Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Vocabulary Lists!
I mentioned that I've been working on vocabulary lists for those people who don't want/need/like flashcards. So now you can print out your flaschard deck as a study list! Give it a try!
- Go to flashcards at the top of this page
- Click "Print a flashcard deck".
- Choose a deck.
- Click the new button that says "Print Deck as Vocabulary List".
- Then simply go to File->Print (or File->Print Preview)!
Labels: features, flashcards, word lists
Regular Progress
I like to keep the news relatively fresh, even if nothing major is happening. But even though this is a somewhat slow time for Numen development, there are still a constant stream of small updates. I'd like to keep everybody apprised of the situation.
One of the benefits of having students who actively use this dictionary is their feedback. One of the things they noticed was that sometimes an error message pops up saying, "AJAX has timed out", and it would happen relatively often -- especially on the flashcard practice tool. So I dug into the code and found the issue: I designed the site so that -- if any request took more than a few hundred milliseconds -- it would give an error. Such timeouts always involve a balance between briefness and lengthiness of waiting, and I quickly realized that I had not struck that balance. So I bumped up the timeout duration to something reasonably middle-of-the-road and. Voila! Problem solved! Gratias vobis ago, discipuli.
More: My big project with Vergil and Livy is still paying off. I continue to correct dozens of tiny mistakes and errors in the data every week, and I was able to run some statistics. Excluding proper names and place names, the parsing engine can analyze and pin down around 98.5% of all the words in these two Augustan authors. So accuracy is definitely improving daily! I can't yet account for all false positives, but they seem to be less than a fraction of a percent (anecdotally).
Speaking of accuracy, there is still room for improvement in three key areas:
In other news -- I guess I have more than I had first assumed -- I've almost got a word list feature finished. This is for people who prefer to work with formatted word lists as opposed to flashcard decks (which I understand are sometimes referred to as index cards). The only major problem I have with this process is that the Lewis Elementary dictionary does not provide a "core" definition for most words, so the word list would have extremely lengthy definitions. I think one of my best options is to import the data from Whittaker's Words, which have more simple, more core-like definitions. But this could be problematic as a 1:1 mapping between Lewis' forms and Whittaker's forms would be difficult to achieve. Alas, I shall continue to think on this one.
Okay, so that's enough for now! Keep using it, and please keep reporting problems and errors! It may take a few days or weeks, but I eventually do fix all the errors!
One of the benefits of having students who actively use this dictionary is their feedback. One of the things they noticed was that sometimes an error message pops up saying, "AJAX has timed out", and it would happen relatively often -- especially on the flashcard practice tool. So I dug into the code and found the issue: I designed the site so that -- if any request took more than a few hundred milliseconds -- it would give an error. Such timeouts always involve a balance between briefness and lengthiness of waiting, and I quickly realized that I had not struck that balance. So I bumped up the timeout duration to something reasonably middle-of-the-road and. Voila! Problem solved! Gratias vobis ago, discipuli.
More: My big project with Vergil and Livy is still paying off. I continue to correct dozens of tiny mistakes and errors in the data every week, and I was able to run some statistics. Excluding proper names and place names, the parsing engine can analyze and pin down around 98.5% of all the words in these two Augustan authors. So accuracy is definitely improving daily! I can't yet account for all false positives, but they seem to be less than a fraction of a percent (anecdotally).
Speaking of accuracy, there is still room for improvement in three key areas:
- syncopated forms (laudaverunt => laudarunt), which Livy loves by the way!
- irregular forms (bobus, filiabus)
- proper and place names (which do not, for the most part, exist as a regular part of the Lewis Elementary dictionary).
In other news -- I guess I have more than I had first assumed -- I've almost got a word list feature finished. This is for people who prefer to work with formatted word lists as opposed to flashcard decks (which I understand are sometimes referred to as index cards). The only major problem I have with this process is that the Lewis Elementary dictionary does not provide a "core" definition for most words, so the word list would have extremely lengthy definitions. I think one of my best options is to import the data from Whittaker's Words, which have more simple, more core-like definitions. But this could be problematic as a 1:1 mapping between Lewis' forms and Whittaker's forms would be difficult to achieve. Alas, I shall continue to think on this one.
Okay, so that's enough for now! Keep using it, and please keep reporting problems and errors! It may take a few days or weeks, but I eventually do fix all the errors!
Labels: bugs, core definitions, features, feedback, flashcards, Lewis, Whittaker, word lists
Friday, May 29, 2009
Flashcard Printing Support
I've re-enabled printing support for flashcards! Yay!
I've also re-written the instructions. Hopefully they will make printing a bit more clear.
I've also re-written the instructions. Hopefully they will make printing a bit more clear.
Labels: flashcards, instructions, printing
Monday, May 25, 2009
Flashcards, UTF8 and XSS
I know, I know! I've been bad about updating. But as usual, there's way more going on behind the scenes here than meets the eye.
I've been a busy beaver since the semester ended. I've got two main things going on in my life right now: my reading list and this web site. I read Lombardo's translation of the Aeneid and now I'm reading Ferry's Georgics. I'm also working through Discourse, Consciousness and Time by Wallace Chafe.
But I've also been working on this site! If you've tried to visit in the last week, you might have noticed that the site was a bit flakey from time to time. It's true, and I apologize, but it was all temporary and for a good cause.
First, I rewrote the flashcards feature entirely using AJAX technology. Check them out! They're completely awesome. They should work at the very least in IE8, Firefox 3, Chrome and Safari 3. That should cover 98% of the people out there. Maybe I'll test them in Opera later. There is one major feature missing: printing. But I added two super-awesome features: custom flashcards decks and practicing those decks online! Two other minor features are missing: timed slideshows when practicing and searching by tags. Those are minor additions that I'll get to later.
I also made the site more uniformly UTF8 compatible. This is a technical, backend feature that won't affect you at all, most likely. I used to send all the Latin characters to your browser in HTML entities, but now I'm sending them directly in UTF8 encodings. Surprisingly, that was a really easy feature to enable.
Another big improvement is the site security. I've been looking for holes and security breach-points. I discovered a big one: XSS (Cross Site Scripting). It's kind of an ugly loophole on websites, one which has been around for ages. Essentially I fixed my back-end library code to disallow these so-called XSS attacks. With a bit of luck and some salt thrown over the shoulder, I've hopefully closed all the loopholes.
As usual, I'll add a promise to try and update the news regularly. But if I don't, just remember that this site is continually improving behind the scenes.
I've been a busy beaver since the semester ended. I've got two main things going on in my life right now: my reading list and this web site. I read Lombardo's translation of the Aeneid and now I'm reading Ferry's Georgics. I'm also working through Discourse, Consciousness and Time by Wallace Chafe.
But I've also been working on this site! If you've tried to visit in the last week, you might have noticed that the site was a bit flakey from time to time. It's true, and I apologize, but it was all temporary and for a good cause.
First, I rewrote the flashcards feature entirely using AJAX technology. Check them out! They're completely awesome. They should work at the very least in IE8, Firefox 3, Chrome and Safari 3. That should cover 98% of the people out there. Maybe I'll test them in Opera later. There is one major feature missing: printing. But I added two super-awesome features: custom flashcards decks and practicing those decks online! Two other minor features are missing: timed slideshows when practicing and searching by tags. Those are minor additions that I'll get to later.
I also made the site more uniformly UTF8 compatible. This is a technical, backend feature that won't affect you at all, most likely. I used to send all the Latin characters to your browser in HTML entities, but now I'm sending them directly in UTF8 encodings. Surprisingly, that was a really easy feature to enable.
Another big improvement is the site security. I've been looking for holes and security breach-points. I discovered a big one: XSS (Cross Site Scripting). It's kind of an ugly loophole on websites, one which has been around for ages. Essentially I fixed my back-end library code to disallow these so-called XSS attacks. With a bit of luck and some salt thrown over the shoulder, I've hopefully closed all the loopholes.
As usual, I'll add a promise to try and update the news regularly. But if I don't, just remember that this site is continually improving behind the scenes.
Labels: ajax, features, flashcards, security, utf8, vergil, xss
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
New Server and Speed Increases
It's finally here and up and running!
I bought a new server. Did you know you can get slightly older computers, but still really powerful, for super cheap? People and businesses upgrade and then basically give their computers to discounters for nothing! I got this server for $144, with tax, shipping and an extra year's warranty. I'm very impressed.
Also, U.N.M (University of New Mexico) gave me a static IP address on their network, so we have a super-fast internet connection.
So, if you're used to this site being slow, get ready for serious changes! In general, moving to this new server on this new internet connection has increased the speed by an order of magnitude (from 300ms per request to 15ms per request). Wow!
But that's not all folks! I've also done some back-end coding to cache the results of morphology lookups. So now morphology lookups should increase by another order of magnitude (as long as a word is cached). If the word is not cached, the lookup will still be 2-3 times faster.
I apologize for geeking out a bit here, but I hope you notice the speed improvements.
As usual, I'm always developing The Latin Lexicon, but since I'm on winter break, expect to see some serious improvements for January!
Oh, one more thing. I also set up some bug-tracking software (BugZilla) to keep track of issues and improvements. So if you find all this technical stuff interesting, feel free to check it out!
Ok, one more thing! OpenID logins will be down for a day or two. Also, if you created an account or any flashcards between the 16th of December and today, I'm afraid that information is lost because I upgraded the database on the 16th and didn't get it moved until today. Sorry about that, if you're affected.
I bought a new server. Did you know you can get slightly older computers, but still really powerful, for super cheap? People and businesses upgrade and then basically give their computers to discounters for nothing! I got this server for $144, with tax, shipping and an extra year's warranty. I'm very impressed.
Also, U.N.M (University of New Mexico) gave me a static IP address on their network, so we have a super-fast internet connection.
So, if you're used to this site being slow, get ready for serious changes! In general, moving to this new server on this new internet connection has increased the speed by an order of magnitude (from 300ms per request to 15ms per request). Wow!
But that's not all folks! I've also done some back-end coding to cache the results of morphology lookups. So now morphology lookups should increase by another order of magnitude (as long as a word is cached). If the word is not cached, the lookup will still be 2-3 times faster.
I apologize for geeking out a bit here, but I hope you notice the speed improvements.
As usual, I'm always developing The Latin Lexicon, but since I'm on winter break, expect to see some serious improvements for January!
Oh, one more thing. I also set up some bug-tracking software (BugZilla) to keep track of issues and improvements. So if you find all this technical stuff interesting, feel free to check it out!
Ok, one more thing! OpenID logins will be down for a day or two. Also, if you created an account or any flashcards between the 16th of December and today, I'm afraid that information is lost because I upgraded the database on the 16th and didn't get it moved until today. Sorry about that, if you're affected.
Happy holidays! Happy Hannakwanzaamas!
Labels: bugs, development, features, flashcards, openid, slowness, UNM, web server
Monday, July 28, 2008
Into the Great Wide Open
There's still a lot of work to be done on this site, but the main dictionary features are in place. You can search in Latin and search in English, you can browse Latin words, and coolest of all is the word study tool. The word study tool allows you to type (or copy and paste from any Latin source such as The Latin Library) up to 50,000 words -- and see the words parsed, identified and defined.
Another cool feature, one which is in development, is the flashcards feature. Anytime you see a word you want to study, just check the "I want a flashcard" option. Then, you can print out a list of your flashcards on Avery Business Cards! A planned feature is to be able to study your flashcards online, and keep "sets" of flashcards.
One feature which is not ready yet -- but coming soon -- is the paradigm creator. When completed, The Latin Lexicon will create a full paradigm for any word in the dictionary!
Currently under development is The Latin Lexicon for iPhone/iPod touch. If you have one of these fantastic little devices, give it a try!
There's a lot to come, so this application will remain in beta for a while. Even so, I hope you find it useful!
Another cool feature, one which is in development, is the flashcards feature. Anytime you see a word you want to study, just check the "I want a flashcard" option. Then, you can print out a list of your flashcards on Avery Business Cards! A planned feature is to be able to study your flashcards online, and keep "sets" of flashcards.
One feature which is not ready yet -- but coming soon -- is the paradigm creator. When completed, The Latin Lexicon will create a full paradigm for any word in the dictionary!
Currently under development is The Latin Lexicon for iPhone/iPod touch. If you have one of these fantastic little devices, give it a try!
There's a lot to come, so this application will remain in beta for a while. Even so, I hope you find it useful!
Labels: browse, development, features, flashcards, iphone, ipod touch, paradigms, search