Another one …

Posted on 2013-02-20 by Oliver

Ever since I worked in Göteborg (Sweden) and heard the word “torg” 1 for the first time I wondered: is this related to the Russian root -торг- as in “торговать” 2? Turns out my hunch was almost right from the beginning. It is related. I just never bothered to check up on it.

But the connection is the inverse of the one I assumed until now. The Rus, a Varangian tribe from what’s now Sweden 3, settled in what’s now Ukraine and was the original center of the Russian empire, also known as Киевская Русь. They were what I thought the connection here – and looking at the fact they probably are.

We already know for a fact that the Russian “город” 4 and the Polish “gród” 5 are connected through the word “Garðaríki” with the old Norse word that is in modern Icelandic “garður” (cognate of English: garden). Obviously it would make sense for the Norsemen that traveled as far South as Constantinople to have an influence on Slavonic 6 and vice versa. However, “arrogantly” I assumed that the Slavonic people borrowed the word from the Norsemen. Turns out I was wrong about that part.

This adds “torg” to my personal list of words I now know are related to Slavonic roots such as “die Grenze” 7, “die Gurke” 8 and “garden”. I wish there was a proper dictionary about this with the set of languages I’m interested in most 9.

// Oliver

  1. i.e. “(city) square”[↩]
  2. translit: torgovat’, i.e. “to trade”[↩]
  3. who also gave the name to Russia[↩]
  4. translit: gorod, i.e. “castle” but mainly “city”/”town” these days[↩]
  5. roughly same meaning[↩]
  6. or early Russian in particular[↩]
  7. German for English “border”[↩]
  8. German for English “cucumber”, also keep in mind English “gherkin”[↩]
  9. Slavonic + Germanic + Romance languages[↩]
Posted in EN, Thoughts | Tagged | 2 Comments

Typical Tarantino

Posted on 2013-02-20 by Oliver

“Django Unchained” isn’t for the faint-hearted because between all the funny scenes there is plenty of blood and gore 1. I loved Christoph Waltz’ sterling performance already within the first few minutes, but Jamie Foxx was also brilliant in his role. It was great to see Michael Parks again, one of my favorite actors from Tarantino movies ever since “From Dusk Till Dawn” 2. The role was a little smaller than I hoped for, however. And of course Tarantino himself had an appearance … with, shall we say, a sudden and somewhat comical “disappearance” 😉

All in all you get the fun you expect from a Tarantino flick, but also the blood and gore, paired with revealing the hypocrites such as “Monsieur Candie” and showing some of the uglier aspects of the US before 1860.

The most intriguing character – second to Waltz’ doctor Schultz – was Samuel L. Jackson’s character of Candie’s house slave Stephen. He was the hypocrite par excellence in the film.

There are plenty of winks and nods at other movies and literature, including – I believe – a nod at Waltz’ previous movie “Water for Elephants”. Not sure about it, but the reference seemed too fitting to be coincidental.

Anyway, it was fun to watch and I may even go watch it again in the cinema but definitely will get myself the DVD and/or BluRay once they become available.

// Oliver

  1. as to be expected from a Tarantino flick[↩]
  2. not to mention the movie “Red State” where he stars as the leader of a Christian cult[↩]
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How to get English error messages on a localized Ubuntu?

Posted on 2013-02-19 by Oliver

Have you ever noticed that oftentimes people in anglophone forums will almost be offended if someone quotes an error message in their local language? Well, on one hand I can understand it, on the other I see more value in providing a copied+pasted error message in whatever language rather than some machine-translated abomination which makes it incomprehensible to readers trying to answer the question and the native speaker posting it alike 1.

But what if we could simply convince our programs to spit their errors in English and at the same time diagnose an error that is locale-specific? Turns out we can. On Ubuntu the en_US.UTF-8 locale always seems to get installed as a fallback. So if we ran apt-get update as ordinary user, it’d tell us in plain Russian that it can’t acquire a lock:

oliver@rukubuntu:~$ apt-get update
E: Не удалось открыть файл блокировки /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13: Отказано в доступе)
E: Невозможно заблокировать каталог /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Не удалось открыть файл блокировки /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Отказано в доступе)
E: Не удалось выполнить блокировку управляющего каталога (/var/lib/dpkg/); у вас есть права суперпользователя?

If we wanted the same phrased in plain English instead, we could set the LANG variable for this single invocation of apt-get.

oliver@rukubuntu:~$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 apt-get update
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

Neat, eh?

// Oliver

  1. there is of course still the chance that the OP will be able to provide a sensible translation.[↩]
Posted in Administration, EN, Linux, Software | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Clever indeed

Posted on 2013-02-19 by Oliver

Just for giggles and some test I installed Kubuntu in Russian and it turns out that the “Д/н” prompts can also be acquitted with y or n as one would expect. Otherwise I would have been in a kerfuffle as I installed the system in Russian, but the keyboard as US-English 1.

It’s a positive surprise to see that I can get through system administration tasks with the default English responses whenever I need to. Kudos to whoever made that decision!

// Oliver

  1. I actually prefer US-English keyboards for my daily work and use only those on all my machines. Not surprising it’s convenient on US-English keyboards … after all most programming languages come from an anglophone background 😉 … [↩]
Posted in EN, Linux, Software | Tagged | Leave a comment

Bizarre

Posted on 2013-02-17 by Oliver

And I don’t mean the fact that “Kindergärtner” in German describes the kindergarten teacher, not the child. Bizarre is that a five year old girl – in all seriousness – gets suspended for suggesting to another kindergarten child that they should “shoot” each other with bubble guns. Perhaps the teachers should also intervene when balls get thrown at other children, for example?

Ans what really threw me off when reading this: there is actually a file for five year old children? In a country in which the people takes pride in fighting a nation-wide ID this is quite something. I for one will file this under: you couldn’t make it up.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Opinion, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Imagine this a 1000 years ago …

Posted on 2013-02-15 by Oliver

When I look at the majestic and at the same time scary images of the meteorite fall in Russia (e.g. here), I’m wondering what impression this must have made on humans a thousand years ago.

Or imagine something like that during the time of the cold war. Well possible someone would have pushed the button.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Thoughts | 2 Comments

Let us hope this pans out for the PSF

Posted on 2013-02-15 by Oliver

Read the article over here: Python trademark at risk in Europe: We need your help!.

I really hope this backfires so hard that no one else will try similar things on well established names that have been spread by non-profit organizations.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Python, Software, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Unimaginable?

Posted on 2013-02-12 by Oliver

The media doesn’t seem to deem it possible that just about any catholic man could rise to the position of pope. Let’s face it, they’re probably right. Only cardinals have been elected for hundreds of years now. Similar to the resignation of a pope which hadn’t happened for nearly 600 years until now.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Opinion, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Ich will den Wulff zurück!

Posted on 2013-02-11 by Oliver

Jedes einzelne Mal wenn ich unseren aktuellen Grüßonkel und Bundespräsidenten sehe, wünsche ich mir Wulff zurück. Der hat zwar auch gelabert, aber unterhaltsamer war er allemal.

// Oliver

Posted in DE, Meinung | Tagged | Leave a comment

A few websites I like when improving my Vim skills

Posted on 2013-02-10 by Oliver

http://vimcasts.org
http://www.vimdrills.com
https://www.shortcutfoo.com

Posted in EN, Software | Tagged | Leave a comment

In which Hg repo is the hook getting executed?

Posted on 2013-02-07 by Oliver 
REPOPATH=$(hg showconfig|sed -n 's/^bundle\.mainreporoot=//p')

Based on this, btw, I came up with the following hook in the hgrc file:

[hooks]
changegroup.bundlerepo = hg bundle -a $(hg showconfig|sed -n 's/^bundle\.mainreporoot=//p')/.hg/bundled.hg

The idea is to create a bundle with all revisions whenever a new group of changesets gets pushed to the repo.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, VCS | Tagged | Leave a comment

Mercurial woes

Posted on 2013-02-07 by Oliver

Today I stumbled over an awkward issue. Pulling from a repo mounted read-only I always got:

searching for changes
adding changesets
transaction abort!
rollback completed
abort: index [filename] is corrupted!

where the filename would differ. First I tried downgrading my repo as pointed out here. Why? Well, I had the dotencode issue before, so I reckoned it should be the same. Unfortunately it wasn’t.

What I am doing now instead is to bundle the source repo and put it up as bundle on the read-only location. This seems to work now.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, VCS | Tagged | Leave a comment

Noch so eine Entdeckung …

Posted on 2013-02-05 by Oliver
  • Isländisch: stígvél
  • Deutsch: Stiefel

Erkennt noch jemand außer mir die Ähnlichkeit?: að stíga bedeutet zu steigen bzw. zu treten. Der Wortteil vél bedeutet heutzutage Maschine oder Motor.

Ich habe das Gefühl, daß es sich beim isländischen Wort um die ursprünglichere Form handelt von dem auch unser heutiges deutsches Wort Stiefel abgeleitet ist. Ist natürlich nur so ein Bauchgefühl. Bin kein Sprachwissenschaftler.

Übrigens handelt es sich bei stígvél um eines der Worte bei denen ich ganz ohne Hilfe auf die Bedeutung kam – und zwar aufgrund der Phrase: stígvélaði kötturinn. Wobei ich das zweite Wort bereits kannte.

// Oliver

Posted in DE, Gedanken, Island/Iceland/Ísland | Tagged | Leave a comment

Re: Oh the pain

Posted on 2013-02-05 by Oliver

Referring to this earlier post.

In November a person from their complaint department 1 contacted me and told me I would get a replacement.

He arranged it so that I would receive it on short notice in December, during my brief stay in Germany. And all went well. I got the replacement laptop (Elitebook 8770w) about six hours after my arrival. They allowed me one week to migrate my stuff over to the new laptop – which was sufficient. It then got picked up by another company the week after.

The new laptop has been a lot more stable ever since. It’s a whole different way of working without the constant fear of it crashing in the middle of some unsaved work. Let alone the problem to get back to the state you were at when it crashes, even with the work saved.

After an odyssey of of nearly ten months I’m glad this finally worked out. But I think it is also just to point out that it worked out and how. Let’s praise HP where that praise is due.

// Oliver

PS: there was a minor nuisance with the new – slim – power supply that was included with the new laptop. It made this buzzing noise that sounded like a fan or some short circuit at the open air. Although I would have liked this lighter and smaller power supply, I decided to send this one back and stick with my old one. Most of the time I use my laptop as a stationary workstation, so it’s of no relevance.

  1. as I understand a different company[↩]
Posted in EN, Opinion | Tagged | Leave a comment

Verdicts in the IceSave case available

Posted on 2013-01-28 by Oliver
Posted in EN, Island/Iceland/Ísland | Leave a comment

EU-Bürger: Unbedingt unterschreiben!

Posted on 2013-01-23 by Oliver

Es geht darum die EU-Institutionen zu zwingen sich mit den Privatisierungsplänen in der Wasserversorgung noch einmal auseinanderzusetzen: right2water.eu

Posted in DE, Meinung | Leave a comment

Webdesigners who don’t want me to use there website

Posted on 2013-01-22 by Oliver

… are the ones to use some fancy JavaScript snippet to display a black box saying “You need Flash player to see this” or something similar instead of letting me activate Flash on demand. Opera has the setting as long as I can remember

Opera preferences dialog, content preferences page

and Firefox just recently got it under about:config under the name plugins.click_to_play (which should be true to prevent Flash content from loading automatically).

Meh. Annoying!

// Oliver

Posted in EN, IT Security, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Tmux is great … (but how to build on Lucid Lynx?)

Posted on 2013-01-16 by Oliver

… only a few troubles to get it to build on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 😉

Basically you’ll want libevent2, which doesn’t come in the package repos, so fetch it from here. Then you obviously fetch the tmux source via tmux.sourceforge.net and then it’s easy (until you try to run the resulting binary 😉 ).

Assume you have the two files in a sub folder of your home folder, called tmux.

$ ls
libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz  tmux-1.7.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf tmux-1.7.tar.gz && tar -xzf libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz
$ ( cd libevent-2.0.21-stable/ && ./configure && make && sudo make install )
# loads of output ...
$ ( cd tmux-1.7/ && ./configure && make && sudo make install )
# loads of output ...

Now you’ll notice the man page is installed properly, but trying to run tmux fails like this:

$ tmux
tmux: error while loading shared libraries: libevent-2.0.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Why is that?

$ locate libevent-2.0.so.5
/home/oliver/libevent-2.0.21-stable/.libs/libevent-2.0.so.5
/home/oliver/libevent-2.0.21-stable/.libs/libevent-2.0.so.5.1.9
/usr/local/lib/libevent-2.0.so.5
/usr/local/lib/libevent-2.0.so.5.1.9

So the files are there, why does tmux not find them? The most likely reason is that ld.so, the dynamic loader, doesn’t know where to look for it. So let’s check:

$ grep -R local /etc/ld.so.conf*
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc.conf:/usr/local/lib

So it does know about the folder. And it certainly should be able to find the correct file. No conflicts about the bitness used for either one either:

$ file $(readlink -f /usr/local/lib/libevent-2.0.so.5)
/usr/local/lib/libevent-2.0.so.5.1.9: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, not stripped
file $(which tmux)
/usr/local/bin/tmux: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, not stripped

I’m still puzzled about why I can explicitly tell the dynamic loader to look in /usr/local/lib via LD_LIBRARY_PATH but it ignores the default setting in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc.conf. However, the workaround to get it to run was for me:

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib tmux

My final solution, however, is to statically link tmux using the following ./configure line and make to build a tmux binary:

$ ( cd tmux-1.7/ && CC='gcc -static' ./configure --enable-static && make && sudo make install )

That does the job.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Linux, Programming, Software, Unix and unixoid | Tagged | 4 Comments

The stubborn guy in me …

Posted on 2013-01-15 by Oliver

Several times now I have been invited to the US by couch surfers I hosted and even by other people. Most of them are stumped at first when I tell them that I’ll probably never take them up within my or their lifetime due to the political situation. It almost sounds like a bad motto from the cold war. Not so. What I am referring to is the way travelers are are being subjected to – euphemistically speaking – a level of scrutiny that quite frankly appalls me. The land of the free and home of the brave has decided, sometime after 9/11 (2001, I should add) to lock down their country and treat visitors as criminals. The only thing that is worse is the way the EU countries (and others) seem to follow suit.

Turns out most of the US citizens I meet are very understanding once they here about it, or know about it already and acknowledge the problem.

While before the first world war virtually all borders where toll borders and didn’t much impair traveling, we seem to get to a point where traveling freely 1 becomes virtually impossible in the near future. So much for globalization, eh?

// Oliver

  1. as in unencumbered by ridiculous treatment of some border control officer[↩]
Posted in EN, Germans have no notion of sarcasm, Human Rights, Thoughts | Leave a comment

Vimcasts.org …

Posted on 2013-01-14 by Oliver

Great website to learn about Vim. I can also warmly recommend the book Drew wrote: Practical Vim. If you have bought the hard copy via some other way than the website of the publisher, you still can get a nice discount on the ebook. Check out the last page inside the book for details.

And after taking the “Vim master class” I still don’t feel like a master, but I feel empowered and know better where to turn for answers and how to perform repetitive and why solution abc is better than xyz. Great stuff and therefore I warmly recommend the course as well.

// Oliver

Posted in EN, Opinion | Tagged | Leave a comment