Greg's House of Treats

Vision of Escaflowne エスかフローネ

Just for fun, I'm going to translate the theme for "Vision of Escaflowne". For those of you who are out of the loop, Vision of Escaflown is an animated serial drama, where some teenaged girl flies around a fantasy world in her school uniform. I enjoyed the story, but always wondered how she kept her uniform so clean, wearing it every day for weeks. The story is harmless, and the theme song sung by 阪本真綾 (Maaya Sakamoto) is quite pleasant. I had two people download this song off my p2p tonight (out of two total on a 56K modem), so it must be popular.

約束はいらない

I don't need your promises

ねえ　愛したら誰もが　こんな孤独になるの？
ねえ　暗闇よりも深い苦しみ　抱きしめてるの？
Is no one else this lonely, when she is in love?
Does no one else embrace this pain deeper than darkness?

何もかもが二人輝くため　きっと
The world must be meant to make us shine

[Chorus]
君を君を愛してる　心で見つめている
君を君を信じてる　寒い夜も
I love you, gazing with my heart
I believe in you, even on cold nights

ねえ　恋しても誰にもいつか　終わりが来るの？
ねえ　青空よりも澄んだ　ときめき捨ててしまうの？
If you love, does love always end?
Must you throw away your pounding heart, clearer than the blue sky?

季節変わりの風道を走る　ずっと
Always I will run the windy road where seasons end (1)

[Repeat Chorus]

たとえ明日亡くしても　あなたを失っても
出来る限りの笑顔で輝きたい
If tomorrow you died and I lost you (2)
I want to wear a bright smile

涙で今　呼びかける　約束などいらない
君がくれた大切な強さだから
I cry out now in tears: I don't need your promises
Because I have the precious strength you gave me

瞳で今　呼びかける　約束などいらない
瞳で今　手をのばす　寒い夜も
I call out now with my eyes: I don't need your promises
I reach now with my eyes on this cold night

---
(1) Must be running where the television seasons end ;-)
(2) Not sure of this one, maybe should be "if tomorrow died"
ときめき = (n) palpitation; throbbing
澄む = To be clear, clarify
---

Here is where I found the lyrics. All credit and blame...

http://www.geocities.com/seatbelts003/kashi/yakusoku.html

If you want another translation of the lyrics you can go here. It's a pretty good translation, so don't be shy, click on it!

http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/1224/escalyr.html

Microsoft Global IME Programming

What I'm trying to do here, is to replace the current set of crappy EDICT Japanese dictionary tools (the best free alternative being JWPce, which is embedded in a text editor!) with my own. Ideally, this will obsolete all current options, and support the new XML version that Dr. Breem is putting out.

Because I have to develop on Win98, I have to interface with Microsoft's global IME. I'm still not sure how to do this, but apparently the Netscape Composer can do it (Netscape 6.0 and greater). According to Netscape, they were able to edit Japanese correctly only in an "HTML" edit field, although it is not clear whether these HTML fields are a Netscape construct or a Microsoft construct (I assume it is a Netscape thing). But in a worst case, I could look at the Netscape 6/7 code and find out how they do it.

http://wp.netscape.com/eng/intl/gimesupport.html

According to Microsoft, you communicate with the IME using one of two interfaces:

(1) Use the standard Microsoft® Input Method Manager (IMM) APIs published in the Win32 SDK
(2) Use the Microsoft IME native application interface exported from the IME itself

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnime/html/imeinterface.asp

Presumably we want to do (1), because then we could interface with a non-Microsoft IME. And, perhaps programming with IME is not so difficult. Look for example at Rei's booth. Rei likes to speak about Rei in the third person, but still Rei has some interesting advice. In particular, Rei mentions that MSDN contains the code samples, in "imeapps", which comes with VC 6.0 (or you can download from the Microsoft site. She also distibutes a sample code called "imedic".

http://plaza27.mbn.or.jp/~satomii/design/imm/index.html

For better or for worse, Rei's code does not work. Several things go wrong, but even after you fix the problems with uninitialized variables causing crashes the code doesn't allow Global IME input.

The code by Mr. Inoue(?) also does not work for win32, but it does not crash, and also it is simpler. He gives lots of good advice on his web page which may be useful eventually.

http://home.catv.ne.jp/pp/ginoue/im/win32-e.html

I have had moderate success with the Microsoft "imeapps" sample. No, I can't get Japanese input, but the program receives a message from alt-shift. It cannot be built on win98 with WINVER=0x0500 (MSVC 6.0 complains about the headers being out of date).

Here is another Microsoft site. Not sure if it is useful yet. But it sounds like in win98, the IME gives you ANSI (is there a Japanese ANSI character set? Should be ISO?) character set, so you need to convert to get Unicode.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/ime_371h.asp

Finally, here is an interesting web site, related to unicode utilities.

http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/utilities_fonts.html

Looking for Blog Software/Hosts

Well, I am dissatisfied with this blogger/blogspot "stuff" for two reasons:

(1) No easy way to post images
(2) No way to download my blogs into plaintext (for later editing/storage of good info)
(3) Sucky web-based client
(4) No comments

I guess that was four reasons. If I could post to my geocities account it would be sufficient to fix (1). Maybe I have to get a tripod account instead? For alternatives, there seem to be the following software:

(a) LiveJournal -- Supposedly this fixes 2-4 above
(b) Radio UserLand
(c) DiaryLand
(d) Grey Matter
(e) Big Blog Tool

This one looks good:

(f) mblog.com

Or I could use:

(g) my slashdot journal.

If I use ftp, where might I go?

(h) tripod -- supports ftp, but has sucky popup ads
(i) freewire.co.uk
(j) plusnet (plus.com)
(k) fortunecity.com
(l) xoom.com
(m) hometown.aol.com -- supports ftp

Streaming Enka　ストリーミング演歌

I tried to listen to some streaming Enka on the net. I would have liked a shoutcast stream (so I can use streamripper), but any old stream is fine. Here are my findings.

http://joyjoy.com/E/lite/msc-ama.html
This site has links to amateur bands in Japan. Some have streaming audio. The excerpts describing each link are priceless. I listened to some -- you should too.

http://www.yasumaru.com/net_enka.html
This is Enka Oyaji's site. His original enka songs in English.

http://www.quixium.com/enka/
This is Barbara's Enka site. A good overview, but the song snippits are rather short.

http://www.okada.de/archive-japanasitis/enka/enka.html
Masaki Okada's site has a few streaming Enka songs. He can't be bad, because he's got a page devoted to Nakajima Miyuki too.

http://www.keaton.com/sitecatalog20.html
Now this looks interesting. There are lots and lots of links here. Even one that claims to have streaming Enka. Hmm, I could only find some acoustic guitar songs. Hmm, lets try some others...but nothing works...sigh.

Also of note:

http://www.nhk.or.jp/rj/index_e.html
This is the NHK radio station. Seems to be mostly news.

Using Japanese on Blogspot

This turns out to be simple, I guess. Just need to turn the encoding field to UTF-8. Now all of my Japanese text can be displayed correctly.

漢字テストです。かたかなの「ソ」がぼけないように。。。

I could use other encodings such as EUC-JP or Shift-JIS, but this may eventually cause problems if I want to mix Korean. Better just stick to UTF-8.

Things I don't like about the blog site. First, it's slow. Second, you have to log into blogger first, in order to edit your entries.