Wohlgefällig … Миша Wolf … Shining me on 19th of April, 2006 ANTE·MERIDIEM 12:01

Ich bekam während des Wochenendes eine Email von einer Freundin, die ich nicht seit einem Jahr gesehen habe, und der Empfang dieser Mail hat es noch einmal erklärt, das ich meinen aktuellen Lebensstil verändern muss. Die ist wohlgefällig, charmant, und wir passen gut zusammen; ich rede mit ihr gerne, und sie mit mir, aber falls ich ledig bin, verbringe ich die zwei Wochen nach so einer Konversation ganz deprimiert, da sie kein Interesse für mich hat. Wenn ich mit einer Frau zusammen bin, kann ich mich mit ihr beschäftigen, und diese Depression vermeiden, und das ist gut so.

Diese Freundin hat mir eingeladen einen Besuch bei ihr zu machen, aber da ich jede Nacht zu Hause bleibe, mit vielen Büchern, und dem Internet, und deshalb wenig Gelegenheiten habe, neue (lokalen) Frauen zu treffen, werde ich ledig bleiben, und wird die Nachfolgen eines solchen Besuches nicht leicht zu tolerieren. (Also, es gab und gibt finanziellen und anderen Gründe dafür, dass ich mein Leben so führe; ich sage nur dass es mir nun klar ist, dass ich Gründe (ja, es gibt andere, finanzielle, zum Beispiel) habe dieses Verhältnis zu beenden.)

Markus „Mischa“ Wolf was the highly-effective head of the foreign intelligence part of the Stasi from the fifties to the mid eighties. Joel of Far Outliers mentions him in this post; but his wider story is fascinating, in the way that those of realistically evil people often are. Of Jewish background, left Germany with his Communist father and the rest of his family in 1934, took Soviet citizenship, went back to Germany in May 1945, gave up Soviet citizenship in the early fifties, pursued his foreign intelligence strategy with good judgement and success for decades. John le Carré’s “Karla” was based on him, apparently; I would love to read his autobiography, but would prefer not to help him in his comfortable retirement by buying it. Must join a library.

Phrase of the day; in North American English, “shining you on” means “conning you,” “pulling the wool over your eyes.” One Usenet post dates it to ~1971 and calls it Jazz slang, but since it’s not clear on the meaning—and it does mean what I write, look at the Google results—I’m not over-inclined to believe she’s right. It’s not in the OED, maybe I should send it in to them.

XEmacs sucks, evidently … PHP rocks, evidently … Ohne große Beziehung mit dem Leben 15th of April, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 08:21

(Warning, uncomfortably nerdy post, even by my standards!)

Things that are annoying me lately:

• Marcus Crestani’s incremental garbage collector patch for XEmacs is tying up my editor much more that its predecessor, which is in direct contradiction of the idea of the thing. Fuсk, I need either a) understand that and fix it or b) trust Marcus to do the latter, which, sharp intake of breath is not a given.
• There’s an XEmacs beta bug that manifests itself on Linux with ncurses; effectively typing fast, or pasting in something to a TTY frame, results in the first character passing through and then everything else getting lost. I’ve switched to a beta XEmacs for my (TTY-bound) mail client, and since my typing is pretty good and pretty fast, this is driving me slowly mad. Double plus ungood; I can’t reproduce it locally, evidently because I’m not running Linux, so I’ll have to go and debug it on the server, if I get to it.

Things that are cheering me up lately:

• I’ve moved this site to using the PEAR DB API, which means that I can switch to a grown-up database backend when and if I have the opportunity and energy to do so, as opposed to the previous state of affairs, where I was stuck with the most widely distributed alternative. In the process I came across bugs here and there, the fixing of which should speed the site up a little.
• I’ve fixed a few minor bugs independent of that; notably, now the links to the homepage of whoever wrote a comment make sense (the href= attribute gets stripped, if no home page was supplied) and I provide a syndication feed for the comments, which is much more for my convenience than for the rest of you; but anyway, it’s at http://​www.​parhasard.​net/​atom-feed/​comment/​ .

A diverting Hamburg (German, legal) judgement via BeLUG, available at Heise Online here:

»Das Bereithalten von Internetforen stelle eine Form unternehmerischen Betriebs dar. Der Betreiber müsse sein Unternehmen so einrichten, dass er mit seinen sachlichen und personellen Ressourcen in der Lage sei, diesen Geschäftsbetrieb zu beherrschen.

„Wenn die Zahl der Foren und die Zahl der Einträge so groß ist, dass die Antragsgegnerin nicht über genügend Personal oder genügend technische Mittel verfügt, um diese Einträge vor ihrer Freischaltung einer Prüfung auf ihre Rechtmäßigkeit zu unterziehen, dann muss sie entweder ihre Mittel vergrößern oder den Umfang ihres Betriebs [ ...] beschränken“, so das Landgericht Hamburg.«

This apparently isn’t representative of the previous legal position on internet fora, and will probably be struck down on appeal, but it does raise a bit of a spectre before German Usenet operators; there are quite definitely things posted to news.individual.net every single day that are in contravention of German law, and if the choice is between “stop providing the service” and “hire people to look at everything posted and cancel illegal articles,” I’ll have to go and look for another NNTP provider.

Word of the day: гӯсфанд is Tajik for “sheep.”

UCC, CS, eh? … Grimm’s Sound Shift … Халхин-Гол 13th of April, 2006 POST·MERIDIEM 04:46

From my Google™ referrer logs and some googling myself, I learn that an Aidan Kehoe is a postgrad at UCC, in the Computer Science department. I take this opportunity and its likely quick Google propagation to apologise to him for monopolising the Google results for our name, and to suggest beers if he ends up in Berlin in the next few years.

Also in the realm of homonymy, my Flemish par hasard brother over at http://​www.​parhasard.​be/​ has the coolest header image I’ve seen in a long time; it’s the wreck of a Mitsubishi Zero apparently on the floor of the Pacific, taken by David Doubilet. And my Dutch is non-existent, but the Einstein quote currently on the front page is the best demonstration of the High German sound shift you could hope for, and is as such pretty readable; weet, wapens, ik versus German weiß, Waffen, ich. It also demonstrates a sound shift between Mittelhochdeutsch and Neuhochdeutsch that didn't take place in Dutch: as t'Wikipedia puts it,

Die wichtigsten Veränderungen vom Mittelhochdeutschen zum Neuhochdeutschen betreffen den Vokalismus:

• Die mittelhochdeutschen Langvokale <î>, <iu>, <û> werden zu den Diphthongen nhd. <ei>, <eu/äu>, <au> (»nhd. Diphthongierung«) - Beispiele: mîn → mein, vriunt → Freund, hûs → Haus

Historical and important battle you probably didn’t know existed, which I learned about via Wikipedia’ing on the Zero: the Battle of Khalkhin Gol was an engagement between the Japanese and the Red Army in the summer of 1939, which the Red Army won, and which scared the ѕhіt out of the Japanese, for no good reason. It is interesting to me in that it’s one engagement where the Soviets seem to have made exactly the right choice strategically in World War II, in contrast to their long-term choices later, which were, basically, “be really big and prepared to lose millions and millions of lives until your chief enemy is exhausted and over-extended, you have years of industrial aid, and it finally occurs to you that competence in soldiery is a good thing.” Probably a matter of Жуков versus Stalin.

Word of the day: Оллоҳ is Tajik for “God,” from the Arabic.

Fruncé … Mein Kastilisch ist schwach … Provenzano 12th of April, 2006 ANTE·MERIDIEM 11:14

One of our clients had an interesting and apparently false “city” specified in our records, so I went and checked if it really existed before changing it. Turns out it does: http://​www.​flickr.​com/​photos/​tags/​frunce , less confusingly and more correctly known as Fruncé.

I’ve learned off this spiel in the last few days in the last few days, since our sales call centre gave the French-language number to Spanish-speaking customers: ¡Buenas tardes! Perdone, no hablo español, pero hablo inglés, francés, allemán, y tengo una colega que habla español. Most of the callers want to speak to my colleague, unsurprisingly enough.

Und noch was auf Spanisch: http://​www.​elmundo.​es/​elmundo/​2006/​04/​11/​sociedad/​1144748584.​html

Der “líder” einer sizilianischen Mafia ist vorgestern (im Dorf „Corleone“, wie schön !) verhaftet worden. Bernardo Provenzano ist seit 1993 Führer der „Cosa Nostra“, eine von verschiedenen Mafien in Italien, und die am bekanntesten. Seit vierzig Jahren hat man versucht ihn zu verhaften; das finde ich erstaunlich, dass in einem modernen, industrialisierten Land, jemand absolut unabhängig von der Regierung so lang leben kann. Oder vielleicht ist es nur dass Sizilien kein modernes, industrialisiertes Land ist, sondern genauso wie Mario Puzo es beschrieb, anarchistisch und korrupt.

Word of the day: el Juez is Spanish for a judge, a magistrate; der Richter is German for the same thing, and was often used in a piece of commentary about 1933–45, that „das Land der Dichter und Denker in Land der Richter und Henker abgewandelt war.“