Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

When Microsoft says “server name”, they really mean “Server name\instance name”.

Due to online buying frenzies, I now have too much reading material queued up every month. Besides my “planning to read” queue, I now have 5 magazine subscriptions each month. Well one of those (the acm crossroads) is an extra magazine they throw in for free while subscribing to the CACM as a student (it is cheaper, ok). I like to read offline materials, while it is less selective, and it thereby strengthens the ability to be a specialized generalist. This reason is just a minor addition to the fact that reading paper based material, while lying on the couch sipping coffee just is damn relaxing.

I more or less just finished my first facebook app. It is an electronic version of Chinese flashcards, with some testing and scoring functionality. It started as a mix of my interest in learning the Chinese characters, and trying out the facebook developer framework.

As a facebook developer, you have the choice of writing your application as a canvas page which is embedded parsed html, returned from your script, or as an iframe. Though you have more freedom on the iframe page, you can’t really make use of the specific functions provided by the facebook framework, so the right choice would be to use the canvas page. The framework is pretty well thought of, even though it has its shortcomings. For security reasons and to generally prevent mess-ups, facebook provides their own version of javascript, called FBJS. Even though it is a serious pruned down version of JS, it does the trick.

I used the CEDICT database, for the Chinese words, and sorted them into difficulty categories according to their natural frequency. This does not necessarily reflect the number of strokes, which also can be a sign of difficulty. While not everybody has the Chinese language pack installed, I had to generate images of all the characters, and their pinyin representatives. I haven’t yet found the optimal font for generating pinyin images, so some of the representations can look a bit off.