Casper's Life

The Language

As a non-native English speaker it can sometimes be difficult or awkward to use a language I did not grow up with (my English teacher actually failed me in verbal English – in High School). But it also makes me allergic so to say, to ‘add’ words to my native Danish – not mine (as it have not really developed for the last 9 years), but the language in general. I do not listen to a lot of Danish, I normally get my daily input from online news papers, and sometime I really get worked up over ‘add’ words which do not fit into the context or simply look like they are used by the writer just to “look” cool.. no good.

All languages have developed over the years (maybe except for Icelandic… they where cut off from the rest of the world for a while), and every language borrows words from neighboring languages, which means that in Danish there are German, Swedish (god forbid), English, Latin and so forth words, which have over the years found their way in, so that they are a part of the language, natural language development.

Thanks to the TV, movies and the internet it has now accelerated to the extent that people use English (actually American English which is even worse) words in combination with Danish where the words are used out of context. Which makes it very annoying for a native Danish speaker who is using English as the first language. It would be as using käfer (German nick name for the VW Beetle) when describing a normal beetle found in nature, if one would know that the käfer is a beetle (tough a car) then one would also know what the person would talk about, but otherwise be utterly lost.

Now in English it’s slightly different, here words are created (or developed) so that they describe something for which there earlier wasn’t a word, or simply because the object for which the word is being used didn’t exist before. Like ‘Social Notworker’ which is a person who is so busy with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc) that this person does not find time working (nerds are like that – non-nerds think so). Unfortunately these words also find their way into other languages, and by that pollute them, why not use local words instead?

Paul McFedries have created a website for these words (the English ones); called wordspy.com, have a look and see how bad it can get…..

technorati tags: language, Paul McFedries, wordspy.com

Posted in life in it's simplest form..., rant | No Comments »

OSX X11 Keyboard issues

There is a small issue with the “default” keyboard setup in OSX X11 (Leopard), after having had this issue for some time I finally decided that I needed to have this fixed.

And found a post which pointed to “/usr/X11/share/X11/xkb” as being the issue, and yes after renaming it:

# sudo mv /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb /usr/X11/share/X11/xkb.orig

Everything is working…. grrr

technorati tags: keyboard, OSX, X11, xkb

Posted in apple, osx | No Comments »

iPhone Push Notify Applications

Just a quick question, did you unlock your iPhone?

If you can answer yes to the above, then do not buy any Push Notification Application, as it seams that Apple is blocking these phones from receiving notifications – more here

Now how about the phones bought in Italy, or Belgium which already are unlocked, but are used on non-approved carriers by Apple, will they work, or is it the “activate” thing one should do in iTunes which is the whole secret to this…

One day someone might figure out how this works….

technorati tags: iPhone, Push Notification Application

Posted in iphone | No Comments »

To “Netbook” or not to “Netbook”

There have been quite a buzz about the Netbook syndrome, there is Asus, MSI, Acer, Dell, and possible other brands which have come up with a notebook which is build around the Intel ATOM processor and ~1GB ram, and eiter a SSD or a harddriver. The screen is ~9 – 10″ with a resolution of 1024×600′ish.

Now I’ve been looking at these things for a while, and ones in a while I’ll have another look, and everytime I decide against them as they a way to underpowered for what I need them for (well that is not correct), as I normally use a MacBook Pro (unibody) which even for what I use it for sometimes is underpowered.

Also I do not want a Linux nor a Windows netbook, I want one which officially runs Apple OSX!!!

But now, the rumors have started again for an Apple Netbook, this latest incarnation is a “Netbook”, but it’s also a tablet….

More about it here

In short, I would like one of these…..

technorati tags: Netbook

Posted in apple, computers, hardware | No Comments »