Hacking tool

[gusl]

Given a database in a binary or text format, is there a tool to find what the data is and allows you to edit it? (obviously there can be no guarantee that it figures out the format, especially if there is some kind of encryption)

I am unhappy with my English<->Dutch dictionary for PalmOS, because it doesn't have enough words and it doesn't show enough meanings for each word. So I'm looking for a better free dictionary online to try to adapt into their format. 1

Click here for the files.

By the way, it's really hard to find good, complete dictionaries on the Net. Since governments waste so much money anyway, they could at least fund such a basic thing: the public benefit of having free dicionaries is potentially much bigger than its cost. And it could be even cheaper to buy out the copyright of an already-developed private dictionary or two, especially if they know that they're about to compete with free information. All left to do would be break the protections, thereby making the dictionary's content open-source for everyone's customization.

Comments

[selfishgene.livejournal.com]

One of the benefits of XML is that it is supposed to provide a URL to it's own description. Most proprietary databases designers don't care about this issue. They assume you will know from the context which database format you are using.
I think there are some open source dictionaries. Maybe you could contribute your specialized knowledge to one of them.

[evan.livejournal.com]

i've been thinking about solving that problem a lot lately, but it's really hard: in the general case, inferring structure from a sequence of data. like language acquisition! (but many would argue with language we already have a model before we even start!)

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

well, inferring the structure isn't that hard when you consider that learning a language (whether English or .PRC) can be interactive and compositional: you can first make little theories and test them until you get it right. Then you build bigger theories based on the little theories (which you already know to be right).

Perhaps people should talk to computers the way they talk to babies, reinforcing correct usage, etc. Otherwise it's not really a fair comparison :-) Nobody learns to speak by silently listening to a huge spoken corpus (I could be wrong: maybe there is a case of a voiceless, non-deaf child who, thanks to science, eventually got a voice and showed everyone that he/she could speak normally (except for shallow things like phonetics).