The Japanese writing system has a long and deep history, tracing back to the scratching on Oracle Bones in ancient China. This depth of history thus carries a huge weight of etymology behind it. This etymology is not just frivolous either. The old forms of chinese are used in Chop Seals which are effectively signatures of legal documents.

The difficult thing with the etymology of a given Kanji is actually quite problematic. When Han'zi characters were imported to japan, they were (generally) imported as their "traditional" version. During the communist revolution in China, the government simplified a great number of characters. Thus, there are currently two versions of a given Chinese character. For example, the character for "see" is 見 in Traditional Chinese, and Japanese, but 见 in Simplified Chinese. To make it even more confusing, there are a few characters of exclusively Japanese origin (called Kokuji). Finally, the Japanese went through their own simplification process.

What this boils down to, is that if you are wanting to study the Etymology of a Kanji character, you might have a couple of places to look. The first step is to take a peak at this great Chinese etymology database put together by Richard Sears. You can feed it a simplified or traditional chinese character, and it will come back with results. The only time that it doesn't come up with any results, is when you try and input a kokuji, or even just a Traditional Chinese character that the Japanese simplified (if that is the case, you can search for the kanji you are looking for at the link I just provided).

On a completely different angle, the writing of Kanji has progressed in a different direction, which is to say, calligraphy. I'll be talking about that more in another post, but I thought I would mention 2 great calligraphic dictionaries I have found:

http://www.font.com.cn/fontzd/

http://www.9610.com/zidian/index.asp

Both dictionaries are on Mainland China, which means they are exclusively simplified Chinese. This means that if you want to look up a traditional chinese character, you need to find its simplified equivalent. This isn't too hard, because Thats where Richard Sears saves the day again. It provides a good amount of information on any Chinese character you feed it. Simplified or Traditional.

Even if you are not studying Japanese (or Chinese!) you should go have a look at these sites, some of them have quite beautiful imagery, and it it is quite interesting to see the etymology of a few different characters. If you need some example characters, you can use these (you'll just have to copy/paste them):

• Sun 日
• Moon 月
• Mountain 山
• Stream 川
• Tree 木
• Gold 金
• Soil 土

Whoah. On March 22nd, I will have been blogging for a year. The fact that I have stuck with it for so long is pretty freaking amazing. As a general rule, I tend to be rather flighty about my projects.

I just finished categorizing all the old school entries. Next up is to clean out all the entries marked as a draft. Why is this important? My blog is my brains offline storage. If it is organized, my life is easier. At least one of my brains should have some kind of order.

Kamera Watcz0rz is a one-off app that I coded in an hour to check the status of the incoming Canon Digital Rebel... *DR000000L*

This of course, is for my lovely wife, whose photographs will one day grace the hallowed halls of... errr... some photography museum in someplace cool, like Prague, New York, or some shit.

I am thinking about opening it up some, and giving it RSS. That would pwnz0rz, just enter in your USPS id, and it would check for you every hour. Although, after a day or so of the USPS post office site getting 100 different queries every hour from the same host, it is bound to raise suspicions, and probably a few hackles, so I will refrain from doing that.

Update: She finally got the Camera, so I shut down the page. It took 8 weeks or so.. UGH!

I haven't been writing much about Harmony in this blog, because she has her very own site for that. Well, I finally started actually writing in that one, so Here is my first entry. Whute!

Wards Wiki (or WikiWikiWeb), the Ur-Wiki has a little problem. If you check out Quick Changes (Local mirror here) You will see that someone has apparently decided to start from AaMilne, and work their way up and got stopped at AndersenConsulting I am guessing they are doing some kind of evil page badness (spamming? deleting?). Now the wiki CGI script gives a 404, (probably to avoid further page meltdowns.)

If I remember, c2 has its own page-change-flow-control mechanism that ensures that edit wards, and continuous page changing by a single (group of) IP address(es) don't happen. whoever wrote their evil script was smart enough to realize that, and make sure that they changes pages well below the threshold. EIther that, or the dumbass didn't notice that 99% of his script running time was spent parsing "403 Forbidden" messages.

Given the behaviour of some individuals on Wiki, it wouldn't surprise me if it was an "inside job". Sad really.

So, I am up in Ft. McMurry. In case you don't know where it is, in relation to my hometown... it might as well be the freakin Great White North. Coming here is kinda like a Vancouverite coming to Calgary, (I finally understand what it is like).

Yesterday morning Telus got barsted, so of corse, our webserver was inacessable. Thanks to Trevor and Drew for fix0ring things when the interweb was fixed. All this wen't down whilst Shell, Harmony and I were in the car. We got periodic updates from Trevor via SMS along a two lane highway on the way to a 2 bit whitebread mining town. What a wired world we live in.