language

Solid food

Yesterday, when I wrote about Maxim’s first food I of course meant his first solid food. It’s just that I didn’t know that solid food is called solid food in English. The direct translation from Russian is “solid” indeed, but when I was writing the post, I wasn’t sure that I could the word “solid” to describe food. And I was too lazy to check in the dictionary. Today, when I was replying to a comment for that post, I noticed the Google Adsense banner which was promoting some “solid food” website. I checked the site, double checked in the dictionary, and it was indeed – “solid” food.

Either I am being too smart or too stupid. I don’t know.

P.S.: Maxim seems to really enjoy his new diet.

Char or trout

Consider the joke told by Richard Stallman that I read in this article:

Once I was eating in Legal Sea Food and ordered arctic char. When it arrived, I looked for a signature, saw none, and complained to my friends, “This is an unsigned char. I wanted a signed char!” I would have complained to the waiter if I had thought he’d get the joke.

Until today, the word “char” had only one meaning to me. It was a computer term, which is used as a declaration of a character or string variable in some programming languages. Such as C, for example.

It turns out, that there is another meaning. Here is a quote from the dictionary for you:

also charr (n. pl. char or chars also charr or charrs)

Any of several fishes of the genus Salvelinus, especially the arctic char, related to the trout and salmon.

Wikipedia entries for those of you who want to learn more on this fishy subject: Salvelinus, Arctic char.

Englightment

During the last few days I started to change my understanding of the word “enlightment”. I think I already mentioned that Maxim loves looking at light sources (lamps, windows, etc). He loved looking at them from his very first day in this world and he still enjoys it.

Sometimes he would lay on the bed looking at the light bulb, thinking about something. And than he would suddenly start talking in his meaningful manner (‘Rggggrgg’,’Arrrrgggrrgg’, etc). When I see him like this, I say that he just was “enlighted”. Thus “enlightment” is talking your mind out after watching a light source.

New default dictionary

Until now I’ve been using http://www.rambler.ru/dict for all my translation needs. I realize that it might not at all be the best out there, but it is was good enough. I wanted something fast and simple. No need for phrases, just quick word translations from Russian to English, and back.

I think I’ll be switching to http://lingvo.yandex.ru now. It is also a good enough alternative. And fast enough. It also takes care of the greatest annoyance I have with the Rambler dictionary – language switching. When asking for the translation, I think, it is pretty obvious which language the original word is in. So, if I type ‘muse’ and ask for the English/Russian translation, it is obvious that I have typed an English word and I want thus a Russian translsation. For some strange reason, with Rambler, I had to specify. But I would have minded it aswell, if not the ugly interface. Check it out. What is the problem? Well, the language switch is after the submit button. That’s inconvenient.

I’ve been coping with this for far too long. Enough!

P.S.: Yandex dictionary has another nice feature – it shows the meaning of the word in other languages too. Educational.

Open Text Summarizer

I stumbled upon an interesting tool – Open Text Summarizer. It is a small utility which reads provided text, analyzes it, decides what is important and gives it out either in text, or in HTML as highlighted text. Surprisingly, it works pretty well. I have tried it on a couple of blog items and articles. And good news are that this tool is a part of Fedora distribution. Check it out.

Run it as /usr/bin/ots somefile.txt. If you don’t have it installed, than apt-get install ots.

In fact, it is so good that I might incorporate it into my email client for all incoming English languaged messages. Leaving just 5% of the original message, highlights just a single sentence with all the essence of the letter. /usr/bin/ots -r 5 email.txt for that.