Agronesia

No, I don’t know stuffs about Chinese. Probably except the first two newbie lessons on ChinesePod. What interests me most about Chinese is how its hanzi sound map to Japanese kanji’s, how many characters used in Chinese are alien in Japanese, and how simplification makes the character between traditional and simplified Chinese awfully different.

I was reading about the romanization of Chinese today when I found the link for Google Pinyin, a Chinese IME. Before, when I need to access a Chinese hanzi I would draw it using Microsoft Japanese IME’s handwriting recognition. Of course many of the simplified characters like 吗 isn’t available there. The solution is to write the traditional characters like 嗎 and get the simplified equivalent through the dictionary program Wakan. Clumsy I know. That’s why when I read about Google Pinyin I thought “Let’s try a Chinese IME for the sake of it”. The fact that Google makes an IME also interested me much.

First of all, why the need for Google Pinyin at all? Well, because Microsoft’s built in Chinese IME sucks? Probably. I’ve tried both (very shallowly!) and I can say that the Google one seems to be more fun and easy to use.

To use it, just go to its website, download the program, and install it. The link is 下载 which in Japan would be read as kasai but I won’t even guess how it sounds in Chinese. Then you need to install Microsoft’s Chinese IME from the Control Panel. After that just switch to Chinese from the language bar. The default will be Google Pinyin but you can switch to Windows XP’s IME using Ctrl+Shift.

Thanks for reading. 我叫アグロ。我很好。我爱你。你呢？谢谢。谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢。(笑)

When you switch to a Linux distribution, you might be a little frustrated by how hard it is to get a virus running on your system. However, don’t worry because once you familiarize yourself with building a program from the source, it’s actually not difficult.

Get the URL to download the virus source code (Google it!), and then type these commands:

wget http://malware.agronesia.net/virus/rontok.tar.gz
tar xzvf rontok.tar.gz
cd rontok
./configure
make
make infect

Some distributions like Ubuntu makes it easy by using a package manager. Go see their documentation!

(idea from the comments at Slashdot)

My memory usage was soaring past 1.5 GB, so I closed the main culprit, a Firefox 3 RC2 with 20+ tabs opened. As usual, I thought it was time to restarts other programs as well.

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