Has it really been that long?

It's been nearly four months since my last post. A lot had been happening in my life and it seemed like no one was reading my blog anyway. The last month of school was very hectic; in the last three weeks, I had so much to do that I withdrew from a course to reduce my workload. There were projects everywhere: the Fourth Year Design Project, the compiler project, the database project and the parallel processing project--this last project was in the course from which I had to withdraw.

In my database class we had to do a database project--a web application with a database back-end. I considered this my opportunity to finally do something I wanted to do.

The Esperanto international auxilliary language (IAL), which I've discussed before, suffers from poor-quality and incomplete English dictionaries, and I felt that a user-editable dictionary could be the solution to that problem. Wikipedia has a sister dictionary project, Wiktionary, but it's inconvenient to use Wiktionary to actually look stuff up, especially when you want a translation dictionary.

So I made qwertie.net. Note:

• Only the English<=>Esperanto dictionaries contain a significant number of entries.
• It doesn't work well in Internet Explorer 6; get Firefox.
• This site might not be up forever.

Qwertie.net used to be an alias for my home page (qwertie.netfirms.com), but now it's an alias for my home computer (66.222.237.211). Anyway, it was my first web application and my second database application. I would sure like to give a piece of my mind to those guys who run the database course, because they didn't teach us squat about how to write web applications or how to interface with a database. They did teach SQL, but even that seemed to be on the sidelines in this course. Anyway, I pulled through with an A, and my three other A's should make up for having dropped out of a course.

I should write some more entries now. I've got a new best friend, a new job, a new home, and new ideas for programs I want to write.

In the meantime, uhm, well, check out my del.icio.us bookmarks. There's lots of programming stuff but also freedom-fighting goodness... or better yet, learn from the EFF about how Big Media is having its way with the U.S. Congress:

"With so many tech mandate proposals and DRM restrictions being introduced, it's all too easy to miss how they fit together. A digital radio mandate here, an analog hole plug there, add in a little HDCP on video outputs for bad measure, and so on -- pretty soon, you've got DRM everywhere, and the whole is far more dangerous than the sum of its parts."

The Battle for Your Digital Media Devices And learn about Digital Video Restrictions