How to learn Greek the Hard Way

happy_moron — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:11:57 +0000

… or, “Why I will not get ‘A’s in school unless I change my behaviour”
… or “Why nothing in life is simple”
… or simply: “Yak Shaving“.

I don’t want to lie. Being me has considerable advantages. But it has some challenges, too – like the way I learn Greek:

The Challenge

1) Sit down to learn Biblical Greek.
2)Wow – Mounce’s BBG has a lot of vocab!
3)Cool! Mounce has audio files for every single vocab word!
4)I should listen to Mounce say all the vocab so I can learn to pronounce them right – it will be easier to do this now, so I don’t make a mental association with incorrect pronunciations…
5)But the vocab is spread throughout all the lessons and it’s so slow clicking through all the web pages…
6)This will surely go quicker if I do things The Right Way…

Finding The Right Way

7)The files are all Quicktime…
8)Install Quicktime.
9)I should cache the audio-files locally… and I can maybe even convert them into .mp3 so I can play them in a playlist!
8)Open terminal ==> ‘man wget‘
9)Hmm… But I need to get the file locations from the links! Is this a job for regex?
10)Save the source for thirty web-pages for link extraction.
11)Oh no! The .html files only link to the individual html pages for each word – there are about 300 of them! Time to ramp it up… oh, IT’S ON.

Getting Ready for Battle

12)Is it finally time to learn BASH scripting or should I brush up on my Ruby? Let’s go with Ruby.
13)Which Ruby screen scraping library should I use to handle the html pages? (Google them) Scrubyt isn’t actively developed, should I use Nokogiri or Anemone? I think Nokogiri…
14) Oh wait… Ruby isn’t installed – what’s the current best practice for install on Ubuntu? It seems to be the Ruby Version Manager, but the Ubuntu packages don’t seem to work right. I should probably install RubyGems manually…
15)RVM install botches horribly.
16)Ok, we’ll just use the old ruby1.8 with Nokogiri then…
17)But I don’t have a good editor installed and I haven’t used one in about a year – I wonder which is top of the hill? (Research Netbeans & Eclipse) Hmm… they’re chunky! (Install Geany and Redcar and jruby)
18)Hey, I’m almost ready to start playing around with editors and finding which one I like better… And after this I can figure out how to use Nokogiri! Isn’t Biblical Greek fun?

Battle is Joined

19)Spend three hours writing program that uses nokogiri
20)Finally! Downloading the .mov files…
21)Discover that running wget through Ruby means the downloaded files are incomplete
22)Change the program to generate command line scripts
23)Think about manually running 30 command line scripts. Oh Goody! I get to brush up on bash scripting after all.
24)Google “Parameter Extensions” and remind myself how a bash “for loop” works.
25)End up using ‘find’ to concatenate all the files into a single script.
26)Download the .mov files.

Cleaning up the Battlefield

27) No, really, that’s about it… All that’s needed now is to write my bash scripts to convert all the .mov to .mp3 (after installing the proper codecs, of course) and to generate the .m3u playlist files so I can play all the vocabulary for a given chapter.
28)But I guess once that’s done, I can fire up Audacity and record myself reciting all the words after Mounce – this way I can make my own .mp3s with my own voice, using correct pronunciation *and* Fwith the definitions – so it will make it easier to memorize! Also I can share those
29)But I don’t know about that… that might be a bit of a distraction from the task at hand…

Isn’t learning Biblical Greek Fun?

Addendum

30)As with anything in our modern scientific world, if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen… Laboratory rule #1. The last step is, obviously, to write the blog post!

UPDATE: It turns out that downloading via manual wget scripts or even single wget commands clips off the ends of some of the QuickTime files. Weird. The same thing happens if you update your Nokogiri scraping program to generate ‘curl’ download scripts as well. Even if you open them in Firefox and ‘Save As’ you will get clipped versions of the files

But they play all right on the website… Maybe I’ll just use that

Every Now and Again

happy_moron — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:29:10 +0000

I remember Dinosaur Comics.

And I smile a little bit.

If I Remember My Belt

happy_moron — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 16:34:27 +0000

… then my Friday morning has been a success.

I forget too often on Friday.

As I’m on the train, or walking into work, my hand will brush against my waist. Some neuron in my brain fires (I’m pretty sure I have a dedicated belt recognition neuron) and yes, it feels wrong because my belt is. not. there.

I call them Eye Contact Fridays.

If you see me catch and hold your gaze from afar? If I approach with vim and vigor, greet you enthusiastically? Don’t look down. You’ll see me beltless. Or you’ll see the spot on my shirt.

Hold their gaze… Close the distance quickly… Big smile!

I don’t know what it is about Fridays.

The Joy of Computing – II

happy_moron — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 19:40:39 +0000

for /f %%i in (‘find %~1 -print ^| grep .*java$’) do @for /f “delims=” %%j in (‘wc -w %%i ^| sed s/\(^^[0-9]*\^).*/\1/’) do @set /a N+=%%j

This is why I hate computers.

The Joy of Computing

happy_moron — Fri, 27 May 2011 23:29:20 +0000

for /F %%n in ('echo %working_path%\%1 ^| sed s/[^^^^\]\$/%2\\%1/') do set new_file=%%n

This is why I hate computers.

For all you perfectionists

happy_moron — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 03:28:46 +0000

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

It takes a whole village to raise a child

happy_moron — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:07:34 +0000

Or so they say… but if you’ve ever seen a small boy play with matches, you know the truth:

It only takes a child to raze a whole village.

Brrr…

happy_moron — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:36:47 +0000

It’s so cold here even our steam is only room temperature.

Where is the internet at?

happy_moron — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:48:55 +0000

CuteWinFail is where the internet is at.

Contact

happy_moron — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:56:15 +0000

But why is it called “eye contact”, and not, “you contact”?

The Happy Moron » tongueincheek