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Archive for category Projects

A Program For Fetching Go Games

Nov 27

Posted by ren in Projects | No Comments

For years I have preferred to play Go exclusively on KGS. The service is nice overall, most people there are friendly—surprising for an online community—and it’s free. If you want to view older games you can go through the archives, but you have to download the games one-by-one. As a programmer, when I see some repetitive manual task on a computer, my first instinct is to automate that somehow.

So I did. I only tested this on my own computer, but it should be usable on both Windows and Macs. Although on both of those systems you’ll have to install Perl and the appropriate modules.

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Trying to Wrap Up ‘Year One’

Oct 14

Posted by ren in Projects | No Comments

I’ve mentioned before that I have been studying and working on music. I was not going to say anything else about it until I was ready to release my first work. However, someone very close to me convinced me to talk about it. She said I should not keep it bottled up, and ultimately I agreed, figuring that by discussing it publlically I would be even more motivated to finish it. And it will partially explain why I have not been updating the site as much as usual lately.

So I wanted to briefly talk about Year One.

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Things I Like About Perl

Jul 1

Posted by ren in Blog, Projects, Ren | 6 Comments

At my last programming job I worked primarily on web-based software, which meant using the Three Big P’s for most projects: PHP, Python, and Perl. After I left in December 2010, I took a complete break from programming for about a month, and then returned but working in languages like C and Scheme. Then recently I had an itch to write a program (JTorrent) to scrape torrents for me and I turned to Perl.

I had forgotten many of the things about Perl that I always enjoyed.

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JTorrent

Jun 29

Posted by ren in Projects | No Comments

I visit Tokyo Toshokan almost every day to see what music and anime torrents are available. However, when you are a computer programmer you often get tired of doing the same thing over and over. Especially on a computer.

So I decided to write a program to handle this for me: JTorrent

JTorrent is very selfish in the sense that it was written for my needs only, and is not a program that I have tried hard to make usable to others. It may only work on Linux. Hell—it may only work on certain flavors of Linux. The page at GitHub lists the things you need to get JTorrent working.

I use the program Transmission to download things via torrents. You can configure Transmission to automatically add any torrent file put in a particular directory. This behavior of Transmission is what led me to write JTorrent. I run JTorrent, it asks me which torrents I want, and they go directly where Transmission automatically loads them. This saves me the time of having to open my browser and save each individual file (which is a pain since many torrents listed on Tokyo Toshokan go to another site, requiring a second step to download).

I’m sure the program has bugs, and I still intend to work on and improve it. Any suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports are welcome. The program is Public Domain, so other computer programmers can feel free to screw around with it if they want.

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Casting Call: Really Truly

Aug 18

Posted by ren in Projects | 1 Comment

Ever want to be in a famous Japanese pop group? Then we’re looking for you! Think you have what it takes to put on fake airs, lip sync to cheesy lyrics about the cherry blossoms of first love, and promote hair products that you don’t use?

The three-member J-pop group Perfume posing.

Do you have what it takes to be this? Then we want you!
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