Greetings friends. I have a new MoHM for you. It is an interesting day for Hack Mars. The first is that I bought hackmars.com and now have redirected it temporarily to it's new site which resides on a secondary server. It works for me, but depending on the speed of your dns lookup, you may not see it. Well, I wrote and posted a webpage. All the links should work, but there isn't more than just the first page of content. There is one page that I didn't link. Here it is, a translation of Hack Mars into Japanese. A friend of mine asked me if I could translate his new domain into Japanese. Sure, I said. I was thinking about doing it for parts of my own site for a long time.

It's kinda fun to translate stuff anyway. I've done a bunch of translation in my time. I learned German at age 16. I translated 30 or so pages from Dokumentation, biography of Karl Koch. I have been teaching myself Japanese little by little for 2 years off and on. I have translated a few manga. So the site you see was translated by me with my tools listed on the page. One of the tools is xjdic. It is a dictionary which translates from English to Japanese and back (sometimes). Unlike babelfish, it is word by word, so you don't end up with something that says: "We do it because we love the feeling of memories." Instead, you get something that looks like a dictionary look up. It outdoes a normal dead tree Japanese-English dictionary because entering the English will give you the Kanji, not just the romanji. That allows reverse searches to ensure that the literal translation of the Kanji is correct. For example, anarchy can be literal "without without rule (gov) prefecture" or literal "without police". There's a big difference between the two. In fact, I would say that the second would more effective, but the first would be technically correct. Learn Japanese yourself using my custom page.

You might notice that I'm using Linux to do this. You might also notice that I'm using KTerm which is a terminal application that can display kanji. It works well. The cool thing is that I can select a few characters with my mouse and paste them into Kate perfectly. There is a GUI-based Japanese dictionary for KDE called Kiten, but I haven't gotten it to work as well as xjdic. Of course, Microsoft implements this at the os level instead of the user level. This is a symptom of a serious problem with Windows. Microsoft integrates programs into the os level and the kernel level. For one, security at the kernel level is poor at best. Secondly, it creates massive bloated kernels.

Also, the fact that I am using Linux to do Japanese work ought to tell you the maturity of Linux as a multilingual operating system. Really opening the source attracts world attention because programs can easily be written in any nation in any language. A free compiler helps programmers who aren't in school in other countries to write code without spending much money. As a broke hacker, I can vouch for the best programmers being those without money.

You might also notice that in my list of tools, I give a shout out to The GIMP 2.0. This ought to tell you how happy I am with the new version. It's very clean, smooth, sturdy, and stable. I was slightly cautious having tested The GIMP 1.3 and getting big errors. I can clearly see no errors in The GIMP 2.0. If you keep up with the software, it will keep up with you. But I might make an exception for a majority of closed source programs.