Since ever the Kobo firmwares also allowed downloading of a bunch of dictionaries, most of which I don t need. As I am fluent in most languages I read and write, the only real dictionary I would like to see is a Japanese-English (I don t dare asking for a Japanese-German). Unfortunately, Kobo never shipped one. OTOH, starting with firmware 3.16.10 they ships two different English-Japanese dictionaries, one excellent Japanese-Japanese dictionary, but not one Japanese-English. So I took the liberty to write a script that allows everyone to enrich the shipped Japanese-Japanese dictionary with English definitions.
Till now I have used
Tshering s excellent Japanese dictionary which was enriched with English definitions. It was based on the older Japanese-Japanese dictionary shipped with firmwares before 3.16.10. I didn t want to loose the more complete dictionary from the new firmware, so here is a script that updates the dictionary for you
Prerequisites
The script is neither fool-proof nor does everything by itself. Furthermore, it requires a set of programs. In details:
- Unix/Linux computer I haven t tried anything of this on a Windows machine, but I am happy about feedback. I am working on a version that does not depend on external programs, and thus might be much more portable.
- Dictionaries A copy of the Edict dictionary see below for details on dictionaries.
- 7z A standard zip/unzip program that also takes the locale into account when unpacking (different to unzip that I have access to)
- Perl modules Various Perl modules that should be standard on most installations: Getopt::Long, File::Temp, File::Basename, and Cwd.
Supported dictionaries
At the moment the program can use the following two dictionaries as sources: Edict2 and Japanese3.
Edict2
The
Edict dictionary is a free dictionary which is the base of most other dictionaries. Created by the JMdict/EDICT Project it provides a very complete Japanese-English dictionary.
To use the dict with the current program, one need to download the
edict2.gz file and unpack it with
gunzip edict2.gz. If you put it into the same directory as the Perl script, nothing else needs to be done, otherwise one can use the command line option
--edict PATH-TO-EDICT to specify the location of the edict2 file.
Japanese3
The Japanese3 is a
dictionary application for iOS which provides another very complete Japanese-English dictionary. My feeling is that it is 90% and more based on Edict, so adding it will not buy you much, but still a bit (see below for how much!).
If you have purchased this dictionary/application, and you manage to get access to your iOS device (via jailbreaking or some other tools), then you need to get the file
Japanese3.db from the application folder, and then generate a file via
sqlite3 as follows:
$ sqlite3 Japanese3.db
.output japanese3-data
select Entry, Furigana, Summary from entries; |
If you save the generated file
japanese3-data into the same directory as the Perl script, nothing else needs to be done, otherwise one can use the command line option
--japanese3 PATH-TO-J3-DATA to specify the location of the Japanese3 data file.
Command line options
The program supports the following command line options:
- -h, --help Print this message and exit.
- -i, --input location of the original Kobo GloHD dict, defaults to dicthtml-jaxxdjs.zip. This can of course point to one of the old dictionaries named dicthtml-ja.zip to enhance those.
- -o, --output name of the output file, defaults to dicthtml-jaxxdjs-TIMESTAMP.zip
- --dicts dictionaries to be used, can be given multiple times, possible values are edict2 and japanese3. The order determines the priority of the dictionary.
- -e, --edict location of the edict2 file, defaults to edict2
- -j, --japanese3 location of the japanese3 file, defaults to japanese3-data
- keep-input keep the unpacked directory
- keep-output keep the updated output directory
- -u, unpacked location of an already unpacked original dictionary
Note that in case you pass in the option
--unpacked, the files should be properly named (encodings are a problem!). Furthermore, note that the unpacked directory contains lots of
.gif and
.html files that are actually gzip-compressed files, but lacking the
.gz extension.
If you want to unpack the dictionary, by advised that the file names in the Zip directory are already encoded in UTF-8, but normal programs (unzip, 7z) assume that they are encoded in some other encoding. Thus, if your are using UTF-8 locale, it is necessary to set
LC_CTYPE to
C to make sure that the encoding is used, as in
Typical run
In the following example we use both dict2 and Japanese3 dictionaries, and prefer Edict2:
$ perl enhance-dictionary.pl --dicts edict2 --dicts japanese3
Using the following dictionaries as source for translations: edict2 japanese3
loading edict2 ... done
loading Japanese3 data ... done
unpacking original dictionary ... done
loading dict files ... done
searching for words and updating ... done
total words 805521, matches: 130563 (edict: 123388, japanese3: 7175)
creating output html ... done
creating update dictionary in dicthtml-jaxxdjs-201508072201.zip ... done
$ |
Installing the dictionary
After having created the enhanced dictionary, one can install the generated file as
KOBO/.kobo/dicts/dicthtml-jaxxdjs.zip (where KOBO is the mount point of the eReader). The dictionary should be picked up automatically. And the next lookup should give you something like the following:
There is only one caveat: Syncing with Kobo will re-download the original dictionary and overwrite the enhanced one. There is at least one solution here, which I am employing, see
this post on MobileRead.
Download and development place
I am using the github repository
kobo-ja-dict-enhance to develop the program. Please report bugs, and feature requests there.
The file for the last released version can be downloaded from here:
enhance-dictionary.pl
Future plans
I am planning to get rid of the 7z dependency and use
Archive::Zip for all the unpacking and packing. This would also allow to do everything in memory and thus make it faster. There is a branch on github with ongoing work on this matter.
I also think about including translations for Hiragana words by providing the translations of all possible Kanji readings.
Conclusions
Even if Kobo does not provide us with a decent Japanese-English dictionary, adding at least a huge amount of translations to the current dictionary is now easily possible. For serious students of Japanese who are reading or starting to read Japanese eBooks, this will be of great help.
Enjoy, and don t forget to give feedback, suggestions, and improvements either here or better via the Github page.
Thursday was our big day: After more than 2.5 years of working in the
hidden, ups and downs, Frank
Hofmann and myself were able to announce the availability of our
book project Debian
Package Management under a free license (Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International
License, short CC BY-SA 4.0 ) during a Lightning Talk at DebConf15 in Heidelberg.
This became possible because we found Onyx Neon, a publishing company
which is specialised on books with contents under free licenses. Its
founder does not only have a faible for Perl but also for Debian.
(Since the question already came up: We also thought about
self-publishing, e.g. via Lulu or Epubli and it would have been our fallback solution
, but we prefer the professionalism and services of a real
publisher. I m though happy to share what I found out about
self-publishing in the past few months.)
The source code of the book is written in the AsciiDoc format and available on
GitHub.
The book is still work in progress. But if you want, you can
already build an e-book out of the publically available source code:
Following the tradition of 
Found at the 
I keep being asked about automated bootloader testing and the phrase which crops up is SD mux hardware to multiplex SD card access (typically microSD). Each time, the questioner comes up with a simple solution which can be built over a weekend, so I ve decided to write out the actual objective, requirements and constraints to hopefully illustrate that this is not a simple problem and the solution needs to be designed to a fully scalable, reliable and maintainable standard.
The objective
Whether you re a TDD zealot, or you just occasionally write a quick script
to reproduce some bug, it s a rare coder who doesn t see value in some sort
of automated testing. Yet, somehow, in all of the new-age Infrastructure
as Code mania, we appear to have forgotten this, and the tools that are
commonly used for implementing Infrastructure as Code have absolutely
woeful support for developing your Infrastructure Code. I believe this
has to change.
At present, the state of the art in testing system automation code appears
to be, spin up a test system, run the manifest/state/whatever, and then use
something like 
Maybe setting up a BOF would also be a good idea.
What happened in the 
After less than a week of complaints, the 
July was the third month I contributed to 
It's been a while since I talked about Ceilometer and its companions, so I
thought I'd go ahead and write a bit about what's going on this side of
OpenStack. I'm not going to cover new features and fancy stuff today, but
rather a shallow overview of the new project processes we initiated.
Ceilometer growing
Ceilometer development activity
