Django Pony - Magic that can’t be removed
Tuesday, 16 Sept. 2008 http://djangopony.com/
A personal django based information manager
Friday, 01 Aug. 2008For quite some time I was looking for the “optimal” software to manage all kinds of information:
- To Do Lists
- Reminders
- Writetups of ideas or concepts for some new application or article
- Code snippets worth remembering
Ideally, there is one central place for all this stuff - not one for to do lists, another for article drafts, and a third for storing code snippets. The “place” needs to be somewhere on the web, of course, to make it accessible from everywhere.
I tried many of the applications to be found on the web. There’s backpack, the excellent minimal information management app from 37signals; there’s google notebook with its seamless integration in firefox; there are countless more examples. Needless to say, I didn’t evaluate them all. There might well be the perfect application for me somewhere out there. But none of the solutions I looked at really was the ...
Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
Thursday, 24 July 2008 http://wordle.net/
This word cloud is based on the text of my “about” page and was done using the wonderful wordle application.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
New Django App: German-Swedish Dictionary
Monday, 21 April 2008 http://www.ericfehse.net/voc/As I wrote in my previous post, I’m currently busy learning Swedish. One result of this endeavour is an ever growing collection of swedish words in my vocabulary program. And because there is no really usable online dictionary for swedish and german, I decided to put my collection online, in the form of a very simple web application.
The dictionary is of course by no means comprehensive - it’s just my private collection of words and expressions. I tried to follow some rules when entering the words, and I plan on extending the dictionary as my learning progresses (and I read more books).
There’s exactly one feature: searching for words. The search term is matched against all swedish and german words in the dictionary. The results are shown in a table. The whole thing is somewhat unnecessarily AJAX-powered (using jQuery).
As always, it was fun to develop ...
Learning a foreign language by reading
Friday, 01 Feb. 2008The probably most important activity during language acquisition is listening to and speaking in the language. There’s just no substitute for that if you want to become a fluent speaker yourself.
That means: you will not be able to learn a foreign language by reading alone. But it can be very effective. If you enjoy reading as much as I do, all you need is a basic vocabulary and an understandig of the main grammatical concepts of the language. Then find a book you know you will like. In my case, it’s “Innan Frosten” (“Before the Frost“) by Henning Mankell. Armed with a dictionary and some means to collect newly learned words, just delve in and start reading.
In the beginning, it may be tedious (ok: it will). But soon you’ll realize that this works astonishingly well. Some of the reasons are:
By reading, you harness the ...
