Installing Ubuntu 10 on Fake RAID 1
Our company bought a new PC recently that was delivered today.
It came with Windows 7 preinstalled, and they had already partitioned the harddisks, so I thought installing Ubuntu 10 would be easy.
What I hadn’t thought much about was the problems that would arise because I had ordered two harddisks with RAID 1 (mirror). As is often the case, RAID here meant Fake RAID, i.e., a mixture of software and hardware RAID, and Linux isn’t too fond of this.
It looked OK initially, though. The Ubuntu 10 CD booted up happily, and it even recognised the Fake RAID setup.
However, when I tried to install it, it refused to reformat the partition that I wanted to install Linux on. I searched on some Ubuntu forums, and somebody suggested to install Ubuntu 9 followed by Ubuntu 10.
I tried this, and it actually worked. Ubuntu 9 was happy to reformat the partition, and Ubuntu 10 was happy to overwrite the old Ubuntu 9 files.
Alas, the worst was still to come!
Although I didn’t get any error messages, Grub (the boot loader) did not get installed correctly. I tried all sorts of suggestions, but nothing worked. After installing Grub, the machine would boot happily straight into Windows 7. 
I then found a blog posting describing how to use Windows 7′s boot loader, BCDedit, to boot Linux. It looked promising, but it didn’t work either – after selecting Linux in the boot menu, I just got a blank screen with a blinking cursor.
At this point, I was about to give up, but I then found a suggestion to use EasyBCD to configure the Windows boot loader, and it works! EasyBCD finds the Grub loader on the Linux partition and activates it.
Easy! 
Sapir-Whorf revisited
I once saw a painting by a Nordic artist that depicted the sun as a woman and the moon as a man. In most Germanic languages that have masculine and feminine (including German and Nynorsk), ‘sun’ is indeed feminine and ‘moon’ is masculine.
On the other hand, in Romance languages the situation is reversed, and ‘sun’ is masculine and ‘moon’ is feminine.
So when I described the painting to a native Romance speaker, she was shocked.
Ever since that episode, I’ve thought that you couldn’t fully discount the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even if that placed me in the minority among linguists (I even wrote an essay about Whorf in my second year at uni).
I therefore read this article in the New York Times with great interest. You always have to be extremely cautious about believing any piece of linguistics published in mainstream media, but I didn’t spot any obvious errors.
It’s good that it quickly shows why the simplistic versions of linguistic relativism cannot be true, and I wasn’t aware of the existence of geographic languages, but the description sounds fairly convincing.
I guess I’d better get hold of a grammar of Guugu Yimithirr or Tzeltal to learn more!
Zopa
I should probably have known about it already, but I had never heard of Zopa until ten days ago.
It’s simply a ‘social lender’ who will take your money, split it into small packages, and then let different people borrow one package each. The effect is that you get a much better interest rate than you would in a savings account, but obviously you are running a risk if they all default.
Here’s a video about it:
I’ve started out by lending out £50 over 48 months. The initial process is very slow – after creating your account you need to transfer money into it, and that has taken me a week and a half, but now I’m up and running.
I’ll blog about it again if it turns out to be better or worse than expected.
Banoffee Pie
I’ve made banoffee pie several times, and it always seems to go down well, so here’s the recipe. It’s based on a recipe from Good Housekeeping: Step-by-step Cookbook
150 g digestive biscuits
75 g unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp ground ginger
450 g dulce de leche toffee sauce
4 medium-sized bananas
juice of one lemon
285 ml whipping cream
Put the biscuits in a food processor and whiz to a crumb. Add the melted butter and ginger, and process for one minute to combine.
Line a cake tin with greaseproof paper. Press the biscuit mixture into it. Pour the toffee sauce on top. Peel and slice the bananas, toss them in the lemon juice, and put them on top of the toffee sauce. Chill the pie.
Remove from the tin, whip the cream and put it on top. Optionally, decorate with chocolate shavings.
If you can’t get dulce de leche, make it like this: Pierce two holes in a tin of condensed milk. Place in a pan. Pour water three-quarters up the can. Simmer for 2 to 4 hours, topping up the water as needed.
If you can’t get condensed milk, make another pudding.
Ti og tis
Léon er nu begyndt på anden skoleuge, og han har fået lektier med hjem for første gang i dag.
For det første skal han synge nogle talsange, som jeg sikkert ikke kender.
For det andet skal de øve ord, der kan skrives med ‘a’, ‘i’, ‘s’ og ‘t’.
På engelsk er der sikkert gode grunde til at begynde med disse fire bogstaver (de prøver vist at undgå bogstaver som ‘e’ og ‘r’, der hyppigt er stumme), men på dansk er der altså ikke ret mange ord, der kan skrives med dem.
Jeg skrev fluks en one-liner til at finde alle ordene, og her er en fuldstændig liste:
ais
asiat
at
i
sats
sit
stat
statist
sti
tast
ti
tis
‘Ais’, ‘asiat’, ‘sats’, ‘stat’ og ‘statist’ kender han helt sikkert ikke, og ‘at’, ‘i’ og ‘sit’ er nok ikke de bedste ord at begynde med (konkrete substantiver og den slags er nok bedst), så tilbage bliver blot ‘sti’, ‘tast’, ‘ti’ og ’tis’.
I Léons aktive ordforråd bliver denne liste nok til reduceret til ‘ti’ og ’tis’.
Jeg glæder mig til senere på ugen, når han også begynder at bruge ‘n’ og ‘p’ – så kan vi da tilføje nogle nyttige ord såsom ‘ananas’, ‘pasta’, ‘satan’ og ‘spinat’.
English grades vs. ECTS: A* should be called A, and A B
The A level results for England are here, and about 8% got an A*, while a plain A was awarded to 27% of pupils.
As far as I can tell, this means that when mapping English grades to the ECTS grading scale, A should be mapped to B, and A* to A. The mapping is not perfect, given that the ECTS system stipulates that 10% should get an A, and 25% a B, but it’s definitely very close.
I don’t understand why the education authorities in the UK don’t try to get rid of grade inflation by adopting a statistical system such as ECTS.
Otherwise, they’ll need to introduce a new grade such as A** in a few years’ time, then A***, and so on ad nauseam.
The emergence of hypergrams in the written language of young people
Anybody who has young Facebook contacts from the UK is likely to have come across weird spellings in recent years.
It started out as text speak, i.e., the abbreviation of words to make them easier to type on a phone, such as gr8t ‘great’, 2moz ‘tomorrow’ and wat ‘what’.
However, recently they seem to have started making the words longer too, typically by repeating letters.
Here are a few examples from my Facebook contacts:
helloooo bestieee ♥
ehhh itss kindaa sick :L
NAKKKKEDDD scenes :O wuu2 ?
yu madeee soo many mistaakes i think u comeee tomorrow i think orr maybeee wednesdaaay :S
in londonnn and itss fiaaaaane !
I’m not aware of any existing term for these spellings, so I’m going to call them hypergrams.
Obviously they help to mark the writer as a young person, but we asked Marcel over dinner whether they served any specific purpose (such as adding emphasis to a word), but he claimed this was not the case.
It would be interesting to know if anybody has done any research on this topic.
Første skoledag
Léon begyndte i første klasse (P1) i dag.
Han fylder fem den 29. september, så det er jo en lidt tidligere skolestart, end man er vant til i Danmark, men det er faktisk senere end i England.
I dagens anledning begyndte han først kl. 9.20, men han kom først ud til normal tid – kl. 15 – og allerede fra i morgen skal han møde kl. 9 ligesom Charlotte.
Denne skoledag på seks timer er den samme i alle grundskolens syv år. I gymnasiet (altså de følgende seks år) bliver skoledagen ca. ½ time længere, men det er så fast for alle årene der.
Tilbage til Léon: Han var naturligvis en lille smule nervøs på forhånd, men så snart han fik øje på sin lærer, løb han glad hen til hende. Da han kom ud næsten seks timer senere, var han også glad, men meget træt.
Bare for en god ordens skyld, så begyndte Charlotte (10 år) i sjette klasse (P6) i dag, og Marcel (13 år) fortsatte i niende klasse (S2) – i gymnasiet rykker man op et par uger før sommerferien, så man kan møde sine nye lærere.
Camping is good fun for babies
Before we embarked on our epic journey of England, we were a tiny bit concerned whether Amaia at six months was too young to cope with the travails of camping.
She loved it, however! (Except that she thought we travelled too far between campsites.)
As the photo shows, she enjoyed playing with the lantern. She also enjoyed sleeping with her mum and dad in a double sleeping bag, listening to the noises through the canvas, and being around all her siblings all the time.
She complained one night when Phyllis was taking her to bed while the rest of us was having dinner outside – she wanted to sit together with us and have a chat and a chip.
Of course it wouldn’t really work if you were too keen on sterilised bottles with formula, but for a breastfed baby who’s happy to supplement it with real, dirty food, it’s a great holiday.
Star Trek and pizza with the daughters
Amaia has always (well, for a couple of months, which is eternity when you’re seven months old) been fond of Star Trek, and she has now discovered pizza.
Anna also quite likes Star Trek, and she loves pizza so long as there’s sausage on it.
Given that Phyllis isn’t very fond of either (I mean pizza & Star Trek, not Amaia and Anna), and given that the Gautier kids prefer Star Wars to Star Trek, I’m looking forward to a lot of Star Trek & pizza nights with my daughters whenever we’ll be home alone!
