Author Archive

My Start in Options Trading

December 26th, 2021

CNBC’s Yun Li reports, “A record of 39 million options contracts have traded daily on average this year, rising 35% from 2020, according to Options Clearing Corp.” After nearly twenty years of opening a brokerage account and managing a stock portfolio, I completed an options course offered by TD Ameritrade and contributed to this year’s […]

Tobira Kanji and WaniKani

December 5th, 2021
Posted in 日本語 | No Comments

Tobira Gateway to Advanced Japanese Learning through Content and Multimedia assumes 297 kanji are already learned by its potential readers. Tobira presents many words using these kanji without furigana. Learning the statistically most common kanji on- and kun-readings through WaniKani makes Tobira more accessible.

The following table shows what percentage of these prerequisite kanji are covered at particular WaniKani levels:

Level 5: 40%
Level 10: 76%
Level 15: 92%
Level 20: 97%

Only nine prerequisite kanji are introduced by WaniKani after level 20: 職違質授痛貸婚汚遅. The other 277 required kanji are covered in the first 20 levels.

The following snippet, with furigana as provided in Tobira, is extracted from page 5 of the textbook:

日本には、47の都道府県(一都、一道、二府、四十三県)があります。一都は東京都(首都しゅと)、一道は北海道、二府は大阪おおさか府と京都府で、そのほかは、静岡しずおか県や広島ひろしま県のように全部、県です。静岡県はお茶や富士山ふじさんで有名で、広島県には戦争せんそうおそろしさと平和の大切さを伝える原爆げんばくドームがあります。

Working through level 20 on WaniKani will not give language students the ability to know all vocabulary in the above text. However, they will be able to make good guesses at how to read words such as 都道府県 and use online dictionaries like Jisho. Several words with furigana included by Tobira, such as 他, 大阪, 広島, and 戦争, should be known by WaniKani users at level 20. If Tobira is a gateway to advanced Japanese, then WaniKani is a great tool to develop vocabulary and reading skills needed to pass through that gateway.

The above percentage data was derived from output of a JavaScript program, wktobira.js, which maps Tobira prerequisite kanji to WaniKani levels and is an example of using the WaniKani Web API.

JavaScript: SHA-256 Implementation

October 3rd, 2021
Posted in JavaScript | No Comments

This weekend I decided to experiment with using JavaScript to implement client-side processing of files using a web browser. To make it interesting, I wanted to see if it was possible to implement a cryptographically strong hash function: SHA-256. This exercise gave me exposure to Web Workers and the Stream API. I encountered compatibility challenges. […]

Using GoDaddy API for Dynamic DNS

September 27th, 2021

It has been difficult accessing my home computer, with potentially a dynamically allocated IP address, from anywhere on the Internet after dyndns.org became a paid service. The following bash script made available by TheBelcherman on the GoDaddy Community forum simulates the functionality of dyndns.org by programmatically updating a DNS record that has GoDaddy as its […]

Manipulating Raspberry Pi GPIO Ports with C#

September 18th, 2021
Posted in 日本語 | No Comments

Quarantine and working from home because of COVID-19 has provided an opportunity for me to take up Japanese again. I studied Japanese for years in high school and college, but I was unable to consume media intended for a Japanese audience. I hope that I can practice reading Kanji with posts like these.

This is the first post in which I try to translate snippets of technology articles written in Japanese. I hope that I can provide translations for longer snippets as my Japanese language skills improve. The following snippet is from Let’s Manipulate the Raspberry Pi GPIO Ports Using C# by Ken Takae:

C#とえば、Windows環境かんきょうだけとおもわれがちですが、.Net CoreをLinux環境にインストールすれば、C#で開発かいはつしたアプリケーションが動作どうさします。また、Raspberry Pi(ラズベリーパイ)でも、C#を使つかってIoT開発をおこなうことができます。

My translation:

Although when speaking of C# one tends to think about only the Windows environment, if .Net Core is installed in the Linux environment, applications developed in C# operate [in the Linux environment]. Moreover, even with a Raspberry Pi, it is possible to use C# and carry out IoT development.

Notes:
~がち: a suffix to express an undesirable tendency in someone or something. Formed by Verb-masuがちだ or Nounがちだ.

Source: C#でラズパイのGPIOを操作しよう~LEDを点灯させる
Reference: Makino, Seiichi and Michio Tsutsui. A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar. The Japan Times, 2001, pp. 47-50.