The GITS Blog

Note: although I am now a Nintendo employee, my postings should not in any way be interpreted as being on behalf of or condoned by Nintendo. They are my personal views only. And now that that's out of the way… It's been a whirlwind month. I left Okinawa on March 10, just one day before [...]

I just released version 2.1 of my free word-counting program, Count Anything. Click here to get the latest version. This is a minor release with two fixes: the "No" button of the check for updates dialog was broken, and files on the results page are now in alphabetical order (in the next release, I'll make [...]

Last week, I took a job as a technical translator at Nintendo of America. I'll be moving to Redmond, Washington at the end of February, and my family will move out there permanently in June. While it'll be hard to leave behind my life of relative freedom in sunny, laid-back Okinawa for the corporate world [...]

According to Wikipedia, The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The more ignorant you are about a subject, the easier it seems to you. When I was starting out as a translator, [...]

I recently read two books with rather gloomy outlooks for our future civilization: The Ecotechnic Future and The Long Descent. Both books predict that when the petroleum runs out, human civilization will go back to pre-industrial levels. While I don't necessarily agree with all the conclusions of these books, other than the obvious fact that [...]

wxPython's iewin.IEHtmlWindow lets you host the Internet Explorer browser control in a wxPython window. Doing so is quite simple: import wx from wx.lib import iewin class MyFrame(wx.Frame):     def __init__(self):         wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, title="IEHtmlWindow")         self.ie = iewin.IEHtmlWindow(self)         self.ie.Navigate("http://example.com/") # your URL here app [...]

A freelance translator's income can be calculated by the following formula: r * p * h * d * w where: r = rate p = pages per hour h = hour worked per day d = days worked per week w = weeks worked per year Let's try plugging in some numbers. Say that [...]

At a time when piracy is putting a dent in video-game sales, Steam appears to be quite successful. Their success is due to two main factors: It's easier to buy a game on Steam than to pirate one Steam offers advantages over pirated apps When you buy a game from Steam, it automatically downloads to [...]

I recently bought some books from Packt Publishing. I was happy with the smooth purchasing process (especially free shipping to Asia — woot!), and they've made some much appreciated improvements to their ebooks, eliminating the onerous copy-protection scheme that they used to use. But they really dropped the ball localizing their purchase page: The first [...]

cpptempl is a simple string templating language (or templating engine) for C++. It has loops, conditionals, and variable interpolation. cpptempl relies on the boost libraries (shared_ptr, string_algo, and lexical_cast). I originally wrote this engine because I was generating HTML files in C++, and generating the HTML right in the C++ quickly got very hairy, besides [...]