Kanji Fuda

Well, what was supposed to be a quick weekend project back in March is finally on it’s way to the iPhone App Store; and for the second time no less.

“Kanji Fuda” is a simple Japanese kanji learning game reminiscent of ComCul’s excellent Kanji for Fun. Between work and baby management, I’ve been cobbling it together in fits and starts over the last couple of months. Even have the fancy shmancy website that seems to be prerequisite for releasing any kind of mobile app.

Now that the basic version is done and “released” — assuming that I am able to get it by the App Store gate keepers — I’m working on an advanced version specifically to help study for the year-end Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). I’ve always wanted to go after Level One, but given how little I actually use my Japanese these days, it’s going to be a stretch… hence Kanji Fuda.

Father Figure

I found this buried in a drawer over the holidays.  It appears to be from a 1976 edition of the Readers Digest.

Happy Father’s Day!

The following essay, which had evidently been written by a young schoolgirl as a Father’s Day assignment, was found blowing around in the front yard the other day:

The best thing about my father is that he doesn’t use  words like groovy or gross or try to talk like a kid.  When he drives me and some of my friends to a show, he doesn’t tell any jokes.  He just groans a lot and sometimes mutters to himself.  All the kids think it’s funny the way he groans.  Many of them have fathers who tell jokes, which are boring.

When he taught me to throw a baseball like a boy, he didn’t say it was becasue girls throw baseball funny.  All he said was that if I would learn to throw a baseball the way he showed me, he wouldn’t get sick to his stomache watching.

My father says that women can be anything they want these days, judges or scientists or even President.  But he says in all these jobs it’s important to keep your room cleaned and brush your teeth after every meal.  He says it is bad to cheat at games, and points out that when he is playing with us kids, the only times he cheats are when he would lose otherwise.  My father has worked very hard for every dime he has, a fact which he mentions from time to time.

My father has this weird thing about telephones.  He says that were intended to convey a message in two minutes or less, not to giggle over for 45 minutes.  Alther he doesn’ think people should talk on the telephone, he talks to people on the television all the time.  We tell him the people can’t hear him, and he says that’s just a lot of propaanda the TV people put out to stifle dissent.

He always says that he doesn’t want anybody to give him anything expensive for Father’s Day, and he claims that’s the only thing he ever says that anybody around the house pays any attention to.

– Bill Vaughan, NANA

defeating vsftp error “500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/some/directory”

There’s lots of recommendations floating around the net for this, but try the following first:

Make sure that the user and group permissions for the account and the home directory match. For example, if you are logging in as:

account:x:521:500::/some/directory:/sbin/nologin

then make sure that the home directory defined for “account” is at least readable and executable by user 521 and group 500.

I posted about this previously but this time I also ran into directory permissions. Ugh.

There is no hope for Man

http://storyofman.tumblr.com/

My recent favorites:

Unable to open web project ‘xyz’…

Okay, so I’m working on project in Visual Basic.NET.  Using Visual Studio 2003.  And it’s really, really bad code.

You there, stop snickering!

Anyway, the point of this post is that, if you see the above error, it probably has to do with a bad path in your .sln file pulled down via SVN or other.  Open it in Notepad and change:

Project("{F184B08F-C81C-45F6-A57F-5ABD9991F28F}") = "IPTV", "http://localhost/somepath/IPTV.vbproj", "{AD96074E-13E6-47B2-8B61-14FCE9EE9377}"
ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject
EndProjectSection
EndProject

to resemble how you configured IIS.