Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"

A greasemonkey-free script-free full-page HTML-only web reader for Thomas Pynchon's novel

"Gravity's Rainbow"  is now in place at

http://books.aule-browser.com/gravityrainbowsrc.html

CLICK F-11 for full-page when you arrive

No-javascript added ; no links added.

Greasemonkey JavaScript or an OCR epub version would be required for an improved presentation.

Curl reader version with annotation-maker to follow.

Recognize Passphrase Security with Mnemonics

What links the task-specific browser below to the utility seen below it?

The new utility app:

How do you recognize your passphrases on Monday after a few have changed on Friday?

The Passphrase image above is Copyright ©2012 LogiqueWerks all rights reserved.
"Curl Your Passphrases" is a trademark of LogiqueWerks.

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Kanji Study Offline

Please note: once a Curl browser applet such as http://www.aule-browser.com/kanji/joyo-2010-kanji.html has been started on-line, you can take your netbook or ultrabook and go to an off-line out-of-zone area and continue studying or reviewing Japanese joyo kanji.

I find it helps to tell the Curl Surge® RTE plugin manager ( its icon is green with the "C" curls on your active programs bar) that , as a GENERAL option, it does not need to "force" resynchronization of applets.  That way you can start, say, the Henshall applet and the Joyo applet in different tabs and run both off-line.  I run Henshall with English OFF and go up from below but in another tab run the JOYO but coming down from the high end of the list with English set ON.

The Curl Surge® RTE icon (when plugin virtual machine running )

The Surge® RTE "General" tab

Remember: if you want to skip down into the JOYO applet  to check the English of a Kanji shown in the Henshall applet, you can use the inner right button to "jump back up" to where you had been previously. You can do the opposite to check your memory of one of the later kanji in the set.

For a different set of kanji in a different order or presentation, just make a request in a comment below or in an email to infoATaule-browser.com where that 'AT' is our usual email '@'.

Here is an image of the new Joyo applet:

Of the buttons at the top, the outer "arrow" buttons move faster but not as fast as the control panel arrows on either side of the bottom index entry field.

Hanazono Mincho font

I have just added a Kanji study page to kanji.aule-browser.com which uses the lovely Hanazono Mincho TrueType font in HanaMinA.ttf from Japan.

This first page is only the Henshall Kanji from the on-line Kanjidic2 dictionary.

Of the browsers that I tested, Firefox 12.0 for Windows had the best load time before Kanji appeared.  Running the page locally as an "aule-page" is my preference.

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Kanji Aule

There is now a link to a Kanji page at aule-browser.com

It is not as varied as my own personal Kanji aule-page, but I will make one of those availalbe soon ...

And yes, in some Japanese temples there is a penultimate inner passageway about the core that might be termed an "aule" of sorts ...

At this time the page links to 2 Curl applets for reviewing set of Kanji: the Henshall set and the Heisig set (both extracted from kanjidic2 XML Japanese-English dictionary.)

Kanjidic2 codepoint

Over at aule-browser I have added an HTML page which correctly displays the 13,108 characters in the Kanjidic2 according to the UCS codepoint found in each XML 'character' element.

The XML was parsed using an XPath expression with the Curl XML Document Model library.

日本におけるカール社のウェブサイト

Kanjidic2 UTF-8 character literal

Today I found that not all characters in the kanjidic2 XML file could be parsed and displayed as UTF-8 – at least not in the fonts available to me in IE.

I have posted a utf-8 web page with those that would display after parsing with Curl's xml path library for the content of the "literal" element for each character element.

Parsing gave a total of 13,108 elements when I was expecting fewer than 7000. Issues only arose with the last thousand or so elements - and a few in that tail-end did display. Problems start after the first 12,166 elements.

In the last thousand elements, only the following few literal values would display:

匇 匤 咊 增 寬 嵓 德 晥 栁 橫 瀨 炻 甁 皞 礰 竧 綠 緖 荢 薰 譿 賴 郞 鄕 霻 靍 馞 魲 黑 朗 隆 﨏 塚 﨑 﨓 凞 猪 神 祥 福 﨟 蘒 﨡 諸 﨤 都

If you have been parsing the kanjidic XML dictionary and have an idea, please drop a line.

UPDATE

Using a tail view of kanjidic2.xml I can see that the last UCS codepoint is FA6A which displays correctly in my browser as 頻.

I will revise my parse path to pull the codepoint instead of the literal.

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Bloated Desktop Applications

While reviewing my options for caching some graphic containers in Curl, I checked my process explorer.

My browser was creeping up to 1.8 GB as a busy, greedy process on an XP Pentium with 1 GB RAM.

The browser is not the only offender: otherwise useful Evernote appears to lack some smarts (remember when Prolog simply required too much memory?)

Let the OS worry about it?  Throw more memory in the device?  Ascend to the free cloud?

Is there now a generation of Perl/PHP scriptors working in HTML + JavaScript for whom memory and CPU cycles swapping-to-disk are free? Are they avoiding multiple trips this way?  Is this the AJAX heritage?  SSD merely warm, but not whirring?

Just as it appears that Rebol may disappear.

Remember why Smalltalk was not in use (outside Amex and JP Morgan and ?)  St required a VM and too much memory.  Now as some Smalltalk implementations shrink and their VM's enter a new generation, ask a corporate programmer when she last prototyped an app in a Smalltalk dialect.

I can hear it ringing in my ears: "All we need is one little Perl script to do that !"  But CGI with Perl was too costly on servers, remember?  But now it appears that nothing is too costly on a client device.

But free memory, like free DASD, is only as believable as free money, or 33% annual return on your investment if you get in early.

Where is the desktop UNICODE-savvy text editor app that knows how to edit multiple small files without burping up a 30MB or more process for each tiny text file?

These apps are the bungalows of the sprawling suburbs of 50's Middle-America - and now they propose to bloat invisibly within the cloud. Is this a viable global picture of net resource consumption?  Which economic model suggests greater bandwidth as evolution's competitive winning variant?

Maybe kids running Rebol on Raspberry Pi knock-off's will get us on another track.

Try this: compare some smart e-commerce sites to the UI's of Google PLAY or Canada'a zip.ca

Those UI's are not JavaScript generated by Smalltalk - or by Prolog.  These sad web pages must each re-evolve from dumb and primitive.  These are not smart lean app's standing on the shoulders of bulky slow app's. That is just not how the web is evolving.

PS
Ruby is just a dumbed-down Smalltalk for Perl scripting.

Scala ?  Let me tell you a story that is not up-Lift'ing ...

Multi-core?  Watch for MC Smalltalk.  But bloat and greedy prcesses remain what they are just as a Ponzi-scheme by any name remains your personal goldmine .... and your cousin's, too !

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Kanji stroke-order

I have just added a kanji stroke-order page (your browser must allow a page to be viewed with UNICODE character-encoding.)

The page is an alternate version of winttk.com's own page, as I found their page difficult to read (CTRL-+ also effects the Perapera Firefox tool.)

This alternate view was constructed by first making my own indexed text list so as not to copy from their web page, and then using using regexp to construct the links. A white-on-black stylesheet was then added and the font-size corrected so as to be suited to using Perapera's Kanji dictionary tool in Firefox. But shifting this alternate page to point at, say, the Japanese wiktionary.org stroke-order diagrams might be done so simply using Rebel or ICON.

What would have been so much smarter at winttk.com would have been the use of a smart page server such as can be built with Smalltalk Seaside.

But for the user, a page can be made much smarter with a browser tool.

Yes, Greasemonkey-style JavaScript would be one option, but with all of the security worries.

Consider that my simple page only "remembers" which Kanji stroke-order diagrams you have viewed.  Using Curl and CSPD (client-side persistent data) a task-specific browser can be easily constructed to track which Kanji continue to give you trouble with their stroke order, e.g.,  Kanji such as 海 or 家.

The GIF's at winttk.com are attributed as Copyright Alpha Inc.  Please respect their copyright as these are only available for web view. I believe they are located in Kanagawa prefecture.
Their page on Alpha Inc. states (in an approximate translation) that "Alpha.Inc material is free for personal use, free of charge, if you are not engaged in education as a commercial business."

I have added an alternate page numbered in accordance with the 1988 (1998) Henshall, "A Guide to Remembering the Kanji".  The pages are white-on-black as per my iTouch preference. Would Alpha Inc. be interested in an alternate set of GIF's flipped to white-on-black?

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