The GHZ Forum

This program works so well it feels a bit like cheating. It basically tells you what a kanji means (in all combinations that might be related to the one seen) and gives a phonetic pronunciation in hiragana. All you have to do is drag your mouse over any Japanese kana in Firefox and it brings up a little box of knowledge for immediate digestion. I stumbled upon it in the SA forums and I know a couple of people here speak/are learning Japanese, so I thought I'd share the love. Even if you don't and are just mildly interested it's a neat little application.

Once you've installed it here's a little kana to use it on for kicks: 頑張ってください！

I'm taking Japanese 1 in the fall. How much shit is this program going to get me into?

Bend over and spread 'em, because you're going to TAKE IT UP THE ASS.

Can you do me next?

I'm not a Japanese class, also you're gross.

Well, we've already established you have a small penis anyways! So there! Gibbon says he hardly feels it when you fuck him! Isn't that so?

It's totally true. Sometimes I'll be sitting around playing games and he'll be humping my neck or something and I don't even notice. It makes for awkward situations.

Well, this makes for a neat revelation... mmh, actually two.
And that program sounds cool, I'll try it at home.

Segaholic2 wrote:I'm not a Japanese class, also you're gross.

That is SUCH a girl response, Holic.

EXCELLENT FIND. I'm working for a Japanese company (in Ohio, naturally) this summer. Some of the projects it does involve updating factory automation programs for ancient hardware to slightly-less-ancient hardware. When I started, the only means of doing this was using a Japanese NEC PC9801VM (from 1983) that runs a conversion program.

There is a procedure written up on what buttons to press when, and some minimal english in the NEC/MS-DOS 3.30 but it's pretty much incomprehensible to a non-kanji reader. The hard drive and floppy drives on the computer has already failed, and right now the external backup one works about 85% of the time. The external floppy drive only reads 720kb and the Japanese format 1.23MB 3.5" disks, neither of which modern Windows can natively format.

I managed to steal one of the vital programs off the antique computer and write a frontend for it so that we can use it on modern computers, and figured out how to use emulators to run the other two on modern computers. I'm working on figuring out how to make the last program work on an open-source emulator - I have a Japanese shareware one that runs both, but that's not really suitable for a corporate environment. Almost all the documentation and web sites for these emulators (most of which have been abandoned for years) are Japanese. I've been using Google Translate some, with mixed results, but maybe this extension will help out more... I'm probably going to have to add support for the CPU opcode that's making the free emulators crash, but I'm afraid the 9801 is going to give up its ghost before I figure it out.

NT, how is your knowledge of non-x86 CPU architecture/ Japanese?

Bo wrote:There is a procedure written up on what buttons to press when, and some minimal english in the NEC/MS-DOS 3.30 but it's pretty much incomprehensible to a non-kanji reader. The hard drive and floppy drives on the computer has already failed, and right now the external backup one works about 85% of the time. The external floppy drive only reads 720kb and the Japanese format 1.23MB 3.5" disks, neither of which modern Windows can natively format.

I managed to steal one of the vital programs off the antique computer and write a frontend for it so that we can use it on modern computers, and figured out how to use emulators to run the other two on modern computers. I'm working on figuring out how to make the last program work on an open-source emulator - I have a Japanese shareware one that runs both, but that's not really suitable for a corporate environment. Almost all the documentation and web sites for these emulators (most of which have been abandoned for years) are Japanese. I've been using Google Translate some, with mixed results, but maybe this extension will help out more... I'm probably going to have to add support for the CPU opcode that's making the free emulators crash, but I'm afraid the 9801 is going to give up its ghost before I figure it out.

You mean like tricking a gold fish so it can't grow bigger than the aquarium he is. It might as well work, Spock. Carry on.

Something told me to look around the antique NEC's hard drive for source code. I found the BASIC source files to the program that was giving me trouble stuck in a temporary folder (evidently the definition of "temporary" includes periods from 1988 to 2007) Problem solved!