Vocabrio - a new way to learn a language

I am very pleased to announce the launch of Vocabrio - a new web service from Craic that helps you improve your vocabulary in a foreign language.

Vocabrio lets you read any web site in your target language and translate those words that are new to you. The words are added to your custom dictionary and you can test what you have learned with custom quizzes.

Unlike a general textbook, Vocabrio lets you build up a vocabulary of the words that are relevant to your interests, making it more useful than existing tools.

Vocabrio makes use of some amazing new web technologies.

You can listen to how any word is pronounced using Speech Synthesis and HTML5 Web Audio in your browser (no Flash or plugin required!)

You can test your own pronunciation using Web Audio and cutting edge Speech Recognition - all in your browser.

Vocabrio is free to use while it is in Beta release - over time it will shift to a paid subscription.

You can learn more and sign up for an account at http://vocabrio.com

Example of Web Speech Recognition and Audio Capture

I'm doing a lot of work with the Web Audio API for both playing audio streams and capturing them from a user's microphone. I'm also working with the Speech Recognition component of the Web Speech API, as implemented by Google.

I wanted to combine both of these and so I've written up a simple example:

On this page you can speak and have your words transcribed via Google Speech Recognition and at the same time see the frequency spectrogram of your voice.

Both of these browser technologies offer tremendous potential for web developers. It is great fun experimenting with them, even before they are fully mature - and I am already using them in a new application Vocabrio, that helps you improve your vocabulary in a foreign language.

The page only works in the Google Chrome browser at the moment. The page and JavaScript is released under the MIT license.

Migrating from Rails HABTM to has_many :through

I had a has_and_belongs_to_many (HABTM) association that I needed to convert to has_many through with an explicit model that contains additional columns.

 In my example a User knows about many Words and each Word is known by many Users.

You can find many pages on the web about the differences. The consensus is that has_many :through is the way to go from the start - and after this process I agree.

Making the change in itself is not a big deal - drop the existing joining table 'users_words', create the new one, update the User and Word models and you're good to go.

Problem is that I already had data in the joining table...

And because the standard way of setting up a HABTM joining table does not include an id column, you can't just use that table or directly copy each record from it. Dang it...

Here were my steps - hopefully I got them all - don't skip any !

1: Backup your database and prevent users from accessing it

2: Do not touch any of the old associations, table, etc

3: Create the new table and model with a different name from the old joining table.
My HABTM table was users_words and my new table is user_work_links

4: Update the two models
My original association was this - do not change it yet !

  has_and_belongs_to_many :words, :uniq => true

The new association is this - NOTE the second line is commented out for now - VERY important !

  has_many :user_word_links, :dependent => :destroy
  # has_many :words, :through => :user_word_links, :uniq => true

5: Copy over the data from the old joining table with a rake task
You need to go through the existing associations one by one to get the ids for records in the two tables.
Here is my script:

namespace :craic do
  desc "move user word data"
  task :move_user_word_data => :environment  do
    users = User.all
    users.each do |user|
      user.words.each do |word|
        record = UserWordLink.new({ :user_id => user.id, :word_id => word.id })
        record.save
      end
    end
  end
end

6: Update the two models
Now you can comment out the old associations and uncomment the new ones

  # has_and_belongs_to_many :words, :uniq => true
  has_many :user_word_links, :dependent => :destroy
  has_many :words, :through => :user_word_links, :uniq => true

In the attr_accessible lists in the two models be sure to add :user_ids in the Word model and :word_ids in the User model. If your forget this it will silently fail to create the records

7: Test Test Test
You should be back up and running with the new model

8: Remove the old table
Finally create a migration that drops the old table and run it

Not too bad as long as you think it through before you start and don't rush the steps

Unix command 'comm' for comparing files

I needed a simple way to compare two similar files and only output lines that were unique to the second file. Sounded like a job for 'diff' but I was not finding the right options to give me what I needed. And then I stumbled across 'comm' - a standard UNIX command that I don't think I have ever used. That does exactly what I needed. My two files look like this
File A

A
B
D
E

File B

A
B
C
D

I want the command to just output 'C' By default comm compares two files and produces 3 columns of text - lines that are only in file A, lines that are only in file B and lines that are in both. So with these two files I get:

$ comm tmp_A tmp_B
      A
      B
   C
      D
E

Ugly, and not what I want... But then you can suppress the output of one or more of these columns using -1, -2, -3 options and combinations of those. I want to suppress lines that are only in file A and those in common:

$ comm -13 tmp_A tmp_B
C

Simple - does exactly what I need - can't believe I didn't know about it...