Tools and hacks
Welcome to my tools page. This is a simple link to the various hacks that I come up with.
Wikipedia: language redirect
Example: http://reganmian.net/redir/en/zh/Hamar (takes you to the article on Hamar (哈马尔) in Chinese Wikipedia.
Explanation: redir/from-language/to-language/article.
Example 2: http://reganmian.net/redir/it/ar/Democrazia (looks up democracy (ديمقراطي) in Arabic Wikipedia)
Rationale: Supposed to be used through for example a Firefox shortcut (http://reganmian.net/redir/en/zh/%s) for your most common combination. I use it frequently for Chinese, when my friend tells me he just made a great page about Moscow, or to find out how they spell Plato.
(Update 23.11.2007: Fixed the code so that article names with spaces work again)
Wikipedia: which language has the longest article
I, and many of my friends, speak more than one language. Wikipedia sometimes has surprising gems in some of the smaller languages, yet I find myself always going automatically to the English one (or the Norwegian one for Norwegian topics), thus missing out on the cases where other language versions (which I can read) have better articles.
Example: http://reganmian.net/bigger/en/no,da,sv,de,it/Democracy (will automatically redirect to the longest article about democracy in any of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German and Italian)
Explanation: bigger/language-from/languages-to-comma-separated/article-name
As the above, this is also supposed to be used for a Firefox shortcut, where you pre-program the languages you can understand. Of course size is not a perfect measure of the quality of an article, but it’s a quick proxy for where there is most interesting content.
I was initially reluctant to release this, as I was worried about the impact of WP’s servers (it has to hit every single language version once to get the size), however I now changed it to use HEAD to make its requests, so each request is just a few byte. Through my experience with redir, I know that not many people will use this, and if they do, that’s just an incentive for Wikipedia to implement something similar natively.
Hindi-English dictionary
Based on data from dict.org, Shabdanjali, and a database from a friend, all released under open licenses. This is an incredibly imperfect first attempt at creating a Hindi-English dictionary in StarDict format. (Read more).
Stardict Hindi-English dictionary
XDXF Hindi-English dictionary
Python script to convert from ISCII to UTF8 (not written by me, BSD license)
Offline Wikipedia viewer/random access compressed archive system
A ZArchive library function that enables you to store millions of text chunks in a bzip2/gzipped file, and random access them very rapidly. Used in a Wikipedia offline compressor (to process Wikipedia dumps) and a reader (runs as a webserver on localhost, enabling you to access entire Wikipedia versions offline). Written in Ruby. Available from Gitorious.
(Thanks to pvera @ flickr for the photo)
