Discerning between Asian texts is actually an easy feat. The major point of confusion arises because written Chinese,Korean and Japanese are highly related having all originated from China.  Fortunately the use the Chinese character system did not perfectly fit with spoken Japanese or Korean.  As such both Japanese and Korean have adopted the writing system to their benefit, a fact that can be used to allow one to tell them apart without being able to read them.

The differences can be summed up as such; that Chinese is heavy and messy, that Korean looks alien like and that Japanese is lighter, sometimes much lighter, than Chinese.

You’d be forgiven if you thought that ‘alien like’ and ‘lighter’ are too subjective to be useful.  My use of these terms is by no means scientific nor standard, but it is descriptive, and likely a bit derogatory. Fear not, a more complete and useful description is provided later, but first I should explain to more depth.

Since Chinese is the basis from which Korean and Japanese have evolved it would be logical to start with it.

范丽青：前两天已经公布过一个两岸新增航点以及春节增加航班班次的新闻。尽管春运期间空运资源异常紧张，而且京沪穗深的机场也异常繁忙，但是大陆民航业务主管部门还是想方设法来尽量满足两岸同胞春节期间往返两岸走亲访友和旅游休闲对航空的需求。 Courtesy of  news.workercn.cn

Notice how ‘cluttered’ or ‘dense the text is. Beyond that there is not anything discernable about Chinese other than it is not Japanese or Korean. Someone with an understanding of the characters would of course take issue with my description since a more accurate term would be ‘detailed’.

Now compare the density of Chinese with the light, less dense, text of Japanese.

通常必殺技をはるかに上回る威力を持つ、スーパーコンボ。これよりも強力な超必殺技が、”ウルトラコンボ”だ！　今回入手した写真は、リュウのウルトラコンボ。ド派手な演出からくり出される波動拳の強化版といったところだろうか。体力ゲージが一気に半分くらい減っている点も見逃せない！ Courtesy of Famitsu.com

The important factor is that Japanese uses both the Chinese characters and the かな, whiten in the Roman alphabet as ‘kana’.  The kana are extreme simplifications of certain Chinese characters and instead of carrying meanings as the Chinese characters do, they represent sounds, much like the English Alphabet. They are used for Japanese invented words and words from for foreign languages such as English. The kana are thin and comparable to the English alphabet in density. A general rule of thumb for telling Japanese apart from Chinese is to look for areas of high density, the Chinese characters, followed by areas of light density, the kana.  To achieve a better understanding you will likely have to study the kana, it is not hard to learn them but it is a bit pointless unless you are also studying Japanese as a whole.

Finally last and the easiest, Korean.

복수노조 허용 및 전임자 임금지급 금지 등 노조법을 두고 30일 국회 환경노동위원회에서는 고성이 오가는 등 몸싸움이 벌어졌다.  Courtesy of chosun.com

Notice how alien like it is? Okay so you’ll likely want something a bit more concrete, that’s perfect, because such a thing exists. Written Korean contains circles. If you can remember that then you are set. Neither Chinese nor Japanese texts will ever contain circles. In fact the closest thing Chinese and Japanese have for circles, are squares. This is caused by stroke rules which do not allow the curves needed to make a circle. Convenient eh?

So perhaps a more complicated yet more useful general rule would be that Japanese has periods of density followed by less dense areas, that Korean contains circles and that Chinese is neither Japanese nor Korean.

Three years ago  the Sid Meier’s Railroads community over at Hooked on Railroads found that the 3GB enabler fixed crashing to desktop for Sid Meier’s Railroads.  Apparently we were not alone and a number of games from that era, ~2006, suffered and so far I have seen versions of the 3GB enabler edited for Supreme commander, Stalker, Battlefield 2142 and Oblivion. Recently I edited the 3Gb enabler to work with Sid Meier’s Railroads, before this Sid Meier’s Railroads players had to do weird things like renaming the “.exe”

No more! Now any the 3GB Enabler will work with any program. In fact it is not even limited to “.exe”s. With that said I have no clue what will happen if you edit a none exe. Read on for the readme and the download.

README:

Later Edited by Warll.Dressler to add arbitrary program selection, changed many minor portions of text to clarify and improve readibility
Editted by Chimera for Oblivian
Originally by unknown source for S.T.A.L.K.E.R CTD issues.

****** VERY IMPORTANT: IF YOU ARE USING AN x64 OPERATING SYSTEM:
****** SKIP THE “DIRECTIONS” SECTION.

Introduction:

This is for intermediate to advanced Windows users.
Follow the instructions carefully…the risk is minimal, as long as you backup a copy of your original executable, aka “program” aka file ending in “.exe”.

This will enable an executable, aka “program” aka file ending in .exe, to use over 2GB of memory in the application space.
It uses conventional tools using a batch file so everyone can see nothing suspicious goes on.
This tool will automatically set the header in said .exe so that it can address more than 2GB memory.
Normally XP will only address up to 2GB memory for applications and 2Gb for the kernel.
If we add a boot.ini switch /3GB, then XP is allowed to address up to 3GB for applications.
But unfortunately only applications that are enabled with “IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE” header can utilize more than 2GB of the space.

I highly recommend you look at some official information here at microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

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Directions:

First you need to tell XP/Vista that it can use more than 2GB of RAM for applications.
Manually edit your boot.ini file by adding ” /3GB /Userva=2900″ to your boot.ini (no quotes).
Your boot.ini is normally read only and you will need to change that temporarily while you edit it.
To do this, right-click the file and untick “Read Only”. After editing the file, restore the Read-only status.
To Edit it manually you can find it on the root of your system drive or
go to system properties/advanced tab, settings under ’startup and recovery’ section, then hit edit.

Mine looks like:  multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Windows XP Professional” /FASTDETECT /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /3GB /Userva=2900

Yours maybe different, the only thing you should change is add ” /3GB /Userva=2900″.

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Instructions for using the 3GB Enabler tool:

*** Important: First make a backup of the original “.exe”. there are any number of ways to do this, the simpliest is to make a copy of the “.exe” and store said copy some place safe or to keep a copy in the same folder under a diferent name. ***
*** Without a backup of the original “.exe” you might have troubles updating the program in the future due to copy protection schemes ***

The tool will add the “LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE” header for you to your executable.
Make sure a copy of the program is located in the same folder that the batch file is going to be ran from.
Doubleclick startme.bat then the menu walks you through.
1) Type the full name of the program including the “.exe” portion
2) Press Enter
3) Hit the A key to add the large address header.
4) Press any key to continue.
5) When back at main menu hit ‘V’ to output the headers in text so you can see the values.
6) Now you can check to see if it is enabled.  Scroll to the top and look for section “FILE HEADER VALUES”. Look for a line in that section that says “Application can handle large (>2GB) addresses”.  It’s the tenth line down in that section.  If you see that line then the executable is now enabled for >2GB, you are done.
7) Copy the enabled “.exe” back to the correct folder.
8) To avoid any strange issues with future patches, I suggest you rename your 3GB capable “.exe” to something else like “Fubar3GB.exe”, then make a shortcut to it on your desktop.  In the meanwhile, keep the original where it belongs and you will avoid any possible patching or online issues.

At anytime if you want to remove the large address header then you can restore you original backed up exe or use the app and use the Remove function and it will remove the header.  Once you run (R) to remove the header you have the original exe back, the MD5 hashes will match.

No strange side effects have been witnessed, but gladly I can play some big games now.

DOWNLOAD:

3GB_Enabler_1.2.zip

A few months ago I started on a new project, learning to program in flash. The important point being the fact that at the time I couldn’t program in any language. Thus leaning to program in flash as really more about learning to program in general. The adventure lasted for about two and a half months, of which time little was actually spent programming, which is really my fault, silly internet forums. In the end I did learn to do a whole lot with code than I could before but it also opened my eyes, learning to truly program is a very deep field. As such I will defiantly have to attend some CS courses in university.

I ended up making three point one games. Of which the point one game was the most successful.

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#1: outintherainwithabucket

Note that it actually works! Oh sure, “works” is a bit realitive, but the flash player does not crash, so it works.  It got ~300 plays. It got some complements about the art style.

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#1.1: boring

My justification for this was it is “art”, a psychological test if you will. But you of course say, “Wait, didn’t you say this was the most successful one?” Well it turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought that it was interesting, a large Finnish flash site homepaged the game, and soon one of its competitors also hosted it. In total it got 25K plays, pretty good for half a mornings work.  Sadly I think this gave me an inaccurate impression of what people will play, after all if a really bad game gets 300 plays and a slightly better bad game gets 25K then imagine a slightly good game?

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#2: kuroiNoNaka

By the end of making this one I was really enjoying playing it. Sadly it was either not a slightly good game or I had miss estimated. ~500 plays, although it was fun to learn blitting.

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#3: whitesky

This one was actually developed at the same time as Kuroi, it too meet the same result ~1000 plays. Many commented that it was too short, which does leave me the option of expanding it in the future, I don’t think I will.

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Anyway I had fun and I learned a lot, with that said I likely would have been better off learning the traditional method.  It was also nice to experiment with design, something that classes or books would not have taught me.

On a final note I did “earn” about 12 dollars, spread across about 3 sites, which means I’ll never actually get the money due to being far below payout. But eh, that’s more than I’ve ever earned on the internet before, of course if I did this to earn money, I would have been disappointed.