May 2008

Lingwo.flashcards, now with lower hacktivation energy!

Submitted by David Snopek on May 23, 2008 - 8:49am

A buddy of mine has been trying to get the Lingwo.flashcards server code running on his MacOS X laptop. You can see the discussion on the Google Group. I think this is a HUGE step for the project. I've been recently reading parts of this great online book: Producing Open Source Software. Alot of it is stuff that should be evident, but is easy to over look when your focused on writing code.

Google Summer of Code

Submitted by David Snopek on May 16, 2008 - 5:49am

This just in!  I am mentoring in Google Summer of Code this year for the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit.  The student is Andrey Popelo, who describes his project in this blog post.  GSoC doesn't official kick off until May 26th.  I expect it will be an interesting experience!

Spaced repetition, commitment and Lingwo.flashcards 0.1.4

Submitted by David Snopek on May 6, 2008 - 6:43pm

After reading this post on Confessions of a Language Addict, I've started thinking a bit more seriously about "the commitment problem" with spaced repetition which I recently wrote about. To summarize the problem: Spaced repetition works great if you are committed to quizzing your flashcards everyday. But inevitably, you will have to stop for some period time.  When you come back, the number of expired cards could overwhelm you.

I was using Memorati™ religiously while I was reading the first Harry Potter book. It was fantastic. After finishing the book, I stopped doing flash cards for about 1 week. I needed a break. I have over 2.500 cards and I was on a very strict regimen. Several weeks have gone by and I have still been unable to catch up.

Personal Computing Rules

Submitted by David Snopek on May 5, 2008 - 2:15pm

Over the weekend, I somehow convinced myself that upgrading to Debian Lenny (the current testing) was a good idea. I've encountered countless problems because of this. So, I am going to attempt to lay down some ground rules for my personal computer maintenance. This is written in the 2nd person, speaking to myself.

  1. You only need a root and swap partition. I know that you like to have a separate /boot or /home partition, but inevitably, you will run into issues with disk space. For example, currently I have my /home partition with 65G and the root partition with 6.5G. I ran out of space on the root partition and now I have to carefully prune my Debian packages. Lame.

Harry Potter i Więzień Azkabanu

Submitted by David Snopek on May 1, 2008 - 7:42pm

My copy of "Harry Potter i Więzień Azkabanu" (the 3rd Harry Potter book in Polish) just arrived today!  Hurray!  And this time, I have got the audio book too.  My copy of the audio for the 2nd book is still in transit somewhere, but I'm done with that one anyway.  Rock.

Introducing: The Lingwo Project

Submitted by David Snopek on May 1, 2008 - 7:57am

Happy May Day!

This morning I launched The Lingwo Project website. This is an umbrella project representing the following three projects: