Sunday 28 February 2010

Laoshi release 0.1.0

I announce the first release of laoshi, my Chinese learning application. In this release I include four lessons for beginners. The code and files can be downloaded from the google code page.

Saturday 20 February 2010

laoshi : A Chinese learning application


I had some free time recently so I created a small application to learn Chinese. The name "laoshi" is the pinyin for "老師" which means "teacher".

For the moment the application features :
  • A dictionary, using the database from cedict containing more than 90,000 entries.
  • A lessons viewer, with automatic dictionary lookup when we pass the mouse over the text.
  • A flash card player.
  • Two lessons that I wrote for beginners.
I wrote everything in python using gtk for the interface, so it should work on every platform. I don't provide any package yet, but people interested can check the code at google code.

Wednesday 3 February 2010

Writing a resume using reStructuredText

reStructuredText (rst) is a simple markup language perfect for writing documentation. Altough it may not be as powerful as Latex, it is much simpler to use.

I decided to give a try at using rst to create my resume : here is the input file.

Now, thanks to this rst to pdf converter project (written in my favourite language), I can easily generate a nice pdf version of my resume. Here is the resulting pdf.

This approach has many advantages compared to my previous way of doing (using open office). I can easily update the document, change the style, and generate my resume not only in pdf, but also in html or almost any formats I want.

[edit] : as some people pointed out, the input file for my CV needs an extra file for the style. This file can be found here.