I’ve always been hesitant to run my own database instance, because I was afraid it might break or I’d have to support complex upgrade procedures. Thus, I’ve stored as much data as possible in plain files or tried to use SQLite. While SQLite is quite popular in the dev community, it didn’t really resonate with me. Maybe because I often create data from scripts on my local PC, but would also like to use it in applications on a server.

My Japanese course recently taught the grammar 〜ようとする with the meaning “trying to do” or “about to do”. Let’s try to auto-detect this piece of grammar in a collection of texts using the Python library Stanza.

I think I’ve been using this setup for a few years already, but I have never written it down. So let’s fix that. When you’re using a RAID to handle HDD failures (e.g. RAID 1 or RAID 5) you need some way to get notified about hardware failures. The RAID system doesn’t help anything at all if one disk fails, you think everything’s OK, because the system still works, and then the second disk fails.

I’m currently playing around a bit with grammar detection in English lyrics. A first experiment using past perfect and comparative in English looked promising, so I’ll take some notes about my approach.

If I’m working on hobby programming projects these days, it usually involves foreign language stuff. It often starts with language identification of the text at hand. In Python there are a lot of libraries for language identification and they work quite well. I’m currently using Stanford Stanza’s language identification.