Bitcoin Forum

kongzi.ca (http://kongzi.ca) -- what is it?

It's a real business. Something that adds value to the bitcoin community. Not just some fancy schmantzy financial bond or mining scheme. It's a language school, and we accept bitcoins. We don't accept dollars because I don't have paypal.

We also publish and sell our own language textbooks, and they are some of the most advanced language textbooks in the world. We're starting with Japanese (although others are in development). We currently have the only Japanese textbook in the world that attempts to use comprehensible input theory to teach the language. And our website will be the same.

So, I am looking for private investment to help me develop this. I have a couple of ideas.

One, I can sell the book I'm working on (see: http://kongzi.ca/wtj (http://kongzi.ca/wtj)). <--- No really, check this out. It's real and it's 90% done. It's good enough to offer pre-sales.

Two, I can sell you a lifetime membership on kongzi.ca (http://kongzi.ca). There isn't much there now, but once it gets rolling I'll start charging by the month, and a lifetime membership account would become priceless. Go there and sign up now, it's free. See for yourself how I am working on it.

Finally, you can invest in the language school itself. While I can't offer you shares or bonds, I can offer you an investment opportunity in the form of a private business loan. If you loan me money personally so that I can develop this project, then I promise to personally pay you back once the site starts making money. The terms of such an arrangement can be discussed privately.

So how do you know I'm for real? Well first, I have a very good OTC rating (http://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratingdetail.php?nick=usagi). Second, please visit the link above; http://kongzi.ca/wtj -- There are pictures of the book. Finally, I've done more than one complete and fully functional website before, including hotwallet.ca. So you know for a fact I can complete what I start.

But what's more, I've already finished the programming and solved all the natural language processing issues surrounding a language school; please see my old blog at renli.wordpress.com especially the following posts for some screenshots.

http://renli.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/kongzi-pre-beta-8-progreess-report/ (http://renli.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/kongzi-pre-beta-8-progreess-report/)
http://renli.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/concentration/ (http://renli.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/concentration/)
and
http://renli.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/kongzi-can-now-import-cc-cedict/ (http://renli.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/kongzi-can-now-import-cc-cedict/)

So you know this is for real, you know this will compete with programs like stackz, anki and iknow.jp, and you know it will blow them out of the water. It will destroy programs like Rosetta stone. It will revolutionize language teaching online!

I've always been afraid to release my code for fear that it will be pirated; that concern does not exist with a web app in the way that it does with desktop software. I've been a professional language teacher for the last seven or eight years now; I use the desktop (java) version of kongzi to teach in the classroom and not only do the students love it, it really does help them learn the language more quickly. I'm very experienced teaching English here in Asia, and I will have a large (30+) base of customers on kongzi.ca learning English almost immediately. I also work closely with the cram schools, private highschools and universities I teach English at here, and there will be options for me to draw students from those places and provide English teaching services to those schools and also to help smaller schools get a web presence/computer presence.

I can tell you for sure, a lot of smaller cram schools would LOVE to be able to tell parents they have computer teaching/testing or to give students homework that they have to complete using a computer. Parents eat that stuff up like popcorn.

So how will this work? Here are my ideas:

1. Presales of books/membership:
For 1 bitcoin I will sell you a copy of one of the books I'm working on (see; http://kongzi.ca/wtj (http://kongzi.ca/wtj)). Combined shipping anywhere in the world is 1 bitcoin.
For 2 bitcoins I will give you a 1 year full-access membership code, which will become active when we start charging for membership (no point using it until then, at any rate).
For 5 bitcoins I will give you a lifetime transferrable* membership to kongzi.ca and e-book copies of the books now, and also send you printed copies of the final product when the books are done.
*(you can edit your e-mail/password, or I can give you a code which will unlock a lifetime membership account.)

2. Investment into kongzi.ca
For every bitcoin you give me personally, I promise to pay you back 1.2 bitcoins out of my profit from kongzi.ca. You will be paid first before I realize any personal profit. (idea 1)

kongzi.ca (http://kongzi.ca) -- go there, check it out. I'm working on it.... right now!

FAQ

Q: MPOE-PR (and maybe others) said you were an anonymous, incompetent nutjob. Post quoted:
Is there any truth to this?

A: Hey, who you calling anonymous! This is the internet!
Lol, no, seriously, it's true -- of course it's all true -- people did in fact accuse me of being a scammer.

But guess what! I never got a scammer tag because i'm not a scammer.

In MPOE-PR's zeal she also posted a scammer accusation I made against someone else (#3 on the list above). MPOE-PR is clearly "incompetent" even at accusing others people of being incompetent. How ironic.

Trolls like MPOE-PR are essentially full of shit, don't listen to them. You're better off placing them on ignore. This has been a public service announcement. There's really no need to answer every troll is there?

Kong Zi says "Study the past, if you would divine the future." -> Subscribed for inevitable drama goodness.

I think that it is great you are trying to offer a real service.

I am sure you are familiar with inknow.jp

This used to be a free website which had a lot of nice user constructed material. Later it was turned into a pay website and the user submitted material was removed (I think the company didn't have a license to sell this stuff). This sucked because prices went way up (from zero ->~US$12/month) and quality went down.

Could you build a nice platform for people to create and edit content, (like iknow.jp used to be before it went behind a paywall). Perhaps a platform which would allow people to earn money from their contributions?

I'm not sure what the best revenue model is (ads, premium services, etc.). I feel that iknow.jp made a bad decision though.

Welcome back usagi! We missed your drama  :P

BTW what happened to your post count?

Yes I am using iknow.jp right now (formerly smart.fm). I bought a 6 month subscription. In bitcoins, of course (see the services forum for my post ;-)

Well, I don't know if the quality went down, from what I understand the quality itself went up, they added pictures and native voice actors. Things that you pretty much can't get for free. They did remove a lot of the social features and as you say, user created content. Because they didn't have a license. However, there are ways around that, such as attributions and getting permission -- things which are not hard to do for a real business. I've been in contact with people. Even, a lot of native Japanese. And of course, Chinese. And Korean. I feel that the worst I can do is hire native speakers to generate content, at any rate.

The big thing from what I hear was the social features that were removed when smart.fm changed into iknow.jp. I fully intend to create a "better iknow.jp" which was a lot more like the old smart.fm. As for price, I don't see why iknow.jp needs to charge $12 a month. I think $5 or less a month is a much better price range.

As for users earning money, well, perhaps bitcoins but more likely "kongzi points" or time towards paid services. Kind of like "Add ten facts to the database and get a (gift code for a) free 1 year membership" or something. Users will be able to edit their own content, but there will also be a "core" content owned by the system which is 'default content'. Not sure if you get what I mean, but I have the database structure already worked out for it. I'd never be able to enter all the data by myself otherwise. It will be like Anki's internet-shared decks feature, but done properly.

The way I have thought out for users to get paid for using my site is viral marketing/commissions. I'm planning to offer users a 50% lifetime commission on any user that signs up to kongzi.ca using them as a referral (i.e. get 2 people to sign up and your membership is essentially free, 3+ people, and you get paid). I think that's a great deal. Now, if I just could get 500 active users at $5 a month I would be very happy. I think that is very possible to get that many paying users once the system is perfected.

Anyways I have a lot of plans for this. No online service really offers comprehensive JLPT N5 material which is really the way things are moving in the Japanese Learning world right now. iknow.jp still has a user-created JLPT N5 list but all iknow.jp does is flashcards, essentially. I will be able to do everything they do and much more. One of the big things is having the user create their own sentences and having the computer verify the grammar. One thing I am very interested in doing is offering a teaching trail where the user is taught something, is shown some example sentences, and then has to enter their own sentences and have the computer verify that the grammar is correct. No one else has that. Stuff like that. Beyond that, I'd like to hire native teachers to do video lectures once in a while, and have them available for view/download online. Oh wow there's so much stuff I could do with this it's insane. Please check out the screenshots for the kongzi program. Another great couple of things? hiragana word search. Kanji sudoku. Drag and drop scrambled sentences. And so on. Oh boy do I have ideas! There are so many little games and puzzles I can do.. Man this will be great.

Have you seen YesJapan? I really really like their branding. I'd like to do something like that but a bit more anime (well, more of it, anyway). I could talk about what I want to do for hours with this but I'll cut it short for now. Go sign up on the site. What I am working on right now is the dictionary system. I'm working on the add entries form and the browse entries form. This will allow me/you/us to start entering data into the system. From there it's a short hop over to basic flashcards, and from there -- the world!

You know the funny thing? Kongzi (the java program) uses HTML to display it's data. I did it that way because it was easier to get fonts to display (as I recall). So basically if I wanted to I could drag and drop code into .jsp or have kongzi launch as a web app. I think recoding it for the web would be better in the long run tho. Anyway please do sign up and check back on the site once in a while and let me know what you think, any comments or suggestions.

Usagi is an anonymous, incompetent nutjob. Anyone considering giving him money is irresponsible.

See
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=114820.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=118507.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=112927.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115411.0
but most of all https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113708.0

Oops, looks like you made a mistake ;-)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124391.msg1336285#msg1336285

Nice try tho.

p.s. it's she, BTW. Y'know.. like you?

Your sample textbook pages include too much English.

I am a consumer of language texts. As a consumer, I reject offerings that are full of English language.

Less English language -> More space for examples of actual Japanese.

As you revise the book, consider including more examples and cutting the discussion of grammar aggressively.  


Your English style needs work.

e.g.
Your version:
"Strictly speaking, given the above breakdown, we're not dealing with a subject-verb-object sentence pattern, we're dealing with a subject-object-verb sentence pattern"

My version:
This is a subject-object-verb sentence pattern.   [reference to the breakdown indicated through page layout]

I won't be buying/investing in your textbook or your programs, but if you give me free access to the programs, then I would happy to give you comments.
(on the Chinese and maybe the Japanese version)

Wrong section of the forum surely?

If you want a loan then post in Lending section.
If you want to discuss development of the site/software then there's a section for that.
If you want to sell the books then there's an area for that.
If you want to sell the service you provide then there's a sub-forum for that.

This particular one (Securities) is for "This section is for topics about individual Bitcoin bonds, stocks, etc." - which you've explicitly stated you aren't issuing.

Mildly amusing that someone who professes to teach English somehow picked the one sub-forum that their post clearly doesn't belong in.

You do not want to forget that post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120996.msg1303227#msg1303227


Oliver Richman oliver.richman@gmail.com (usagi, https://www.google.com/search?q=usagi+%22Oliver+Richman%22, know troll in mailing lists and forums) is about 40 years old and not a single bank trusts him with a CC? WTF! Or is he just full of shit and made this poor guy in to his scapegoat, who has to mop up usagis next fuck up in that forum?
Oliver, please, just leave and never return! Your hysterical dramas are not funny any more.

Yes, Oliver Richman aka usagi appears to have a long history in scamming.

Sounds like EskimoBob is just mad he got banned from assets-otc. I warned people not to invest with him. He's what you call a scammer, vs. someone like me who actually has a real business up. Why, just look at the third link down from what he posted:

> My e-mail address says "oliver.richman" but that
> isn't my name, it's my email address. I know plenty
> of people who use their phone number as their
> email address. If I did that would you claim that
> my name is myphone number?"

The funny thing is, that isn't me. And even if it was, whoever posted that said it isn't their real name. So yeah, back to your regular trolling ;-)

What other textbooks have you seen?

Can you speak Japanese? If you have actual experience on this I could pay you to help me.

Usagi is trolling himself now? How sad is that? 

LOL, how stupid are you? Read the rest of the thread. I was lucky to get out of this bull shit service at so early stage. Turn out, this service is a joke and pjotr is as unstable as you are. LOL

Kong Zi says: "Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!"

honest bob's seal of disapproval

The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one.

Surprised noone's asked the obvious question yet - is this business venture insured by CPA?

And now usagi's claiming to be female - yet in a drunken post previosuly referred to "My wife".  China/Japan (at varous times you've stated/implied being in both these countries) have lesbian marriages now?

And isn't it the case YOU linked to books with an author of "Oliver Richman" claiming you wrote them?

I don't particularly care what sex someone I encounter on the Internet is - but I DO care when they lie about it: as if they lie about something there's no reason to lie about then it's kind of hard to believe any claims they make which actually matter.

How you getting with selling off your mining rigs/cancelling your ASIC orders ready to distribute back to your BMF investors btw?

Well gosh since you brought it up...not getting a scammer tag doesn't mean you aren't a scummy fuck, and anyone dumb enough to give you more money probably deserves to get ripped off.

Can we get that as a warning message over the securities board?  ;)

BadBear, usagi doesn't feel like answering my question obviously, can you share what happened to usagi's post count? I remember it was near or over 1000. Has he deleted most of his old messages and how come many messages of other people also seem to be gone from his old scamming threads?

Kong Zi says "Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue."

Confucius said, "Every village you travel to, the people are the same."

I don't mind paying you first, I just want to know what your qualifications are so I can decide how much you're worth to me. It may very well be that you're either overqualified for the position, and I can't afford to pay you-- but what is more likely is that you are qualified in an area I can't use you for and you are worthless to me.

So, wanna learn some Japanese? I can teach you Japanese, if you are interested in learning it.

Guess what badbear, if I don't deserve a scammer tag, that means I am not a scammer. umad? I got a language school online and you're tossing your weight around a forum in a thread you really have no business being in.

I have a real textbook, a real computer program, all pretty much done, and now I'm working on a real website. As a mod you would have access to my PMs where I have told my creditors I will be giving them the profits of kongzi.ca until I can pay them back. So not only is your scummy fuck comment ridiculous, it contains an intent to deceive above and beyond what a normal troll would be doing.

You should probably be fired as a mod for what you said here.

Kong Zi says: "When anger rises, think of the consequences."

Greyhawk, can you speak Japanese? Would you like to learn? I can teach you the basics if you like, and we can go from there.

Let's try an analogy: If your not in jail yet, it doesn't mean your not a criminal.

You do deserve a scammer tag, you just didn't get one yet.



No he doesn't, you should be removed from this forum because you are a scamming fuckhead and a cancer to this community.

False analogy. A better analogy would be, you are here posting in the kongzi.ca thread, and you cannot speak Japanese *yet*. Would you like to learn?


No, I don't deserve a scammer tag. Would you like to join kongzi.ca and learn a new language? It's free!


Now now, no need to swear. Umad? Maybe if you take a chill pill, and one of my FREE Japanese lessons, you would calm down a bit!

結構です

Kong Zi says: "To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness."

Yeah he deleted most of his older posts. I'm guessing it's not because he's an honest, upstanding person with nothing to hide.


I never said you don't deserve one, just that you didn't get one, big difference. For a "teacher" you seem to lack reading comprehension. And if not having a scammer tag is the only criteria you use to judge if someone is trustworthy, then that's just another sign that people shouldn't give you their money, it shows a lack of judgement and critical thinking. You seem to be lacking in many things.

I'm not surprised that you're trying to have me removed from the thread and fired for speaking the truth though, it matches up with your character perfectly.

Nobody is interested in your business. We're just here for your head. Cleaning the neighborhood so to speak.

Thanks for confirming. But is it possible that many messages of other people in his threads also got removed? The forum software doesn't allow for normal users to remove other people's posts, am I right?

Nobody can delete other people's posts except mods/admins. I don't know anything about other people's posts being deleted (if they were), only theymos could answer that.

I don't have proof if it is true or not. I heard it somewhere, but I assume it is not true until proven otherwise.

Well if you know those kanji I probably can't teach you much.　 かんじはむずかしいですね。 o_O  But that's why I am doing this, to make things like kanji much easier to learn. I've combined two different mnemonic methods and organized the first 100 jouyou kanji into pairs of opposites (as many as I could; the last 20 or so are arranged into groups i.e. ear, hand, leg, etc) and I find it really helps people remember. It's amazing, I've never seen anyone try to teach Kanji that way. Sure, you still have to write it I guess, but as for me I find mnemonic tricks, well, "cool" :p

I'm guessing you're past the N4 level? What level are you? If you know Japanese well I could probably pay you to look over a few of the ぶんしょう I've come up with. I tend to make the odd spelling mistake here and there that I never see until someone else looks at it.

Usagi, welcome back.

Do you have any kind of plan to pay back all those people unfortunate enough to still hold shares in all your previous failed ventures?

CPA, the Nyans and BMF?

Remember Nyancat Financial: Your Friend for Life??

This was the latest update I could find on the sad mess:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115284.msg1242847#msg1242847

You've deleted the original, of course.

Were they just scams?

Someone gets a scammer tag if the mods decide they deserve one - which is based on the available evidence not on some magic ability they posses to divine with certainty whether someone actually IS a scammer or not.

Plenty of scammers don't have scammer tags - in fact it only takes elementary logic to work out out that ALL scammers didn't have a scammer tag at some point (they don't get given them the instant they sign up for the forum).

The set of forum members without scammer tags contains ALL of the following groups of people:

Ones who aren't scammers,
Ones who are scammers but haven't scammed on this forum,
Ones who have scammed on this forum but noone has realised it yet,
Ones who have scammed on this forum but the evidence hasn't been sufficient to convince mods to give the tag.

Now you certainly belong in one of those four groups - as do I, and as does every member who doesn't have a scammer tag.  But the lack of a tag, of itself, says NOTHING about which of those four groups you (or anyone else) actually belongs to.  I'm not that interested in arguing here which group you're in - just pointing out the trivial fallacy of your repeated claim about you not having a scammer tag actually being proof of innocence.

And let's be clear JUST how stupid "I don't have a scammer tag so I'm not a scammer" is.  IF that were somehow logically sound then NOONE should ever get a scammer tag.  After all, right before the scammer tag was awarded they didn't have a tag.  And that proves they aren't a scammer, right?  So therefore they shouldn't be given one - and the tag should just be deleted.

I actually don't know a single word of Japanese. While it's good of you to recognize my obvious superiority to yourself in Japanesology or whatever and offer to pay for it, I fear I must decline.

Kong Zi says: "Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud."

Hi!


They didn't fail, GLBSE was shut down. If you had any shares or holdings in any GLBSE companies, you should send me a PM here with your proof of ownership sent to you from GLBSE. As I receive them, I will be distributing assets to people who held my companies. If all else fails, I can always divert some of the profit from kongzi.ca to pay back people who have valid claims. That's one of the reasons I am rushing this project -- if kongzi.ca is successful I can use it to clean up some of the mess GLBSE's blowing up caused and make the bitcoin community a better place.

Ok so, do you want to learn some Japanese? Here, I'll teach you something easy.

Ha.na. Ha like ha-ha, na like nananana. Ha-na. It means flower. Now you know a Japanese word :) Now you can no longer say you don't know a single word of Japanese.

See how easy that was? Hana means flower. The Japanese also use it as a common name; hanako is often thought of as one of the most common girl's names.

You seem to be under the impression of me being on your side. That is incorrect.

Kong Zi says: "Have no friends not equal to yourself."

No I don't think you're on my side. I'm just offering to teach you some Japanese. If you say no, then there won't be much reason for me to talk to you here I guess? Unless there's some other language you'd like to learn.

Maybe she is trans? Are you trans usage? Are you post-op or pre-op?

-Zoey

Well, I am sorry for you... This time EskimoBob came up with meaningful evidence. I confirmed that Oliver Richman is one of your multiple aliases. So your statement is false.

You have just earned a huge amount of respect.

You should disclose to potential investors that you are not fully skilled for Japanese language teaching. You have less than two years of Japanese language writing/speaking:

http://renli.wordpress.com/2011/06/

Bwahahaha.

Nothing new under this Sun https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.martial-arts/ly5cmb5i8bc/aBX3EztwQ4YJ

No shit! Usagi, you pulled same crap with your "insurance" -  arrogant and utterly clueless -  barely comprehending the writings on the wiki page.
 
Usagi (Oliver Richman, Appledog, Renli, troll and a wanker) you are fkn disgrace to BTC community. Go away and troll some other forum.

Usagi is apparently introducing see one, do one, teach one to language studies.

Why should I disclose that? JLPT certification is JLPT certification. It's like someone who has a degree. Why should they disclose that they are not fully qualified.... when they are?

Lol, keep trying. You almost got me here! Except you didn't.

つまらない～

I've taken the JLPT, I've written books about it. You can say what you want. I don't need your approval to succeed, and it's quite obvious you and certain others on here are making an immense fool of yourselves once again. See that membership count on kongzi.ca? Watch it go up and up and up... While you sit here and waste your life trolling forums. Good job EB! Keep it up! Maybe one day you'll reach critical mass and actually get somewhere in life?

Well, for someone who didn't actually read anything I wrote, you sure do have a well-formed opinion ;-)

Actually, well let me put it this way -- ever hear of Dr. Stephen Krashen?

Qualification is a piece of paper, skill is an empirical experience. You cannot obtain a skill without a long period of practice.

Moreover, feel free to prove you are qualified. You did not presented any evidence to back up your claim.

Are you claiming that you passed it?  Ah what level?  What level of JLPT you're certified at is absolutely relevant to whether you're competent enough in the language to teach others.  Nobody should invest in your business or buy your products unless you're willing to provide evidence of your proficiency.  That you thought someone you presumed to be  merely above N4 level was competent to review teaching materials is laughable.

I have it in confidence that the real field of usagi expertise is Ito calculus (http://pastebin.com/G9JM3nEV). This Japanese thing is just a cover.

I've been a professional in-the-classroom language teacher for 7 years now. Before that I taught privately.

As for evidence, and backing up my claim, open your eyes; I wrote a book, there's a sample online; feel free to criticize my Japanese. And then there's the website.... Yeah, I think the onus is on you here ;-) Feel free to bang your head against the wall trying to show I am unqualified, or as others have said incompetent, a scammer, etc -- because it's one thing to make the claim bro, and quite another to actually come up with something real, ね！

From what you've just said it strikes me that you have a good grounding on what other people have said in this thread, but you haven't actually bothered to check out my book or website, and really have no idea of what is really going on here. Feel free to check out the samples from my book for yourself; the link is in the OP. The book is N5/pre-N5 level. Do you like the worksheets? I think they're pretty cool.

As for nobody buying my products until I have provided evidence of my proficiency, that is the funniest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. Just look at my book. it exists. I laugh, seriously, I laugh. How many people bought "Japanese for busy people", one of the most outdated textbooks in existence, for the JLPT N5? It has the worst audio material I've ever heard. And none of them bothered to check the author's ability. Lol! You really have no idea how this works don't you. I don't NEED your approval, nor your investment! I ALREADY have a nearly finished product, and I'm going to sell it, to a LOT of people, whether you like it or not. This will be one of the only JLPT N5 textbooks in English, in the world. Ever hear the word "niche"? As for my JLPT certificate, it will be published in the book. So go buy a copy when it goes to print. I won't be posting it online as it contains my real name.

Good luck with your Japanese!

Good idea not to associate all these scams with your real name.

How did you ever end up with so many aliases anyways? You must have pulled a lot of scams to have to change your identity so many times.

Did any of your scams succeed?  Why don't you tell us about some of your crowning achievements.

Says the person who's yet again seeking funds from others.

Cool story bro. Let me tell you about all my scams -- like actually publishing a Japanese Texbook. And actually coding a real online language school.

Kongzi beta-8 is over 10,000 SLOC. Not LOC, SLOC. You probably don't even understand what that means. I'll let someone like Diablo explain it to you. Anyone here care to explain what being able to code and maintain a 10k SLOC project is like?

I bet if I explained to you some of the natural language processing problems I faced writing this software, that you would be mentally incapable of understanding the solutions. Your troll attempt is a joke. I've seen better trolls on newsgroups about cats.

See you can claim I am a scammer all you want, it's just that... well... here's my book, in my hands.... And my website is growing steadily. Nice try tho.

Good idea not to associate all these scams with your real name.

How did you ever end up with so many aliases anyways?


[Since you failed to answer any of my questions.]

Usagi, you skipped over this particular bit and I too am curious about it.

I assure you. Usagi has S, C, A, and M level JLPT credentials.

Hello Bengt. I didn't skip over it, I posted that I would publish my JLPT certificate in my book but not online as it contains my real name.

I'm also a little curious myself; why are you so interested? Do you speak Japanese or are you interested in learning?

I liken it to being in a bakery. You can see the bread; you can smell it. What kind of a poor troll would demand to see the baker's college diploma before buying a donut? It doesn't make much sense. I'm sorry, but the trolling here is really bad; this obviously isn't a scam, there are real, physical products available here and it's easy to test my japanese. What is even funnier is that I don't actually need to know Japanese in order to write a japanese learning program; the people behind stackz, anki, iknow and memosyne (or whatever it's called) may or may not know Japanese-- their japanese ability is not actually relevant to the science behind linguistics or things like SRS. If you know anything about the advancements in modern linguistics, you will know that the natural order hypothesis states that people learn the same grammatical constructs in the same order no matter what language they are learning. People learn present tense before they learn past tense. People learn continuous tense before relative clauses. And so on. You can learn more about that particular hypothesis on the web (for example here), including reading criticisms of that hypothesis.

burogu o yomu nagara kohii o nomimashita. While reading the blog I drank the coffee.

See, discussing things like the natural order hypothesis is much more what I want to do than responding to boring trolls like eskimobob :) So I'm going to keep pushing forward and doing my book and blog, and if you are really so curious about it there are samples available online. See the OP.

This works. As long as you stop asking for other people's money, offering "investments" and so forth I'm sure nobody cares one way or the other.

I'm not offering an investment nor am I brokering one -- That is what you are doing. Offering an unlicensed security or investment is actually illegal, as you will surely be made painfully aware of in short order. I mean, you've got to know by now, or you wouldn't have prepared a defense. Not that your defense is worth anything. You were pretty much laughed off the forum last time you posted it.

If you're not offering an investment then:

A) Why does thread title say "kongzi.ca going live -- investment/presales opportunities".  How can it be an investment opportunity if you aren't offering an investment?
B) Why is this thread in a sub-forum that is specifically FOR investments?

On point A) you appear to be attempting to solicit a loan (which there's actually a loans section for) - yet it reads more like an investment than a loan.  There's no stated repayment schedule and it seems repayments will only be made out of profits - i.e. if it doesn't make a profit then there's no repayment.  In what parallel universe is "I want you to give me money which I'll use in a business and only repay if it makes a profit" a loan rather than an investment?

And no point you offering "guarantees" until you've delivered on the ones to nyan.a, your existing loan (or has that been paid back? Haven't checked - so maybe you repaid that one), the last few YARR bond-holders (who should have been paid back the second you decided you weren't going to change that into an OBSI pass-through) etc etc etc.

Maybe start sorting out your current mess before creating new ones?

I'm not in any kind of mess -- not sure where you got that idea. Would you like to learn some Japanese? It's really easy! I can teach you right here.

Talking about YARR then Usagi has deleted most of the posts about YARR and closed the thread. 

Before nefario freaked out and glbse'd us all, I had 9 shares of YARR.  Usagi, I like you to buy this stuff back and be done with YARR for good.

You can post about that in another thread, and I'll answer you. This is for kongzi.ca. Would you like to learn Japanese?

What other thread? The YARR one where you deleted all your crap and then closed? If there is another YARR thread, post a link.

Dictionary entry and editing is done. Working on a basic flashcard/quiz mode now.

kongzi.ca/flashcards/fc.php

I won't open dictionary editing to the public yet. It's a little problematic. I need to get entry browsing up first and implement a changelog system for admins to verify entries users submit. Right now tho, coding the quizzing thing is the most interesting to me. I'm a bit of a noob at Javascript but it seems easy enough to figure out as you go along. Bootstrap is awesome :>

I have been interested in learning Japanese for a while but I fail to see how your method differs from purchasing a Japanese language book, listening to audio such as from Pimsleur, and going on italki.com and practicing with native Japanese speakers.

Will you post your CV to back up your teaching qualifications?

Also, could you provide references of past students or maybe post a letter of recommendation from them?  I have written recommendation letters for my past language teachers.

No knowledge of Japanese outside of the odd word/phrase and no interest in learning, I am solely here because I enjoy watching internet drama/comedy. The reason that I am interested in that particular question is because I find the idea of someone incompetent in a language trying to teach other the very same language - sort of like the classic Monty Python Hungarian phrasebook sketch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao).

Having only studied the language for 1½ year would indicate that you are not proficient enough to teach it to others, but to be fair it is possible that you are a language prodigy and knowing Chinese would make it easier to pick up kanji. As I don't know Japanese I can't judge for myself, so knowing what level of JLPT you passed could act sort of as a proxy. As such it is a fair question from the point of view of a prospective student as well, they'd like it established that you fill your boots.

I fully understand that, and honestly I'm not really interested in viewing your actual certificate. If you just say "I passed the [N4 or whatever]" that's good enough for me.

lol, 3:47 "I wish to plead incompetent"

Maybe you can also ask Diablo to explain to you how to loose 97% of your investors money? You two are a great team.

Seriously, I remember you didn't even know how to program a function in Excel. Now it sounds like you also don't know what you are doing as a programmer or are you counting all the blank lines in your code?

Would you like to learn Javascript? It's really easy! I can teach you right here.

My goal is to use acquisition theory and massive comprehensible input to teach Japanese (and Chinese). Please look up some of Dr. Stephen Krashen's lectures on Youtube -- it really is quite fascinating.


I don't think you understand what I am offering. My book will be interesting on it's own, but kongzi.ca is just software akin to anki or stackz or iknow.jp. Most of the content will be created and maintained by native Japanese (or Chinese, for Chinese) speakers. With acquisition theory and MCI it wouldn't matter how good my japanese was because one person alone cannot create the absolutely massive amounts of content you need for the method to work.

About the book tho, if you don't think that Acquisition theory is of any use, don't buy my book. Again it matters little how good my japanese is; the only thing that matters is that you are presented with a large (large!) amount of understandable source material. Over time I'll probably release quite a bit more of it for free on the internet. You will have plenty of time to read more about it yourself and decide if you are interested in it before it is finished and I start really charging for it.

I guess you could say I am actually more interested in the science behind it than the business end. Here's a snippet from "Welcome to Chinese" (the chinese book I am working on). I have 22 chapters (over 400 words) done on it:

Targeted MCI: Why Frequency Order?

One approach is to study characters by frequency. Consider that the most common 180 characters comprise approximately 50% of all written Chinese.  *1 ("6000 Chinese Words”, by James Erwin Dew, pg. 33). If a student learned those 180 characters, he would have a lot more confidence in his progress because every single time he saw a Chinese book, sign, or newspaper, he would likely recognize some if not all of it.

This is a very good idea on it’s own, but cannot make a useable textbook. For one, it is not possible to construct any meaningful dialogue whatsoever out of the first 100 frequency ordered characters out of all written Chinese. Nor the first 200. The reason is that many vital words are from parts of speech classes, that while independently are very low frequency words, together make up a large portion of the language. For example, most nouns may be frequency 1000 or lower; but withot a decent number of nouns, one can’t really speak a language. Even if a student sticks it out and achieves a 90% comprehension rate by memorizing the first 1,000 characters, this will not be enough to actually understand anything since he or she will not understand core areas of the language (such as nouns). Attempting to read anything would be a laborious exercise in dictionary usage.

The problem can be absolved by reducing the sample size, lowering the target vocabulary. Trying to tackle a frequency ordered approach containing 5,000 characters for 99.9% literacy is not a viable option. By targeting the vocabulary to a restricted set of materials which are then used as a stepping stone to reach the next level of language usage, students can experience immediate usability and fluency in the language. This provides a strong reinforcement for learning the language.


Benefits of the Targeted Frequency Order Approach

The targeted frequency order approach used in this book consists of a short frequency analysis of a small to medium sized pool of low-level materials such as children’s books, contrasted with government approved grading systems such as BLI, HSK, CYY and IUP.

The results of the research into the construction of the core vocabulary was very suprising. Following is a small chart which rates literacy of the target material compared to an untargeted vocabulary of several thousand words, based on how many characters have been learned under either approach:
 
# of Words        Literacy(Untargeted Vocabulary)   Literacy(Targeted Vocabulary)
100 37% 70%
200 46% 80%
300 52% 86%
400 56% 92%
500 59% 95%

With untargeted frequency analysis, the first 100 characters learned comprise under 40% of the written language. But with the targeted approach we used it comprised an amazing 70%. As a result, the student would theoretically feels a much greater sense of progress than normal. It is hoped this would fuel their desire to learn as they would feel their fluency increasing measurably with every lesson learned.

As a reassurance, since all of the characters surveyed in this approach would naturally fall within the most common few thousand characters used in modern Chinese, a student isn’t wasting their time studying this method over any other, and could quite easily transition to a normal textbook or Chinse course if it became necessary.


Results of Core Vocabulary Selection Process
 
The approach used in writing this book was to conduct a character frequency analysis of a popular children’s book series. The intent was to create a subset of the most common characters which not only were common, but were able to be used to construct meaningful material. Hopefully, the student would be immediately able to read much longer stories and dialogues than appear in normal textbooks. It is also hoped that the charming, timeless stories would appeal to people of all ages.

As the results of the analysis came in, everyone doing the research was shocked. Here is a snapshot of the pool analysis data for the first 12 books:
 
Book   New Characters   New to Pool   Pool
34-1      137   100%   137
34-2      66   48%   203
34-3      52   26%   255
34-4      42   16%   297
34-5      50   17%   347
34-6      39   11%   386
34-7      42   11%   428
34-8      40   9%   468
34-9      22   5%   490
34-10      0   0%   490
34-11      19   4%   509
34-12      17   3%   526

There are several ways to interpret the data. First, that given the results of the last four books (and especially book 10) we see that with a small, well-tuned vocabulary it is possible to create a large amount of different and interesting reading material. Most notably book 10, which was written entirely using characters which appeared previously in the series. Based on this data, it seems plausable that a core vocabulary could be constructed that would be even smaller, which would support the transition to the MCI approach within the first year of language instruction.


Designing an Optimal Core Vocabulary

There are several considerations to designing an optimal core vocabulary. First is the target size. If we aim for first year students this should be around 250 or 300 words. The set of 527 words from the books listed above is small enough to be analyzed for this purpose. Let's examine the most common characters in this list first.

Appearances   Pool Size   Literacy (to 1%)
> 1   526   100%
> 2   386   95%
> 3   273   90%
> 4   221   85%
> 5   186   80%

The above chart suggests that the core vocabulary does not need to use characters which only appear once or twice in the entire series of 12 books; a 90% literacy rate (over the target vocabulary) can be achieved with just 273 characters. Given the results of the previous table, it is proposed that a minimum of three or perhaps four readers could be constructed based on this material.

A further method is to examine the contents of the stories themselves. Of the most common characters, throughout the 20th to 60th most common chartacters appear many words used to refer to particular animals. This is due to the subject nature of the books (children's story books). Additionally, a large number of objects and places and descriptions vary from book to book. These words will be reasonably common as they appear a large number of times, however, they only appear in one or perhaps two books in the series. We may therefore hypothesize that we can reduce the number of characters in the remaining target vocabulary by 20 to 30 words by introducing a consistent cast of characters and a consistent set/scenery.

Emphasis mine.

This is hopefully not what you intend to end up in your book. You should employ an editor or at least invest in a spell checker or something.

I am not at all concerned with the spelling or grammar of the introduction at this point. As I said the book isn't done yet.

What do you think of the implications of the research? Anyone who has been through a first year language course should have a 300+ word vocabulary. The difference between what my research shows and what is normally done is that with my method an extremely large amount of interesting reading material can be created If you are familiar with linguistics at all and concepts like FVR (free voluntary reading) you will realize just how important and interesting what I have done here is, and how valuable what I am attempting to do will be.

From what I read this is just pseudo-intellectualese for "Wanna learn language x? Read stuff, watch movies, talk!" which is what they advised us to do in any of the four languages I learned thus far and should be pretty much common sense.

Sure, for someone that knows four languages or is familiar with the professional literature. Granted. But that's the problem-- for most people it isn't common sense. Language courses are not taught this way in American colleges and universities. It is not taught this way in Cram schools in Asia either.

That's kind of why I am doing this; i'd like modern language education to catch up with the research.

SLOC and LOC is the same thing.

Stating the length of your source code in SLOC/LOC has no meaning whatsoever. SLOC/LOC can be artificially inflated by adding blank lines. You probably wanted to say LLOC (logical lines of code) but you didn't. LLOC is a much better metric to measure length of source code. But then your statement is still useless if you do not mention which programming language was used. For example 10,000 LLOC in PHP is different from 10,000 LLOC in C/C++ and totally different from 10,000 LLOC in Assembler.

If you understood this and many other known arguments against these metrics you wouldn't use it to try to show off.

http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/sloccount.html

Basic Concepts

SLOCCount counts physical SLOC, also called "non-blank, non-comment lines". More formally, physical SLOC is defined as follows: ``a physical source line of code (SLOC) is a line ending in a newline or end-of-file marker, and which contains at least one non-whitespace non-comment character.'' Comment delimiters (characters other than newlines starting and ending a comment) are considered comment characters. Data lines only including whitespace (e.g., lines with only tabs and spaces in multiline strings) are not included.


Second, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO -- You ARE familiar with COCOMO aren't you?

COCOMO was first published in Boehm's 1981 book Software Engineering Economics as a model for estimating effort, cost, and schedule for software projects. It drew on a study of 63 projects at TRW Aerospace where Boehm was Director of Software Research and Technology. The study examined projects ranging in size from 2,000 to 100,000 lines of code, and programming languages ranging from assembly to PL/I. ... In 1995 COCOMO II was developed and finally published in 2000 in the book Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II. COCOMO II is the successor of COCOMO 81 and is better suited for estimating modern software development projects. It provides more support for modern software development processes and an updated project database. The need for the new model came as software development technology moved from mainframe and overnight batch processing to desktop development, code reusability and the use of off-the-shelf software components.


Oh dear.

SLOCCount can handle many different programming languages, and separate them by type (so you can compare the use of each). Here is the set of languages, sorted alphabetically; common filename extensions are in parentheses, with SLOCCount's ``standard name'' for the language listed in brackets:

    Ada (.ada, .ads, .adb, .pad) [ada]
    Assembly for many machines and assemblers (.s, .S, .asm) [asm]
    awk (.awk) [awk]
    Bourne shell and relatives such as bash, ksh, zsh, and pdksh (.sh) [sh]
    C (.c, .pc, .ec, .ecp) [ansic]
    C++ (.C, .cpp, .cxx, .cc, .pcc) [cpp]
    C# (.cs) [cs]
    C shell including tcsh (.csh) [csh]
    COBOL (.cob, .cbl, .COB, .CBL) [cobol]
    Expect (.exp) [exp]
    Fortran 77 (.f, .f77, .F, .F77) [fortran]
    Fortran 90 (.f90, .F90) [f90]
    Haskell (.hs, .lhs) [haskell]; deals with both types of literate files.
    Java (.java) [java]
    lex (.l) [lex]
    LISP including Scheme (.cl, .el, .scm, .lsp, .jl) [lisp]
    makefiles (makefile) [makefile]
    ML (.ml, .ml3) [ml]
    Modula3 (.m3, .mg, .i3, .ig) [modula3]
    Objective-C (.m) [objc]
    Pascal (.p, .pas) [pascal]
    Perl (.pl, .pm, .perl) [perl]
    PHP (.php, .php[3456], .inc) [php]
    Python (.py) [python]
    Ruby (.rb) [ruby]
    sed (.sed) [sed]
    sql (.sql) [sql]
    TCL (.tcl, .tk, .itk) [tcl]
    Yacc (.y) [yacc] [/i]

No offense deeplink.. but you're just plain wrong, about so many things.... You need to stop and listen once in a while. You might learn something.

It doesn't work.

Want to learn language X? Go to country X, pick up a bf or gf, stay there for a few months. Presto.

It helps if you don't take any money with you.

That one works nicely, yup.

SLOC is a pretty meaningless measure.

Consider the following two (pseudo)code samples:

Sample 1:

X=Y*P/100;


Sample 2:

T=P;
T=T/100;
X=Y;
X=Y*T;


Both do exactly the same thing (set X to equalling P% of Y).  Under pretty much any measure of (physical or logical) SLOC sample 2 has 4 times the count of sample 1.  Is it really 4 times as much effort, 4 times as good or does it represent 4 * as much of ANY useful measure?

No.  In fact sample 2 is worse than sample 1 for at least two reason (three if P/100 will never be reused elsewhere).  THAT is why SLOC is useless as measure of what "value" the code has.  If the intent of SLOC is to reward effort then it's meaningless without knowing what portion of the code was auto-generated (e.g. by placing widgets in some IDEs or by using YACC/LEX to generate parser code etc etc).

If, of course, quoting SLOC was just some pathetic attempt to grow your e-peen then well done!  You wrote 10k lines of code (which could represent anywhere from a day to a few months work).  Of course we don't know if that's really GOOD code - or if it's something a better programmer could have done in 1k lines of code (SLOC counts are higher for bad programmers than for good ones for the same functionality).  It could be the best 10k lines of code ever written - or it could be 10k lines of bug-ridden junk.  It's a meaningless figure - other than to demonstrate that you've put a bit of work into your project.

If you want to brag, boast about what your code can do - not baout how many lines of typing you had to do to make it perform.  That way it at least has some meaning.  Just so you know, I've written (and documented, maintained and given training in) software with an SLOC an
order of magnitude larger than what you're claiming.  Strangely I never felt the need to discuss SLOC with clients - they seemed far more interested in what the software actually did.

(This paragraph is pure opinion).  I view SLOC as a pretty useless means of ameasuring anything worthwhile.  I expect it was devised by managers with insufficent knowledge to more properly assess the output of programming staff.  As a measure (if reward is based on it) it actually encourages bloated, inefficient code.  If you wrote something with an SLOC of 10k and I wrote something that did the same with an SLOC of 1K I'd very firmly believe I had more bragging rights (though if I were going to brag it wouldn't be about the lower SLOC it would be about the lower memory usage/speed/easier maintenance due to less code etc).

So - do you believe my sample 2 is better than my sample 1?  If not - how do we know your 10k SLOC isn't a crappy sample 2 of what should be a 2.5k sample 1?  And if you can't answer that then why 'brag' about your SLOC in the first place?

Oh - and quoting some website for a specific application as being the definition of a concept isn't exactly legitimate.  If you want a definition of SLOC then why not use the IEEE one (or even the SEI one)?  Fact is there's no universally accepted rule on whether blank lines (or comments) count.  As it happens I agree with Wheeler (and yourself it seems) that they shouldn't - but there's no standard definition for it and tbh I don't see to much point in wasting effort on the definition of an essentially meaningless metric.

usagi, your rebuttal is complete and utter nonsense. Are you aware of the KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) principle? Because the number of lines in your source code and your arguments indicate that you are incompetent in both programming and logical argumentation.

Then stop arguing about it.


I get your point but SLOC is actually a useful metric, as there's a huge, huge difference in the amount of skill it takes to program a system with 10k statements vs. 1k or 100k. Your example above is contrived. Here is a sample of code from the tag tree system of kongzi:


This operates in a second thread inside a recursive method. As you can see we are not dealing with T = T + 1 here.

At any rate, businesses need methods like COCOMO to estimate software costs, so regardless of your somewhat valid point that SLOC shouldn't matter, they actually kind of do. As long as you have competent programmers who don't try to inflate LOC, and certain other factors are equal (no one on the team has an IQ under 120, say) SLOC can be used to provide a rough estimate of cost. That is a fact, although you are free to argue with the establishment on that one. I'm just a messenger.

The only point is that it was a huge project. You are demonstrating a massive amount of cognitive dissonance right now. Guess what, I'm not a scammer, and I have real skills that allow me to be able to create value for this community. You should probably apologize to me now.

You see, there are other concerns that I'd rather discuss than your misunderstanding of SLOC. For example, can the following pseudocode be refactored?


This was constructed to show what happens in QuizEngine.java's getPossibles() method. There is a string of about 10 different checks like this which are performed in order. You might think oh, I can reduce SLOC by merging them all into one loop. The simplified example above makes it very clear why this should not be done however... the list gets too large during the early stages so loops which add values and loops which sort or uniq need to be sequenced to speed up processing time. On average, this tends to set the size of what needs to be done to a certain SLOC because skilled programmers tend to do things in a certain way. At any rate I've been over every inch of my program with a profiler a dozen and one times so I'm pretty sure that things have been done properly and that a model like COCOMO would provide a ballpark estimate of what I have done.

And why not? What special reason is there that it shouldn't?

if (i != k) {" is a totally unnecessary line of code

Look at how k is defined.  There's no way k can ever equal i - it starts off at i+1 and gets larger.

TagNode i_tagnode = (TagNode) getChildAt(i);
 String i_childname = i_tagnode.getName();

These are being recreated unnecessarily every time through the inner (k) loop.  If the issue is that the app is multi-threaded and the content of node i/k could change during execution of the function call then there'd be a seperate, much more serious issue.

String k_childname = k_tagnode.getName();
if (i_childname.equals(k_childname)) {

Creating a temp variable that will only be used in precisely one function call is code bloat.  Why not replace these 2 lines with:

if (i_childname.equals(k_tagnode.getName())) {

Not too clear on exactly what you're doing - but comparison of 2 objects of the same class shouldn't really be needing any temporary variables at all.  If you're doing a lot of string comparisons then consider using a string class with reference counters - so at least the overhead of creating temp variables/copies of identical strings has a lot less overhead.  Yeah - it likely makes no noticable performance difference but it's just bad practice to spew temp variables all over the place (including creating two repeatedly in an unnecessarily tight scope).

The first point (a check that can never be met of i!=k) is precisely why I dislike SLOC so much.  Your code with it in with be considered more/better work than mine without it.  If the concern is to somehow be sure that you aren't comparing the same object to itself then that should be addressed by a specific member function or operator that threw an exception when it happened: if you want to check for something that you know should never happen then do it properly so you can identify when it happens.

You're right, I haven't looked at that section of the code for an extremely long time. It is probably a holdover from before k started at i+1.


No, because the java specification states that such arrays are re-used.


Probably a leftover from when I was using that variable to do something else. it was easier to debug by having all the variables defined at the start of the loop. That's just good coding practice. It's how I was taught in University and College, and I've found it helps me see what is going on a little more clearly.


You are welcome to your opinion. In the end, these are just stylistic differences. If I became obsessed with hand-optimizing the code itself, I'd probably go back and make those changes. I was always too busy developing the logic though, to worry too much about hand-optimization. As you are probably aware most compilers contain optimizations far beyond what the average programmer remembers to do... not to mention the fact that real optimization has nothing to do with lines of code and more to do with using a profiler and looking at the big-o notation of your algorithms.....


Sure, everyone's code contains errors. No one is perfect. Feel free to post some code you've written so we can go over it. None of this is relevant to anything anyways so I'm not sure why you're so hung up on it.

Announcement!

I've just done the basic form of the browse entries screen. You can check it out here:

http://kongzi.ca/dict/browse.php

Try this short link which takes you directly to a keyword search for "test".

http://kongzi.ca/dict/browse.php?action=browse&keyword=test

(note; you may have to set your source language to English and target to Japanese to see this)

Over the coming days and weeks, more and more wonderful features will be added!

Krokodill Gena is about 40 years old too. Oh wait, that's you. So you're married with kids ehh? Me too. Got 2 little ones myself, 3 and 5. You list your religion as Buddhist. I was a buddhist for about 20 years myself. I was wondering, have you taken the buddhist precepts (http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/precepts.html) yet?

A quote, if I may:

-http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/eightfoldpath.html

LOL. Did you make that profile? Probably not, because it's from 2011. I must say, this IS actually funny. What makes it even funnier is this, that I have never even heard of this site. Thank you for the info and I hope you spent hours searching for this. LOL.
Now I have to figure out, how I can log in to that account and find my ever lasting happiness. :)
Thank you usagi, time well spent!

It's okay. My name isn't Oliver either ;-)

So Oliver is also an alias. Who said it was your real name?

First reference to the name in connection with usagi came when usagi, a while back, posted his/her/its credentials which included the claim to have written a book.  The link provided by usagi in connection to that claim was to information by a book with the author listed as Oliver Richman (or whatever it is - haven't checked in a while).

Someone (may have been EB - may have been someone else - can't remember) then did some searching and found the rec.martial-arts (or whatever it is) list entires where someone using the online nick usagi had an email address of the form oliver/richman@ (or similar).

Obviously it's possible that there's two people who like to use the nick usagi, have an interest in martial arts, have an interest in pretending to be Japanese and use the pseudonym (or real name) Oliver Richman.  There may be other similarities - I've never had enough interest in it to look any further than the initial links posted bt others.  How likely that is (2 people with so many things in common), is for everyone to decide themselves.  usagi has also explicitly denied that the identity on rec.martialarts is its - but later made a post which at a glance seemed to be saying that in fact it WAS usagi's account (by referring to alleged harassment against that account - and explaining why it happened to usagi).

Fuel was added to the fire by pretty clear evidence that usagi (the one here) changes his/her/its claims of gender.  Initially posts relating to its business were signed on here as "Serena" but there have been several occasions where usagi has cleared referred to itself using male-gender terms (e.g. just recently referring to itself as "a guy" twice in one post).  However usgai has also recently made a straight-forward statement that it is female. But at the same time usagi has also claimed in the past to have a wife.  Barring at least two sex-changes and a lesbian marriage it is not possible for all the claims/inferences to be true at the times at which they were made.

Now I couldn't care less what gender someone I deal with on the Internet is - I'm more interested in their competence, honesty etc.  But when someone lies or intentionally misleads about it, then it naturally leads me to believe that there's a much higher chance of them being untruthful about other (more important) things.

To be clear, I have nothing against someone using a pen-name when authoring a book, even if that pen-name is of a different gender to their own.  But common-sense would tend to suggest that IF they do that and are then going to refer to themself in the opposite gender then they should make plain from the start that it's a nom de plume rather than their real name - to avoid the sort of debate over it which has now occurred.

Nobody cares.

Announcement!

I've just added timer code to the flashcard quiz, and moved it to the Learn page. You can also now browse by tag. I've added a few entries so you can see how this works. Try browsing by keyword and by tag.

I've also added a convenient link to the editentry screen in the browse results!

Everything is proceeding according to schedule. Right now I am focusing on getting a basic flashcard system up and running; should be a piece of cake, I've already written the code for the Java version of Kongzi.

Stay tuned!

Hot links to where the most significant recent developments have been made:
http://kongzi.ca/dict/browse.php
http://kongzi.ca/learn/fc.php

usagi is Japanese for rabbit. In case that helps anyone's investigations.

usagi, this is exactly the kind of shit which keeps negative attention focused on you.  The other day you were asking complaining that people wouldn't leave you alone.  You said that you'd give Eskimo Bob an opportunity to find out what had happened to his YARR shares - something which is quite reasonable given the GLBSE clusterfuck and people's dependence on Nefario releasing accurate information.  Now you're back to engaging in pointless pissing matches again.

No-one's going to take you or your ventures seriously if you feel the need to write a diatribe every time something negative is said about you.  It's your own posts which call both your competence and your sanity into question so stop playing the game if you don't want it to bite you in the ass.

I almost want to send him money out of pity. Maybe you should try making up pathetic stories and begging usagi? It seems like a line of scamming which is better suited to your natural talents.

No I'm not, what are you referring to? I'm working on my website, I just made an announcement about the flashcard system. Did you read it? Did you create an account on kongzi.ca? What do you think? I'm really excited to see it come this far already :) It will definately help me generate a little extra income to help pay back CPA loan holders and others. Cool, huh?

As if usagi will listen to reason....



See?  :D

Therefore your argument is invailid.

Announcement! The flashcard system is almost ready! This means the site will be usably operational very soon. You cannot see the recent work I have done unless you look at the page source; but I have already finished the backend which connects the database to the modal window! Right now the server side scripting pulls the data off the database and creates dynamic javascript code to feed it into your browser! That's absolutely amazing!

Here are two sample snippets of the dynamic code to show that the interaction is working as intended:

sample test run #1

sample test run #2

This is really fantastic news for kongzi.ca. I think, that I will have a usable system done by the weekend. It won't have all the features I intend yet of course, but it will start providing value to the community as a set of online flashcards. I can't wait to soup it up and open for business!

For those who are interested in critiquing my code, or to see proof that I am actually writing code and capable of doing this (which is material information for anyone interested in supporting this project with a personal business loan), I've decided to release the snippet of code which creates this:


Thanks and good luck!

If you are taking input from users and not sanitizing it then is to prevent them from injecting malicious php code or creating xss vulnerabilities?

Good point. In this case, the server-side pulls info out of the database and pushes it into a javascript variable. So if someone could introduce an entry name like x"}}; {malicious code}; var z = {{"x there might be some sort of problem. However, right now only admins can put information into the database, and in the future users who edit the database will have their submissions put into a changelog where admins can review it before it goes live.

Generally I design for security first, but in this case it's not so vital, as admins would have access to the database anyways.

On other sections of code, I have a cleanstr function which right now uses (I think) htmlentities. ex:


One interesting point to make about a site like this is that it isn't the sort of thing that would come under repeated or focused attack (IMO). It isn't a financial site, I plan to outsource payment processing (at least at first), and so on. Who would want to hack into someone else's japanese learning account? I admit some people would do it for the lulz but I'm not obsessing over it too strongly this time. Good point tho.

You dont think theres people on this forum who would dearly love to hack your site and show goatse pics to japanese students ?

 :D

What's the advantage that this method (creating javascript code on the server) has over JSON?

Well basically it's a division of labor problem. It's less efficient (slower) to have a javascript program running in a browser communicate with a remote database because of latency. If the number of queries ever gets to the point where the latency ceases to matter, that just means it's getting time to upgrade your server. So to me it makes more sense to process database data on the server. It's also more secure because you can just deny outside connections and you're fine.

So the user clicks on some link or button somewhere and is taken to the quiz. The user expects a certain type of quiz because of selections or options he's made or other information on his screen, and as a result we also have access to this information ahead of time. So when the page is loaded it doesn't make sense to use JSON to transport values during the quiz; it seems simpler and easier to create the javascript code dynamically ahead of time and have it load with the page since it's being processed in PHP anyways. So there's no reason to select "as json" because it's PHP processing the database result. Also doing a select as JSON uses more database time because you need to use GROUP_CONCAT and other stuff.

Another issue is bandwidth. I have a feeling that tossing out a few hundred bytes as a variable is going to be a lot cheaper than tossing out the javascript code to get that structure out of a database and process it.

For example, you would need at least a select statement, sent out on every page load... something like:

second of course you would need to send out the javascript code to communicate with mysql since it's not in the javascript library. Stuff like this:


and I am afraid to even guess how large that code would be.
basically I would rather have the server run a few CPU cycles than have to load and send all that junk over the internet every time someone loads a page (according to a character count it's north of 200k). Then if it's that large you are going to have disk IO issues too.

This is not having a go at you but shouldnt you wait and close down your previous businesses before opening  a new one ?

Well, they are already closed down, more or less. And, the businesses are separate from each other so I don't see how they could interfere. I'm very industrious and sometimes I do bite off more than I can chew but in this case there really isn't much work that needs to be done closing down my other business.

One of the big problems we face is that we don't yet have all the information from Nefario. So it is difficult to handle (say) our holdings with you, because they have nowhere to go. I mean, I do have a personal claim in all this, but I'm handling that last. So it will take a bit, maybe a week or a month (?) until I get the other lists.

OTOH, I do realize some people have the same idea and think that they shouldn't invest money in my businesses. There's a bit of a problem with that tho ;-) It's like, when I was trying to sell insurance on pirate. People were saying no, they didn't believe I would pay. Then when I did, they were shitting themselves wishing they had bought insurance. This is going to be just like that. Not many people are interested in supporting this project or investing in it, but over the coming years, I'd like to muse they will wish they had.

Kongzi Online Beta-2 Official Announcement (http://kongzi.ca)

April 8th, 2013
Hello! I'm pleased to announce that we've reached another milestone with Kongzi Online. We have now entered Phase 2 development at kongzi.ca! Our previous milestone was Kongzi Online Beta-1 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=127638.0) which was reached on November 25th, 2012.

Here's what's new and what's planned:

Recent Developments (1st quarter 2013)

• Our eyecatcher strategy is to give away the dictionary content for free with a front-page multilanguage dictionary search -- similar to tangorin.com, jisho.org, etc.
• We now use a superset of Jim Breen's JEDict/JMdict format. This allows us to store much more information about words and definitions and definitively breaks the dictionaries apart into language and translation. This will aid in multilanguage support later on.
• We no longer create flashcards directly from dictionary entries on the fly. Instead we allow users to create and edit their own personal flashcards with an innovative drag 'n drop flashcard creator.
• The SRS flashcard system is now active, which means the site is now officially useable. It's a bit of a rough draft, but it works. やった！

While we are not planning on smoothing out the UI/user experience until Beta-3 in June, Here's what's planned for the immediate future (April & May):

Development Goals for April/May 2013

• Many new types of game and quiz to help people learn in a fun and exciting way: Memory game, Mix 'n Match, as well as more traditional Multiple Choice and Cloze tests.
• An example sentences system (separate from the "example" field in Jim Breen's JEdict format).
• A Lesson/Path system where you can sign up to "courses" which will contain lots of reading material and pre-made flashcards.
• Users can share and publish their flashcards for other users of Kongzi.ca.

Content / User base:
Our user count has increased from 7 to 15 and one of our users (a native Japanese speaker) has volunteered to help edit the Japanese dictionary. The focus is on adding more N5 level content first, and then progressing to N4, N3, etc. before opening the dictionary to anything-goes mode.

Investment / Presales opportunities:
I've spent a great deal of time thinking about how to offer an investment opportunity for kongzi.ca. This is what I have always been working on, and I always felt I should have done this first instead of other plans. Right now, the idea is to sell shares OTC. I will entertain private offers for how much money you want to invest, and what % of the company it should be worth. Then, when we go live, I will double the number of shares and give those extra shares to myself. This is a pretty fair way to run things, I think. Here are our current and projected costs:

BitVPS server costs us less than 0.5 BTC/month. Will need 5 BTC or less for the first year.
We need to hire a mangaka to help us brand the site. cost 3-5 BTC.
We need to license some fonts for embedding. Something really pro, like TB Yokobuto Mincho, or Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro. This will cost 3 BTC or less.
Adobe Creative Suite subscription costs about .2 BTC a month. Say 2 BTC a year at current rates.
Textbook printing costs for a first run of 100 books will be 4-5 BTC. This will be a money making venture for us but we won't need the money for that for at least another 4 to 6 months.

So as you can see our costs are not exorbitant. I am thinking an IPO done over the counter for 1000 shares at 0.1 BTC/share, with 500 shares retained by myself as lead developer & CEO. This would raise 50 BTC and would completely cover our costs to operate the system for more than 2 years.

When we list your shares will probably be moved BitFunder. We're going to be the best, yo.

PM me any questions or concerns. Please enjoy your time spent at kongzi.ca