Lost in translation

I've been trying to read the the Japanese translation of "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder". So far I'm about one page down, first learning kanji piecemeal then plunging into the text.

One particular sentence in the translation just wouldn't make sense to me, it's where Holmes is lamenting the death of Moriarti:

けちな窃盗事件、理不尽な強盗事件、無益な傷害事件――手がかりを握るその男にとって、すべてをひとつの穴に結びつけることができた。

その男 - is he talking about Moriarti? But Moriarti wasn't holding the clues in his hand. Finally I turned to the original,

Petty thefts, wanton assaults, purposeless outrage ― to the man who held the clue all could be worked into one connected whole.

Oh, Holmes is talking about himself.

Bummer. I found a hole in the translation. And I had chosen a Holmes story specifically, because the subject matter was so familiar to me. Well, no matter, I'll press on. Original stories in Japanese are just way too daunting for now.

お久しぶりに投稿

日本語を勉強する間、昔設定したブログで自分の思い等を述べたいと思います。

もう財団の3年目が終わってから、夏の間勉強を続けたいと思います。いつもの通り漢字の方を一番大切にしていますが、文法にも目を向けた方がいいと分かって来ました。

漢字の勉強、順番なく、面白そうな文書から取り出して塾しています。最近「ノウードの建築家」という「シャーロック・ホームズ」の小説の日本語翻訳を読むことにした。進歩は遅いけど、今まで出来たところは面白い。

先日勉強の為に使っているプログラムを漢字統計を出力させ、900字が分かることを表示してくれた。嬉しい！

日本語はアルファベットを使っている言語と違って漢字を使っているから、普通の字さえ読めなければ勉強は全然進まないものだ。読めるようになったら、よく読みたいという気持ちを持っている。

Cleaning up VMware snapshots

If you cycle through all your snapshots and then delete files whose "Last Accessed" timestamp hasn't changed, you can recover quite a bit of disk space.

I have no idea why VMware doesn't always delete snapshot files (.vmdk, .vmem, etc.) after you've explicitly deleted a snapshot from the GUI, but all the cruft adds up. Last time I did this, I got back about 5 gigabytes across three VMs.

The truth

My high school Astronomy teacher (yes, for some reason we had Astronomy classes) was a hilarious man with a toupee so fake you would think he picked it on purpose. Incidentally, this man was also the Principal. (He taught Math as well, Astronomy was just an extra gig.)

We could never understand how he managed to climb the ladder, and why everyone on the staff apparently respected him. The kids just chalked it off to him being a communist kiss-ass (we're talking Soviet Union here).

He would make outrageous quips in class, some of which cannot be translated from Romanian.

Romanian readers, enjoy this: "Concentraţia de hidrogen este de 25 de procente la sută".

Then one day he produced the mother of all bloopers.

"There are many galaxies, and there is our Galaxy. How do we distinguish our galaxy from all the others?"

"Ours starts with a capital G."

I used to tell that story for many years, enjoying myself, as people often do, in relishing another man's stupidity.

And today I saw here - "Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, sometimes simply called the Galaxy (with uppercase) ..."

Draw your own conclusions.

Happiness: best administered in small doses

One word about computers today: "abundance." There is too much of everything. Gigabytes. Million polygons per second. Do I like it? "Yes, if I can control it."

And I'm not sure how. The amount of knowledge needed cannot be crammed into one human brain; I am reduced to "push this button and it works".

It didn't use to be this way.

There was a wonderful thing in my life, ten years ago - FIDO. A pre-Internet message board that you dialed into every night (with a modem) and pulled in the latest stuff: people discussing things, commenting on what you said. I remember the anticipation of returning home and dialing in for the "latest." It had been a whole day. Someone might have answered me. Some people contradicted and insulted each other for weeks.

It was fun because you knew everyone by name, and gauged their personalities as you read more of their posts.

Why was this "wonderful"? We have a million web forums today, and they are complete drags. In a funny way, each wants to be "the" forum, which of course doesn't happen: if it dies, there are N-1 left.

But with FIDO, you had to watch what you said. A slip of the keyboard in a moderated forum, and you're banned for 2 weeks. The operators had your phone number; getting a new one was unthinkable. And FIDO was the only network. It was a scarce thing.

Why I'm talking about "scarce" will become clear after you see this picture:

http://homepage.mac.com/citizensane/kill_for.jpg

It's from an "old computing" nostalgia site (notice the name of the file).

A 30-something used his 3-GHz machine to post a fond picture of an old clunker that couldn't do anything.

Part of it, of course, is that "after a while, all memories become good memories."

But still.

Computers could do little back then, but what they did, made you happy. You could talk to friends on FIDO (and wait a whole day to hear back), you could play 2-D sidescrollers in 256x256 graphics, and it made you happy.

The ability to extract the most out of that limited hardware made you happy.

What about today? In every programmer is a person tired of climbing up the mountain of learning. At some point we admit we shouldn't know it all.

And with that, we give up the chance to be happy through computers. We don't create; we interact by probing a huge system that's not worth understanding because it will be obsolete soon.

So what's to do? Keep learning, catch up, be professional about it: you can never understand the whole. An admission of defeat.

Performance is trivial. There is no mastery involved in extracting a billion polygons per second: just add more hardware. And the happiness of achievement is gone.

Which is why people drool over an ancient computer with black-and-white graphics, and yawn through the presentation of the PlayStation 3.

I'll make a silent confession: I can't wait for Moore's law to be over. We can then go back to getting the most out of what we have, instead of building our software houses on sand, since we're moving next year anyway.