Down Time

This site was down for about 24 hours -- I apologize for the inconvenience, especially at the beginning of the semester. We had massive power surges due to an electrical storm and the university lost power for a time. All should be back to normal now.

Numen Mobile

jQuery Mobile

I found this awesome little development API called jQuery -- it's made my life a million times easier. One of the components of jQuery is called jQuery Mobile for building mobile websites.

What an amazing API! I completely rebuilt Numen Mobile in about 3 short days worth of coding. Not only does it look better, but it does way more stuff, and best of all is that it's compatible with many different devices. I've tested it on iPhone, iPad and a couple of different Android devices. Supposedly it also works on many different devices and in many different browsers (see a list of supported platforms).

Please feel free to check out Numen Mobile, bookmark it, and share it with people who might find it useful. Feedback is always welcome.

Multiple Sources and Multiple Dictionaries Online

It took almost a year of work to get this new source system online. It's done! Or at least what clients (that's you) can see is done.

As of right now, with any luck, if you look down in the bottom-right corner of your browser, you should see a source box.

[If not, press SHIFT+F5 on your keyboard or upgrade to the most recent version of your browser or clear  you web cache/temporary internet files.]

With this new feature you can control which dictionaries your Latin words come from. As of right now, the old Lewis Elementary is online as well as the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary (the original basis for the OLD). You can also control which priority your words come from.

This feature is a long time coming, but there still may be bugs. If there are, please let me know! I hope you enjoy this feature.

Here are a couple of things to note. 1) Macrons are slightly different in the LNS than in the LEM. 2) I haven't tweaked any of the words in the LNS, so there is potentially a lot more bad data there (which I will eventually fix with your help). 3) Whitaker's Words and Latinitas Recens will be online soon.

UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention is that the LNS includes about 50,000 headwords compared to about 17,000 in the LEM. SO ... there are a lot more words!

English Phrase Lookup

I recently found the need to look up more than just words in English, so I added a feature to the "Search English" page where you can type in a phrase.

Try typing in something like "in vain." It's not perfect, but I think this will help people looking for phrases of a technical, legal, etc. nature.

Site will be down on Monday

Due to a power outage tomorrow, the server will be down most of the day Monday. It should be back late Monday evening or Tuesday morning. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Numen Mobile

As usual, the semester is a busy time and I can't spend a lot of time making visible updates. However, as usual, I'm fixing problems in the background as they arise. Mostly what I fix this time of year are definitions as a result of spending a lot of time using Numen to read Latin.

That brings me to Numen Mobile, which I updated last night. I have been using it a lot lately for studying Latin, and I wanted to open it up to the rest of the world. If you visit Numen on a mobile device, you should notice a link at the top of the screen asking you to try the new mobile site. It's been tested to work on iOS and Android. It should work in any web browser reasonably well equipped with Javascript, Cookies, DOM, etc. [e.g., technical mumbo jumbo! read: the lastest and greatest].

If you have an iOS phone, you should be presented with a link that tells you about turning Numen Mobile into a free app on your phone. Just add it to your home screen (shiny new icon and all!) and you'll find that version works really well (provided you have a stable internet connection).

That's it for now. I'm always plodding away, so if it seems like things are dead around here, they're not!

The big day is coming ... New Sources!

I've finished the preliminary data load from Lewis and Short's "A Latin Dictionary". For those interested, there are approximately 51500 lemmata* (compared to 17500 in the Lewis Elementary).

The data is not live for users yet, so you won't be able to see the new data. But I wanted to tell you about this great breakthrough that I've made. The data needs a little bit more massaging to be considered production ready, but it's very, very clean data so far. I spent several weeks mining the data, and my heuristic algorithms** are getting pretty smart. A few more tweaks!

The big news is how this is going to affect the dictionary. I plan on adding a smart option-box in the bottom right-hand corner that will do two things. 1) List which dictionaries are available for searching and 2) allow the user (that's you!) to change the order in which they are searched and turn them on or off. You can see my mockup of this concept to the right. (Incidentally, this is my first post with graphics!)

The biggest benefit of the LNS (Lewis and Short) dictionary is that it contains 3 times the number of words -- granted, most of them are proper names and place names, but sometimes it's nice to know who and where those crazy ancient authors are talking about.

Keep your eyes peeled. It will only be a matter of weeks until this new data is live!

*For those who don't have experience in the field of lexicography, a lemma is a "head word" ...
** Experience-based methods ...