It’s About Bloody Time:
Thoughts on the Living Dictionary

• Go Round the Back
• Is That the Time?
• Going, Going, Gone
• In a Perfect World
• Closing Thoughts

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I discovered the Living Dictionary in the summer of 2010. It took me a few months longer to start poking around in its innards. When I did, it became obvious that the Dictionary has some serious problems. Some are visible to the casual user; others are lurking in the code. I don’t speak Java, so I can’t detail the solutions. I can only talk about what I see.

. . . Or rather, what I saw. As of this writing (March 2020), the Dictionary is gone, lost, abandoned, no more to be seen. The Moribund Dictionary has become the Defunct Dictionary. The rest of this page may be considered a historical document. Feel free to add a past-tense affix—ᓚᐅᖅᓯᒪᔪᓐᓃᖅ, say, or simply ᔫ—to every verb you meet.

On the plus side, this means I need no longer worry about accidentally linking to parts of the site you should never have been able to get to.

The ghost of Asuilaak past:

I wasn’t around for the Great Unveiling. Apparently the Dictionary won zillions of awards for its under-the-hood brilliance. The earliest attestation I can find is this job listing from Yahoo! Groups, dated February 4, 2003.

Right away you see the problem. Do they want a Project Manager or a Technical Support Specialist? The listing implies that the Living Dictionary program is a separate and free-standing entity—but if it’s got any independent existence, I’ve yet to find it.

Well, one out of two isn’t bad. The only trace of Inuinnaqtun I’ve found to date is in the CLEY logo at the bottom of the sidebar—the one that says “Pithohillkioui” because the person who cleaned up the graphic couldn’t be bothered to check whether they’d got the right pixels in the right places.

. . . but in the meantime, we’ll pad it out with a string of citations. We can’t tell you what this word means, but we’ve got rock-solid evidence that someone before you has used it. Not so helpful, of course, if you’re looking at the same passage yourself and want to know what it means, not simply that it exists.

Pronunciation? Where? I guess they must mean the sound files that go with the names of body parts. The ones that currently don’t play in any browser but Opera, and then only on alternate Tuesdays. Possibly not even then, now that Opera has gone all webkit on us. Oh, and possibly some versions of MSIE. You never can tell. I haven’t found anything addressing usage, either, let alone spelling. But that may be just as well. Trying to canonicalize spelling will only start fights—and the language languages hasn’t haven’t got enough speakers to handle further splits.

A pessimist might remark that if the final and most comprehensive repository of anything is a web site that hasn’t been updated in fifteen years, we’re all in trouble. But let’s not belabor the obvious.

Can you say “Balderdash!” in Inuktitut? This description applies to the people who originally designed and programmed the site. Keeping it running calls for little more know-how than administering your average php/bb forum.

Oh yes. Those. Definite sense of afterthought there. You ask me, it should have been the other way around. If you’ve got a choice between a language expert backed up by a technical support specialist, and a computer expert backed up with a linguistic advisor, go with the language person.

Frankly, we’ll take anyone who applies.

Doesn’t leave a lot of time, does it? Sure hope they had an inside candidate.

The ghost of Asuilaak present:

As far as I can tell, nothing at the Dictionary has been touched since 2004. I’m guessing that’s when it moved to its present server, so all the files had to be copied over. At the very least, I think it is safe to say that the person in charge has not physically looked at the Dictionary since before October 2010.

Just to drive home the point: Recently, when the Dictionary needed some urgent work done, the Person in Charge was nowhere to be found. They had to appeal to the site’s original coders—who must have been happily thinking they’d seen the last of the place back around 2001.

Oh, all right. The 2004 part was an exaggeration. As recently as late January 2009—less than ten years ago—someone swung by to install Google Analytics in the footer shared by all pages. I don’t know who, if anyone, keeps track. But here are some basics, using data from about September 2011-October 2012:

Where are they now?

Would you believe there were once sixteen Living Dictionaries?

• “livingdictionary” and “asuilaak”
• “.com”, “.org”, “.net” and “.ca” for each
• with and without “www.”

You can do the math. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find thirty-two: all of the above, multiplied by two for http and https. Instead, you get a “the connection was refused” error on any https request. The same happens if you try to get creative with port numbers.

The eight domains were originally scattered among three regis­trants and three regis­trars, with two physical servers corresponding to two domain name servers. This would be fine if one of the two acted as a mirror. But it was used strictly for parking, so there’s no point. Three names redirect to two of the others, leaving five different ways to reach the Dictionary. Ten, if you toss the “www.” option back into the mix.

That was then. Today, the Asuilaaks are going, going, gone:

• Asuilaak dot net has definitely expired: finally, irrevocably, name-available-for-purchase. Not even the domain-name dragons are interested; cough up $15 or so and it’s yours.
• Asuilaak dot com, with the same expiration date, kinda-sorta existed for a while longer, though it seemed to be confused about who its registrar was. Last I checked, it was under the sway of a domainer I couldn’t examine too closely, as my browser says the site is “potentially malicious”. They appear to be asking $2195.
• Asuilaak dot org is hanging on by a thread: it seems to have a DNS record, but my browser couldn’t find the server.
• On a slightly more positive note, asuilaak dot ca, redirects to the Nunavut government. Or, at least, it tries to; my browser couldn’t load the page.

And, on the Living Dictionary side:

• Livingdictionary dot org is up for grabs; like asuilaak dot net it leads only to dnserrorassist.
• I can’t say anything for certain about livingdictionary dot ca. It appears to exist, but on various attempts I hit either a problem with its security certificate, or a failure-to-load the same Nunavut government page that is the target of asuilaak dot ca.
• Someone managed to get hold of livingdictionary dot net in time; it now redirects to the Inuktitut-language site Uqausinginnik Taiguusiliuqtiit.
• The worst fate has befallen livingdictionary dot com. The name—to which I won’t link—has been snapped up by an “Online casino dictionary”. Wonder how much they paid for it?

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.

The ghost of Asuilaak yet to come:

• Director
• Programmer
• Technical Support

From where I’m sitting, three people are needed. Or one person wearing three hats—but let’s not make things more complicated than they need to be. This isn’t Toronto.

ᐊᑕᐅᓯ: Director of Living Dictionary Project (permanent, full time)

The Dictionary needs someone whose strengths are in language and organization. Both. Much of the job can be handled by one person, sitting at a computer and pulling books off shelves. But some parts involve calling on a pool of experts. The Director needs to know whom to ask—and how to persuade them to give up their time, without any compensa­tion besides the honor of the thing.

In the short term, this may be a more-than-fulltime job. There’s a fifteen-year backlog of comments and suggestions to catch up on—assuming they’ve been waiting patiently in the database all this time. Once things are up to speed, the workload will drop. But with any luck it should soon pick up again. When people discover that their input is being responded to and acted on, they’ll start contributing, as they did in the early years.

Ongoing tasks are straightforward: handle user comments; deal with suggestions for new terms and definitions; fill in missing definitions where possible. None of this requires any particular technical expertise. The site was designed that way. You don’t need to delve into the innards of the database; it’s all up front, with buttons to click and boxes to fill in. Technically, managing the dictionary is not much harder than using it.

The original designers seem to have assumed that the person in charge would have English as their primary language. That “Administrator View” label up there is an image, not text. Otherwise you’d be able to edit it, as you can edit everything else in the interface. Here shown with non-functional links for illustrative purposes:

That last line about sums it up. N’existe pas. I guess they figured nobody would notice the missing parts. Maybe nobody ever has.

In late-breaking news, the People In Charge have craftily renamed the viewDictionary and viewTerm pages until they can get the access restrictions sorted out. But thanks to the file-encoding issue, the text was never in any real danger. Working in this area is simply too unnerving. Edits can be made to work—but there’s a discongruity between the encoding of the edit area and that of the rest of the page, so you can never be sure of the result. You would think this is physically impossible, wouldn’t you?

ᒪᕐᕉᒃ: Programmer (temporary, full time)

Time to drag the site kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Don’t tell me it’s been there all along; the HTML has a distinctly mid-’90’s look to it. Conceptually it breaks down to User Interface, Coding and Administration. But behind the scenes almost everything is code.

Fix the user interface:

• Replace that painful splash screen with something less . . . well, less yellow. And more useful. A concise version of the Background and History might be nice. Maybe some “How You Can Help” suggestions. The font selector doesn’t belong here. In fact it never did, since it defaults to Unicode and the function can also be called from the interior of the site.
• Expand or replace the current Advanced Search to provide truly useful features like:
  • Limit search to words that have a definition, as opposed to those with citation alone.
  • Choose between exact and partial matches.
  • Conversely, code for at least the most common inflectional endings and dialectal variations. If you look up a word in -vaa, you would probably be happy with a definition using -janga or even -para. If the Dictionary doesn’t have -aaq but it has the same word in -aat, let it say so.
• Dump all code involving legacy fonts. Nobody uses them, and they take up more than their fair share of programming resources. If you must continue supporting them, at least move the font selector to a less in-your-face location. The obvious place is in the sidebar after the Orthography box. Which, incidentally, should be changed from links to radio buttons. That’s assuming you keep Orthography. It seems a bit superfluous, since Kalaallisut (Greenland) has its own dictionaries, and I don’t believe anyone ever uses the Nunavik orthography.
• Update the sound files to a format that works in current browsers. I won’t name names, but there exist sites that have managed it.
• Remember that CLEY logo? When nobody was looking, the department was renamed Culture and Heritage. So instead of fixing “Pithohillkioui” we can proceed directly to “Pitquhili­qiyikkut”. (Hm. They seem to have had a spelling reform, too. Last week’s pitho- is this week’s pitqu-.) While we’re at it, ᐃᓕᖅᑯᓯᓕᕆᔩᑦ will have to become ᐃᓕᖅᑯᓯᓕᕆᔨᒃᑯᑦ.

Clean up the code:

• Before anything: Fix the file encoding. All text everywhere—visible pages, code, databases—needs to be in UTF-8, rather than the current mix of UTF-8, 8859-1 and 1252 (Windows codepage). Some of the most impressive errors in the Living Dictionary happen purely because of text being converted between one encoding and another. Some pages or functions won’t even work unless you deliberately set the wrong encoding.

  I especially like this version, produced by Webkit-based browsers (Chrome, Safari) after manually setting the encoding to 8859-1 to make the search work at all. Do Not Adjust Your Set: it’s supposed to look like this.

  Été - [French] translates to: ᐊᐅᔭᖅ
  il neige en été - [French] translates to: ᕿᑦᑎᖅᓱᐊᖅᑐᖅ
  Temps chaud en été - [French] translates to: ᐊᐅᒪᓐᓇᖅᑐᖅ
  Vent du nord-est (été) - [French] translates to: ᓴᒻᒥᑐᖅᑐᖅ

  See that lone ‰ in the first word? It sneaked in from the Windows codepage, where it lives at Y. Apparently something in the innards of the code converted “été” (C3A9, 74, C3A9) to “Été” (C389, 74, C3A9).

  Fringe Benefit: Once the conversion has been done, syllabic text can be saved in its real form—ᐃ rather than ᐃ and so on. It’s not only easier to read but makes for a great savings in database size: three bytes per character instead of the current seven.

• Conversely: Don’t get too fancy. There are people on Windows XP with MSIE 6 using the site. Until recently, some of them were sitting at desks in Iqaluit.
• Can we get some error handling in here? Ask the Dictionary any question it wasn’t prepared for, and out come the Java errors:

  java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "filesToLoad"

  java.lang.RuntimeException: getStringValue()is NOT supported for large DataSourceValues

  com.macadamian.syndeo.lang.SyndeoFinderException[Id-1350559966594][Nested-0]: Error finding bean with Alias: 2

  and so on. I don’t think the average Dictionary user really cares about this level of detail. A simple “There was an error processing your request” will do. With optional ᒪᒥᐊᓇᖅ.
• It might be a good idea to convert the site to something more widely accessible like php. In any language, it’s due for updating. Those beans that were state-of-the-art in 2001 have long since been superseded by something simpler and more powerful.
• General cleanup: bad links, typos, wrong images, missing Help screens. Notably:
  • The Comments subsection under each search result. Look carefully and you’ll realize that its headers use the search language rather than the primary interface language. For most people this makes them effectively useless. If I could read French comfortably, I wouldn’t be looking up a French word, would I?
  • The Userlist is a mess, with duplications and inconsistencies all over the place. I can only hope the aliases—user_John, user_Sarah, user_nanouk and so on—aren’t supposed to be unique, since they’re anything but. The code doesn’t even seem to check whether a full name has already been used. On the other hand, it was fun to look at the complete list and see how many names you recognize. For as long as the site was active, people were still signing on, 5-10 per month, though what you got by registering was anyone’s guess.
  • We won’t even go into the bug-and-typo list I put together in late 2010 and e-mailed to the person responsible. Twice. No acknowledgement.
• Dump all code referring to the domain name. The Include files are littered with sessionData.getUrlBase(), but when you get to the page source there’s never anything but the ecumenical site-absolute URL with leading slash. As it should be. If you must use a name, store it as a constant and use that. That’s “it”, not “them”, because everyone will be using a single hostname. Anything else is just sloppy.
• Simplify the table-based layout. Get rid of all those <font> and <CELL-PADDING> tags and put the information into a style sheet where it belongs. Drop the font naming entirely, except for antiquated browsers that can’t do it on their own. It may not make a big difference at the server end, but it will save the user a bundle in download time. When your target audience includes a significant number of satellite-internet users, the milliseconds add up quickly.

  Look at the structure of the front page. I’ve color-coded it to show table nesting. Grey, red, green, blue. Yup: four tables deep. All those dark-blue lines and bits of open space on the real pages are separate table cells, one or two pixels deep. I guess the {padding} and {border} properties hadn’t reached northern Canada yet. We won’t go into the mathematical oddities, like the 24-px-high table placed inside a 20-px-high cell, or the numbers 40 and 150 being defined as respectively 15% and 85% of 190. And no use arguing that Inuit aren’t traditionally good in math so what can you expect. This is the work of qallunaat.

  All pages—even the ones that are strictly for administrators’ use—follow the same pattern. Only the content of the main cell, and some pieces of the sidebar, change. Here are two random snippets of the java-generated HTML:

  <td width="100%" align="center" height="2" colspan="2"> <table WIDTH="198" align="center" valign="top" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0"> <tr> <td width="4" height="2"><img SRC="/images/singlepix.gif" width="4" height="2"></td> <td width="34" height="2"><img SRC="/images/singlepix.gif" width="34" height="2"></td> <td width="41" height="2"><img SRC="/images/singlepix.gif" width="3" height="2"></td> <td width="153" height="2"><img SRC="/images/singlepix.gif" width="153" height="2"></td> <td width="4" height="2"><img SRC="/images/singlepix.gif" width="4" height="2"></td></tr>

  and, for variety’s sake,

  <tr><td align="right" valign="top"><img SRC="/images/selector.gif" width=8 height=15></td><td><font face="verdana, helvetica, arial,sans-serif" size="2" color="#000080"><a href="/backgroundandhistory.jsp"><b>Background and History</b></font></a></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="top"><img SRC="/images/selector.gif" width=8 height=15></td><td><font face="verdana, helvetica, arial,sans-serif" size="2" color="#000080"><a href="/term/addTerm.jsp"><b>Add Term</b></font></a></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="top"><img SRC="/images/selector.gif" width=8 height=15></td><td><font face="verdana, helvetica, arial,sans-serif" size="2" color="#000080"><a href="/main.jsp"><b>Return to Main</b></font></a></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="top"><img SRC="/images/selector.gif" width=8 height=15></td><td><font face="verdana, helvetica, arial,sans-serif" size="2" color="#000080"><a href="/index.jsp"><b>Change Font</b></font></a></td></tr>

  Honestly now, programmers, aren’t you just a little bit embarrassed? Anyone know how to say “retro” in Inuktitut?

  It isn’t only about download time. As it’s currently written, almost everything on the site is specified down to the last pixel. It needs to become much more flexible; I hate to think what it must look like on a phone screen. As of late 2012, mobiles were around 10% of visits. This number can only go up.

Divide by sixteen

While waiting for the People In Charge to figure out just how many Living Dictionaries there are, let’s continue the cleanup process:

• Transfer all domain-name registrations to the Territory of Nunavut. It’s either your dictionary or it isn’t.
• Similarly, gather all names into a single registrar and a single DNS. (Different ones, if you’re concerned about security. But only one of each.) This is not some spammy e-commerce site keeping a tentacle in every province. It’s government-sanctioned and should behave that way.
• Collect those names onto a single server, and redirect them all to one domain. The obvious choice is www.living­dictionary.com, since that’s what the over­whelming majority of users ask for already. Sorry, ᐊᓱᐃᓛᒃ fans, but them’s the numbers. If you must, put the second-most popular name, asuilaak.com—assuming it survives—on a different server and run it as a mirror.
• Conversely, let’s set up some proper redirecting. Right now, living­dictionary.net and .ca redirect to www.living­dictionary.org, while asuilaak.ca redirects to living­dictionary.com . . . but in each case, only for the front page. If you change names midstream and ask for something like living­dictionary.net/main.jsp (the primary content page), you’re slapped with an error message. Not the Tomcat error that you get if you ask for a nonexistent file at the proper domain: a generic server error.
• While you’re there, how about an https-to-http redirect? It’s one thing if the server simply doesn’t listen for https requests in the first place. But as long as it is listening, how much trouble can it be to replace the unfriendly error message with a simple redirect? The same goes for anything with appended port number.

ᐱᖓᓱ: Technical Support Specialist (permanent, part time)

It takes less expertise to maintain a system than to design it. It also calls for a different personality type. What it doesn’t call for is a major time commitment. A few hours a week should do it. Keep the databases up-to-date, add sound files as they come in, fix typos and bad links, deal with technical problems, make sure the Project Manager hasn’t broken anything—that’s about it. In the beginning, this will probably have to be done by someone from outside. Higher-grade computer skills don’t seem to fall within the parameters of Multiple Options and Achievable Career Goals. ᐊᔪᕐᓇᖅᑐᖅ.

Philosophical Speculation

. . . On second thought, let’s stop here.

And that was all she wrote.
ᐱᔭᕇᖅᑐᖓ.