SLJFAQ News

External link check for August 2026

All the external links appear to be OK except that the links to ietf.org from the encodings of Japanese page are now redirecting to rfc-editor.org, so I've altered the page to move them there.

The RFC URLs seem to change quite frequently for some reason, I'm not sure why such endless churning of links is necessary.

This page is linked from all of the CGI pages

This page of news is now linked from all of the CGI pages.

"Attitude" is now アティチュード not アティトユード

A bug in the English to Katakana converter where "attitude" turned into アティトユード has been fixed.

References added to the English to katakana page

I've added a few references to english-in-japanese. I also reduced the size of the initial image, which seemed a bit too big.

Katakana to English matching improved

I've improved the katakana to English matching so that words containing しゃ, しゅ, and しょ kana may match an /s/ sound as well as an /S/ sound. This fixes a long standing problem with words like ファーマシューティカル not matching "pharmaceutical".

Formatting updates for the online dictionary

I've done some work on the formatting of the local kanji dictionary so that the lists of compound words don't extend across the page. There seems to have been a change in how the "ideographic space" character U+3000 is handled in browsers since I originally made the dictionary pages, and they weren't wrapping properly. The problem was solved by joining the jukugo entries together with just normal spaces.

Links from Japanese dictionary now go to Kotobank

After the demise of dictionary.goo.ne.jp, I had set the links on the compound words to go to edrdg.org. An English meaning of a Japanese word is not the ideal solution for Japanese users, so I have changed this to use the service of kotobank.jp, which provides definitions from native dictionaries.

Unfortunately kotobank.jp doesn't have entries for all of the JMDict entries, so sometimes an error page will be produced.

News links from kanji pages

I've added a link to this news page to all the kanji site pages.

Translations added

I've added Japanese translations of the acknowledgements for the use of the SKIP and KanjiVG systems.

e2k.cgi updated

Some of the software at the English to kana convertor has been updated to fix some small problems with particular words.

Link checks for July 2026

No bad links were detected this month, everything seems OK.

Link checks for June 2026

The site lfw.org seems to have disappeared, so the link on the encoding page has been changed to an archive.org one.

SQL bore attacks verb-inflect page

A nincompoop has foolishly and persistently been sending streams of SQL to the verb inflection page over the past few weeks and months. This results in gargantuan reams of errors in the log files. Various steps are being taken to stop this ding-dong's nefarious buffoonery.

Link checks for May 2026

The monthly check for external links revealed one link to a "Japanese language schools database" has disappeared. Since it won't be kept current, I'm not linking to an archive.org wayback machine version.

Kanji "realm" update

There was a short period of downtime at around 6am Japan time (9pm 13/4/2026) for an upgrade of the site's "realm".

hw-16.cgi "revived"

Some person with a very old script keeps trying to access kanji.sljfaq.org/hw-16.cgi, the old version of the recogniser from 2009. To prevent clogging the log files with "not found" errors, I've added a simple Perl script to reply to these silly requests.

New logging system for the redirect pages

The redirect pages have a new logging system. This should not affect users.

News page revived

I've revived this news page. I want to report on a lot of small changes which don't affect users very much, and sending an email for each one to the discussion group means a lot of people have to read an email about something which doesn't affect them, so I'm going to put the updates here from now on.

Kanji redirect changed

The kanji redirect system has changed internally. This should not affect users.

The system is now cross-compiled on the local computer and then uploaded as a binary rather than being compiled on the server computer, and also has its support files embedded, rather than reading them from the server's file system.

Four-corner search via minidic removed

The four-corner search has been going via https://kanji.sljfaq.org/ppkanji/ for some time now, but minidic-1.cgi was still serving four-corner data. I don't think anyone was using it, but removing it meant a small amount of work which I've now got around to, and I've now completely removed that facility. This should not affect users at all.