Travelling to Hongkong and Taipei has made such an impression on me, that I couldn’t help but add two new blogs to my homepage kaj.arno.fi:

• http://blogs.arno.fi/guanxi/ is (or pretends to be) in Simplified Chinese, written on the Chinese mainland
• http://blogs.arno.fi/yilingyi/ is (or pretends to be) in Traditional Chinese, written here in Taiwan

Guanxi means “relations”, as in “Community Relations”. It’s also a very common word describing how to get things done in China. It even has its own English language Wikipedia entry.

Yi-ling-yi means one-oh-one, as in Taipei 101. …

I have seen a few people now ask about using MySQL's FULLTEXT indexing with asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean (herein referred to as CJK.), however, there doesn't seem to be a good centralised article that covers it.

The information is out there, I just don't think it has been well presented yet.

As I have recently done a bunch of research on this topic for a customer, I figured it might be a good opportunity to make my debut in the MySQL blogosphere.

So here we go...

I'll open by saying that attempting to use FULLTEXT with CJK text in MySQL 5.0 will be unsuccessful.

From the CJK FAQ in the MySQL manual:

"For FULLTEXT searches, we need to know where words begin and end. With Western languages, this is rarely a problem because most (if not all) of these use an easy-to-identify word boundary — the space character. However, this is not …

I’ve just posted slides and (rather) rough presenter notes and image credits for my Age of Literate Machines presentation.

These are still draft slides. I’ll be working on an improved version in the coming weeks and months.

Many thanks to all who have sat through drafts of the talk (DES, Jen, Hilde, Markus, Monty, Rory, Tony).

• The Age of Literate Machines - Rough speaker?s notes and image credits (PDF)
• The Age of Literate …