A little girl can help preserving Vietnamese traditional folk art?

Traditional folk art is something any nation wants to preserve but it's not always simple. I remembered one evening in 2013, we went to watch a Japanese Noh play "AMA" in a famous Noh theatre near Heian Jingu in Kyoto. The play was opened for free in order to introduce this special kind of Japanese traditional performance art to people, Japanese or 'gaijin' (foreigner). Even so, not all the seats were occupied. The reason is, even with the free leaflet that guided you how to enjoy the show, not many people in the theatre understand what's going on with the show. A native Japanese lady sat next to us said even she didn't fully understand the lyrics, which seems to be in old Japanese. Also, most of my Japanese friends say that they have never been watching a Noh play before.

Back to Vietnamese traditional art, "Chầu Văn" is a similar example. Originated around 16th century, it purpose is to serve Vietnamese traditional religious ritual (Đạo Mẫu), the genre once became a very popular kind of art. Now a day, Chầu văn is one of the national heritages of traditional culture. And again, not many people, especially young people, understand this genre. I've watched and listened to Chau Van many times before, but I didn't understand or enjoyed it either. Most other people simple don't care about this special art.

Until one day, this little kid showed up in the finale of Vietnamese's The Voice kid, 2014. Her beautiful performance and maybe her innocence, some how made the Chau Van song "Cô Đôi Thượng Ngàn" became so lively and enjoyable. Countless of young people gave whole hearted compliment to the performance and started to be interested in this type of art. Thien Nhan (the girl) became the champion of the show, and somehow give out this kind of art to many people, especially youngsters.

If you have no idea of what Chau Van is, then enjoy watching this

A new Japanese Translator and Morphological Analyser

Years ago, I stumbled on some of my favorite songs in Japanese and I always want to know the meaning of them. Many foreigner fans know Japanese lyrics in Romaji without knowing the meaning or how they write in Japanese. That's the reason I created the a Romaji to Hiragana/Katakana converter wich later became a comprehensive website that assisting learning language: RomajiDesu. Later, I stumbled on songs that I can only find the lyrics in Japanese and a natural need is to know how to pronounce them, ie. to convert from Japanese to Romaji. I did make such a converter back then using Edict Japanese dictionary and my simple PHP code. But I removed it from RomajiDesu after that because its performance is bad and the converter cannot perform well with such a complexity language as Japanese.

It's been a while since I meet Mecab, (Yet Another Part-of-Speech and Morphological Analyzer), and it's time I put back the converter, now called RomajiDesu Online Japanese Translator. The formula is:

Mecab + Edict + Kana to Romaji + Google translation = RomajiDesu translator.

 The result is as follows (Figure 1):

Figure 1. A screen short from RomajiDesu's Japanese translator. The text is a paragraph from the song "Mirai e", (to the future) by Kiroro.

The current result is quite a satisfactory to me as it perform very fast, the translated Romaji/Kana is quite correct. And more important, the original text is decomposed into small part-of-speech elements which will shows more information when I hover the mouse over theme (Fig. 2). A very useful features is that, the translator will indicate the original base form (dictionary form) of the words. When I click on the words, I will get the meaning by looking up from the Japanese dictionary.

Figure 2. As figure 1 but when the mouse is over.

The last feature is the translated English, this is actually done by Google section translation, the best machine translation out there in my opinion. However, since Japanese language is very complexity, even Google translation is still far from acceptable translation for complex sentences. However, it's quite correct for simple structures and still serve as a reference for the more complex ones.

How to remember the Kanji: Sakura 桜.

Has the Sakura (桜) season started in Japan?

I took this photo Osaka Castle (大坂城 - Ōsaka-jō) in Sakura season last year. Sadly I am not staying in Japan currently, but I can imagine the pink sakura blossoms start lighting up the country, from the south to the north.

So how do you remember the Kanji 桜? To me, there's a woman (女) on the right who is enjoying the
sakura petals (⺌) falling from above near a sakura tree (木) on the left. It seems to be logical, right? ;)
How about you?

I miss Kyoto, Japan!

How to log MySQL slow queries

Since I upgraded mywebsite to VPS, I can analyse the slow queries by loggin them into a file without restarting mysql as follows:

# touch /var/log/slow
# chown mysql:mysql /var/log/slowqueries
# mysql -e 'SET GLOBAL slow_query_log=1;'
# mysql -e 'SET GLOBAL slow_query_log_file="/var/log/slowqueries";'
# mysql -e 'SET GLOBAL long_query_time=5;'

Or I can add these lines to my.cnf:

slow_query_log=1
slow_query_log_file=/var/log/slowqueries
long_query_time=2

To test if it is working correctly, try:

# mysql -e 'SELECT SLEEP(6);'

Romajidesu is back!

After three days upgrading, RomajiDesu Japanese dictionary is back on a new powerful VPS server. After one year, Romajidesu steady gain the trust from Japanese leaner community and the traffic reach approximately 3000 visits per days, or nearly 20000 page views per day. Another great upgrade of RomajiDesu before that is the website framework. The underline framework is also upgraded to a more powerful and extensible one, which cannot be seen from the surface.

Post by RomajiDesu.

Audio pronuciation on RomajiDesu

If you are a frequent users of the RomajiDesu English - Japanese dictionary, you must have noticed the difference, there are a small speaker icons next to Kana definition of each dictionay entry. Click on that, and you will hear the audio pronunciation for the word. For example:

A sample search for "恋人" (Lover) using RomajiDesu dictionary

Have fun learning Japanese!

Farewell Paypal, never see you ever again!

I opened my Paypal account in 2007 but haven't used it since then until recently we have a charity cause to help a friend who has a brain tumor. Our friends oversea offered help and I thought Paypal is a the best way for them to send money to help. I logged in to my Paypal account and got account verification. The verification itself was not comfortable because they seemed not to recognize the security number on my Visa debit card, so they charge $1.95 and I had to call my bank to get the verification code.

Just after the a second donation was made, I received two email said that my account was limited again because:

Feb 26, 2013: We need a bit more information about some money you recently received or withdrew.(Your case ID for this reason is PP-002-223-472-153.)
Feb 26, 2013: We've noticed some changes to your usual account activity. As a security precaution, we'll need a little more information about you and your account.
(Your case ID for this reason is PP-002-223-472-236.)

Well, it seems that I just need to log into the resolution center and choose the case ID and provide them answer or proof, right? There are nothing to choose there. There is a section to verify a credit card, but I need to add another card and verify again! WTF?

So I chose email contact and provided them information of the two above cases.  They did kindly answer an email said that give time 01 day for reviewing my account. Then, after 02 days, this is what I received:

For the safety and security of the PayPal network, we often review accounts for potential risks. After reviewing your account, we have decided to close it because of security issues. We are making every effort to minimize any disruption to your business. If your PayPal account balance is zero, and you have no unresolved buyercomplaints or chargebacks, your account will remain limited. 

-----------------------------------Disbursement options----------------------------------- 

Option 1. If you owe refunds to any of your buyers, you can use the money in your PayPal account to refund them.To refund your buyers:1. Log in to your PayPal account.2. Click "Contact Us" at the bottom of any page.3. Click "Contact Customer Service."4. Under "Choose a Topic," select "Sending/Receiving Money."5. Under "Choose a Subtopic," select "Refund/Cancel a Payment."6. Click "Continue" and follow the instructions to refund payments. 

Option 2. Money in your PayPal account will be held for 180 days. After 180days, we'll email you information on how to receive your funds.We regret any inconvenience this may cause.

It's so dissapointing, but of course I chose Option 1. However, again, there is no "Contact Customer Service"!!. I took me sometimes to figure out that should be "email us" section.

It can be understandable cares must be taken especially with countries which have many suspicious activities. But it is so disappointing since they just close a account with no clear reason. And  the process was also confusing and annoying. I've had the most horrible experience I've ever had.

Well, thank you and farewell Paypal.