The GITS Blog

When dealing with full-width (especially CJK) characters, you'll often want to know the type of a particular character — Kanji/Hanzi/Hanja, hiragana, katakana, and so on.
wchartype is a Python module that will determine the type of a full-width character. The functions all expect Unicode strings of length one.
Usage:

import wchartype
if wchartype.is_asian(u'\u65e5′):
    print u"\u65e5 is an Asian [...]

Comments(0)

I was reading this post from a fellow translator about her son's 2-year health exam, and was reminded of my son's 3-year health exam in Japan.
It might sound unusual to those of us who are from countries without socialized medicine, but in Japan they periodically round up all the kids who'll turn X by date [...]

Comments(1)

Often using Windows, you'll need to get the names of special folders, like "App Data," "Local App Data," "My Documents," and "My Pictures." This is especially true in Vista, where the recommended practice of writing app-specific data to the (Local) App Data directory is being enforced.
You can do this using the win32com.shell.shell module in the [...]

Comments(1)

For your karaoke pleasure, here's the romaji version of my translation of the lyrics to the Dreams Come True song nando demo.
komiagete kuru namida o nankai fuitara
How many times must I wipe these welling tears
tsutaetai kotoba wa todoku daro?
until I can get through to you?
dare ka ya nani ka ni okotte mo deguchi wa nai [...]

Comments(2)

Here is my translation of the lyrics to the Dreams Come True song 何度でも (nando demo — which I'll loosely translate as "I'll keep on"). Romaji version is here.
こみ上げてくる涙を何回拭いたら
How many times must I wipe these welling tears
伝えたい言葉は届くだろう？
until I can get through to you?
誰かや何かに怒っても出口はないなら
If getting mad doesn't give me a way out anyway?
何度でも何度でも何度でも立ち上がり呼ぶよ
I'll keep on, I'll [...]

Comments(3)

I've just released version 1.5 of Count Anything. This version has several improvements, including the ability to add entire directories to the list of files to count, and more detailed information in the word counts.
About Count Anything
Count Anything is a free program for Windows that counts words, characters, and Asian characters in a variety of [...]

Comments(0)

Lately I've seen a lot of blog posts about how tough it is to be a freelancer. I've been guilty of it myself.
But I remain a freelance translator because I love this career and lifestyle. In this post, I want to list seven reasons why.
1. Good income
Some people complain about low income in the freelance [...]

Comments(14)

As pointed out in this post, Google's new Chrome browser uses the Windows Template Library (WTL) in its Windows version.
I've long been a fan of the WTL — I've written several programs in it, including Felix, Doc2Html, and Tag Assist — and it's great to see it getting some love.
In my opinion, the WTL is [...]

Comments(0)

Having grown up during the dawn of the personal computer, I could essentially understand the analog world of my parents. But kids today are growing up in a world so digital that they really can't imagine the old analog ways. Today, my son (10) asked me about manual typewriters.

Son: Dad, when you were a kid [...]

Comments(0)

I seem to be on a roll with getting selected items from various wxPython controls.
This time, I needed to get the selected items from a list control. wx.ListCtrl doesn't have a simple method for getting the selection, but building on this post by Robin Dunn, I was able to cobble my own together using the [...]

Comments(4)