[kumo.it] » Site

Email problems

kumo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:02:40 +0000

Unfortunately, due to a DNS problem I appear to have lost any emails that were sent to me during the last week of March so if you contacted me then could you please resend me your email.

Contact and feedback

kumo — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:04:52 +0000

If you have any questions about my iPhone programs or want to contact me about problems you are having or anything else please send me an email at support@kumo.it or contact me via the contact form on the About page.

Quizes back online [updated]

kumo — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:03:15 +0000

UPDATE: well the old quiz should be back online so if there are any problems please let me know! I am going to start documenting my work on the new version of the quizes so let’s see how it goes.

Hello, I am sorry to say that I am putting the quizes temporarily offline. The reason being that they are in definite need of changes and I haven’t updated the code for a long time; mainly because it was too awkward deploying new versions. I am starting to take the steps to simplify the whole process, but it may take a couple of days to return.

As I want to go to Japan this summer I think this will be a good opportunity for me to sort out the quizes and make them more useful for me which in turn should be more useful for you!

Quiz poll results for December

kumo — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 09:15:29 +0000

I think it is now time to discuss the quiz poll results. Thank you everyone who spent some time voting and especially those that left comments. The current results can be seen in the graph below:

The comments that I received were as follows:

…should show results at end of quiz…
…ask real words…
…optional real words…
…keyboard shortcuts…
…show correct answers at end of quiz…

Some notes from the graph and comments:

more than half of you requested that you be tested with real words;
repetitive questions appears to be a problem;
an equal number of you wanted to be able to check your progress and also have the questions adapting automatically to your progress.

Real words I believe have been requested by people that have already learnt quite a bit of the hiragana or katakana and now want to be tested on words that are actually useful. When I try to learn things I tend to focus on one group at a time so I think it would be difficult to find a list of words that only contain ka, ki, ku, ke, ko for example.

Repetitive questions could either be the result of selecting too few character groups so that the questions are always formed from the same 10 characters, or instead the same characters are shown regardless of how many character groups are selected.

Progress tracking and automatically adapting questions can allow the software to automatically suggest which groups/characters need testing and when. However, if the on-screen results are not clear then there is the risk that the users are not aware of their progress and perhaps even the mistakes they have made and need to concentrate on.

I will post on this again later, but if people do have any more comments or want to open up a discussion then please use the comment form below.

Site design

kumo — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 08:16:36 +0000

Update: I am trying out The Unstandard WordPress theme and find it rather interesting especially the idea of creating an image for each of my old posts.

I do think that it is about time that I changed the theme of this website. I don’t know if anyone remembers the original hand-crufted theme but luckily archive.org is able to help me out:

The main problem that I have with the current design is the list of pages that is just too long and distracting. I know that I could use some sort of list folding plugin, but I was hoping that there was a better alternative — perhaps even a redesign of the website rather than just choosing a different theme.

Import features are:

News/blog posts
Static pages with subpages — I might have posts that talk about BeOS software, but there is a specific page for each piece of software
Flickr photos!
Spam plugin — I hardly get any comments any more, but akismet has blocked over 45,000 spam

Hiragana and Katakana quiz survey

kumo — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 06:40:42 +0000

I have decided that it my hiragana and katakana quiz are in need of some attention, but I don’t know where to start. What better way than a little survey? Do you think that it keeps asking you the same character over and over again (even though you have selected lots of rows) or perhaps it should realise that you have learnt a specific character and that there is no point asking you it again (not today anyway)? I am sure that the following choices don’t cover all cases so please leave a comment instead.

Thank you!

Update: thank you for the votes that have been made so far. In September I will post the results and my plans.

Site upgraded

kumo — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 07:47:37 +0000

Well, I upgraded to wordpress 2.1 and I thought everything was fine, but as I forgot to copy over some files many of the pages stopped working I suppose I should really try and check for such things in the future! Well, I have a couple of changes coming up, so I’ll cross my fingers and hope that I get them working…

Messy site

kumo — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 05:57:00 +0000

Well something seems to have happened in the past couple of days or perhaps it has been weeks and I never noticed. For now I am reverting to a wordpress version, but surely something doesn’t work.

It is quite troublesome and makes me wonder if I should just hand-cruft some html again but those would be dangerous waters indeed…

Hiragana quiz is back online…

kumo — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 10:58:00 +0000

I used to have some php scripts for learning hiragana and katakana but they stopped working when I changed servers. I took the change to begin rewriting them (in ruby on rails) and finally I have the first version of the hiragana quiz online. It is still basically the same as the old version but at least the code is much cleaner and I should be able to add new features without too much trouble.

Anyway, the new hiragana quiz can be found “here”:http://quiz.kumo.it/hiragana/start.

Good luck!

!http://www.kumo.it/files/hiragana_quiz.png!

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*UPDATE:* The dns problems seem to have been resolved so the quiz is back online again!

Site structure and .htaccess problems

kumo — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:52:00 +0000

I have had some problems redirecting the old site structure to the new one, but now things should be fine. However there are probably a few missing pages that I haven’t noticed yet…

How can this quiz be improved?
	it is not easy to use;
	it is too slow;
	it keeps asking the same questions;
	It should test me with real words;
	It shouldn’t ask me things that I already know;
	It should allow me to check my progress when I keep using it;
	Something else…

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