we had to learn for writing, and all the repetitive writing! I'd much rather look that crap up if I need it. I'd appreciate a class that focused on vocabulary for oral conversation and for reading. Ideally, homework assignments in this type of class should be read this/listen to this and figure it out, take this test in English to figure out if you understood the text's meaning & maybe test some writing. I think giving out sheets of paper asking students to copy a word 500 times is just a fundamental waste of time for Chinese living in America, and quite even possibly for those in China who operate chiefly on computers. Personally, I *rarely* write anything on paper anymore. Teach me how to spell it phonetically in pinyin and what it looks like, and I can probably type it in Chinese and come out with whatever font/stroke order you'd like. Nonetheless, I should probably go back to night school and actually learn Mandarin formally again. On the bright side, I've recently found a Chinese/Asian radio station in the Bay area on FM 96.1. I listen to it every once in a while to at least train my ear to new words and vocabulary. I guess that's a start. posted @ 06:06 PM PST [link] Sunday, March 13, 2005Bit Torrent Azureus client and Netgear WGT624So I spent a good chunk of time this weekend getting a bittorrent client and trying to get familiarized with good torrent sites. I figured it'd be nice to put some of this together for people who want to get into the torrent quickly and don't want to waste 2 hours surfing. For those of you curious about the internals of the protocol, the creator of bit torrent supplies the source code and basic documentation. After reading the basics, you'll probably need a client. There are a lot of clients out there, so I asked Jeff if he had any preferences. He recommended Azureus as a good client. I did some quick checking on Google and found that some critics also chose Azureus as the top client because of transparency and UI. (Disclaimer: I have yet to try any other clients.) With the Azureus client, you can toggle your torrent view to see which pieces of the torrent and which files in the torrent are being downloaded. You can also toggle the menu's to limit uploads and view your overall download and upload statistics. Best of all, the client is persistent & stateful about your download, so it's able to resume downloading even after a system crash (but I think this is more a feature of the bittorrent protocol as opposed to the type of client). In terms of installs it's a Java client so it's not particularly lightweight if you don't have the JRE on your machine already. As of this writing you'll need JRE 1.5 along with the client bringing the total download for the client to be well over 100+Mbytes. The good news is that the client developers try to make the download as painfree as possible. During the Azureus install, you're prompted to download the JRE and a browser window pops up to initiate the client download. If you want to try it out, you can download the Azureus client here. The next step in your install is ensuring that you've got the proper ports open. By default the Azureus client attempts to bind to port 6881 as its "listen" port and it let's you test connectivity. Do *not* use the default ports of 6881->6889 as designated default by the Azureus client. ISP's have caught on that these are bittorrent ports and some just block traffic to them outright. Instead choose something like 53005 or any ports not currently in use. Just do a netstat and you should get an idea of what's currently in use. If you've got a router or firewall, you'll need to configure the ports. From what I gather, the Azureus client only uses one port as opposed to some other clients that randomize on a range of ports. You'll need to set up your router to do port forwarding and punch a hole in your firewall if you've got a software firewall. I've got a Netgear WGT624, so if you've got one of those routers you just need to scroll down on the sidebar to "Advanced" and click on "Port Forwarding/Port Triggering". Just select the "service type" as Port Forwarding and click on "Add a Custom Service", then just specify the name of the new service type and a port. Now that your custom port forwarding is good to go, just install your client and during the Configuration Wizard set your port number and click on the Test button. If this fails with something like "NAT error" then check your firewall settings, you may need to "punch a hole" or allow unrestricted access to 53005 by the Azureus client. Anyhow, once you've got all this done then check out some torrent aggregators: The one I'm currently using is torrentreactor.net. It's kinda slow for some of the anime and shows I want to download, but fast for some movies etc. I didn't realize this at first, so I thought that Azureus was slow. But it just turns out that "swarms" are bounded by their clients'/seeders' upload speeds. This means that stuff which is in demand for high broadband users is gonna be fast to download, whereas things that are "less popular" and have 56k dialup users will be *ass* slow (3kbps) :(. Anyhow the software/protocol was free, so there's not too much to complain about. Hope this saves one person an hour of wasted time. If anyone out there has comments to add (esp. ways to get faster downloads or good torrent sites) please post! posted @ 10:30 PM PST [link] |
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