Saturday, October 27, 2007

Qwertie.net is down indefinitely

It was running on my home computer and we switched to a new internet service provider (from Shaw to Telus). Telus blocks home web servers, hence qwertie.net is inaccessible. Oh well, there were only a few files on it and my blog's not very popular...

The main page was a user-editable interdictionary I made in 2006 that I hoped Esperanto speakers would use to improve an existing Esperanto-English dictionary. It was like Wiktionary, but much more useful for language learners because it was designed for inter-language definitions specifically, and you could click on any word to look it up in both directions (e.g. if a definition contains the word jam, the user could click on it, and the dictionary would spit out the definition for the English word "jam" and the Esperanto word "jam" (pronounced "yahm") at the same time. Anyway, I posted a link to it on lernu.net and tried to start a discussion, but evidently no one was interested. Only one other person ever added definitions, and now it's probably gone forever.

My best friend is learning Esperanto and recently got a Pocket PC, so I used the .NET Compact Framework (a Microsoft thing, don't worry if you don't know what it is) to quickly make a little user-editable Pocket PC Esperanto-English dictionary. It's got a convenient user interface but it's only in alpha state right now (main problem: it takes at least 30 seconds to start). I'm too ashamed of it to post it online, and I'm not improving it because I'm too worried that no one will use it...

Anyway, I placed a couple of files that were on qwertie.net somewhere else: my research paper about why we still use the Qwertie keyboard layout (and what's better?), and the ever-unread paper on electoral reform in Canada. Speaking of which, the coolest democratic system I know of is Direct Representation.

Note to self: learn more about Barak Omama.