Thursday, November 5, 2009
IE8 Flashcard Bug Fixed
Salvete omnes!
I fixed a small bug that affected flashcard decks in Internet Explorer 8 (and presumably earlier versions). If you couldn't create a flashcard deck in that browser, it should be fixed now!
As a side note, I've been working on a big project with Livy and Vergil. I've essentially been editing all the mistakes and unfound words in those authors. This is especially useful in Livy because we have a corpus of about 1 million words! So the accuracy of this dictionary is creeping up to the highest possible levels! With the exception of proper names and place names, I'll ballbark its accuracy with common classical authors at about 95%.
Also, thanks to the people who have been reporting errors and bugs! It's really helpful to have your feedback!
I fixed a small bug that affected flashcard decks in Internet Explorer 8 (and presumably earlier versions). If you couldn't create a flashcard deck in that browser, it should be fixed now!
As a side note, I've been working on a big project with Livy and Vergil. I've essentially been editing all the mistakes and unfound words in those authors. This is especially useful in Livy because we have a corpus of about 1 million words! So the accuracy of this dictionary is creeping up to the highest possible levels! With the exception of proper names and place names, I'll ballbark its accuracy with common classical authors at about 95%.
Also, thanks to the people who have been reporting errors and bugs! It's really helpful to have your feedback!
Labels: accuracy, bugs, internet explorer, livy, vergil
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
J's and U's Updated / Speed Increases
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I planned on making I's/J's and U's/V's look the same on the back-end, while preserving their traditional orthographies on the front-end. I've just completed this task!
My main motivation for making this update is because certain passages stored in The Latin Library reflect the older conventions of using J's for consonantal I's or U's for both consonantal and vocalic V's. Numen's parsing engine was having trouble recognizing forms like jecit (iecit) and uuius (vivus). So now as a result -- after a bit of work -- the engine is updated and now recognizes more possibilities than ever. Incidentally, internally J's are stored as I's and U's are stored as V's.
Another project I completed at the same time is an order-of-magnitude speed improvement for parsing. I was trying to figure out ways to make the engine faster and I discovered a shortcut that boosts speed tremendously. When parsing a word, the engine used to spend between 250ms and 500ms parsing each word! That was always disappointing to me, but I had gotten around the problem by caching the results. Now, however, word parsing takes about 25ms!
Why bother improving the speed? Because soon I will be implementing word lists and frequency lists! A word list, of course, is just a "mini-lexicon" that defines only the words in your chosen passage, and a frequency list is a list of words in order of how often they appear in a passage. The word list will be helpful to quickly work on vocabulary for a passage, and a frequency list will help Latin students study more effectively by giving them the most frequent words first. I'm very excited about this feature, but I don't anticipate it will be done before January 10th (giving me the winter holiday to work on it).
That's all for now!
My main motivation for making this update is because certain passages stored in The Latin Library reflect the older conventions of using J's for consonantal I's or U's for both consonantal and vocalic V's. Numen's parsing engine was having trouble recognizing forms like jecit (iecit) and uuius (vivus). So now as a result -- after a bit of work -- the engine is updated and now recognizes more possibilities than ever. Incidentally, internally J's are stored as I's and U's are stored as V's.
Another project I completed at the same time is an order-of-magnitude speed improvement for parsing. I was trying to figure out ways to make the engine faster and I discovered a shortcut that boosts speed tremendously. When parsing a word, the engine used to spend between 250ms and 500ms parsing each word! That was always disappointing to me, but I had gotten around the problem by caching the results. Now, however, word parsing takes about 25ms!
Why bother improving the speed? Because soon I will be implementing word lists and frequency lists! A word list, of course, is just a "mini-lexicon" that defines only the words in your chosen passage, and a frequency list is a list of words in order of how often they appear in a passage. The word list will be helpful to quickly work on vocabulary for a passage, and a frequency list will help Latin students study more effectively by giving them the most frequent words first. I'm very excited about this feature, but I don't anticipate it will be done before January 10th (giving me the winter holiday to work on it).
That's all for now!
Labels: accuracy, database, development, features, frequency lists, google cache, orthography, parsing engine, performance, slowness, vergil, word lists
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