Damn I’m pleased! Let’s go back to work…

It’s been almost a year since the death of the European patent EP0,129,439 [our local version of the UniSys GiF tax]. This weekend, I thought I’d celebrate, so I added odds and ends of the old GiFLib to fPic. It now can read single-frame .gif files [no plans to support output, as it *is* a vile format, stained by corporate greed and way too many animated abominations]. Doing this I learned a lot on the format, much more than I ever did in the past trying to read the specs. Funny how I relate more to code than docs…

Now back to our regular programming: adding decent formats like .png…

This is at the same time as dead a horse as one can find – especially since the tenants of a specific system won’t usually listen to the arguments of others (yup that includes me); and also because Koreans tend to think that the unknown, vague, all-encompassing mass dubbed foreigners know diddly-squat about the language (whereas it appears that the foreigners who *do* care usually know more than Mr Kim and Mrs Park) – and at the same time, it is a never-ending source of pleasure and frustration.

Short answer: Korean can’t be romanized the way some other languages let us – like Japanese, Viêt, or Chinese. You can’t get at the same time the pronunciation and the orthography. The phonological structure of Korean is such that, akeen to English, one writes “William” and pronounces “Shakespeare”. Well, almost…

Stefan Sewing, a geek software engineer with a strong interest in Korea, wrote up an interesting summary on the main systems used by different people for different usage. For vulgarisation, I am very much myself a McCune-Reischauer man, since it strikes (for laymen) the best balance between orthography and pronunciation. For linguistic uses, there’s only one, Yale [The Unicode Consortium uses it, but fails to be consistant: while the UniHan file has Korean readings correctly recorded in Yale, the algorithm for reconstructing a romanization is yet another fuck-ed system. Needless to say, Tomabaem has an improved algorithm that reconstructs 한글 syllables into Yale ].

Anyway, it’s a good read. Kudos to sewing.

Sicily’s finest:
 
Mafiosi and Models

I bet this stuff was as vile as it sounds…

Roman Food, Drinks and Meals: Sauce and Spices

liquamen (aka garum) made from salted fish and fish insides. may have been the ancestor of Worcestershire Sauce

Nah, that’s nuoc mam to you, sir…