one week vacation

Hi there, I'll be in Berlin for the next week (until wednsday) which means that, first, I'll be much more relaxed than usual :) and, last and least, that there will not be any new posts here. This is listed in order of importance, as not posting here for over a week or so is not actually something unusual after my last break from blogging was about 6 months long (ups) :P

And so that you don't feel bored from reading this void entry, here is a pic of Cadaques, a location to the north of Catalonia where Salvador Dali used to live and which I visited last Saturday.



Guess this is good-bye then. Cu

guitar zazen experiences

Hiyo there,

In my particular way to understand metamusical zazen (坐禅) (?) I thought I'd provide some recordings with my guitar during meditations. Don't take my made-up term "metamusical zazen" as something serious, it's just I don't find any better way to describe this activity of mine consisting in finding relaxation by concentrating on guitar-playing per se, without caring on modern song-writing. This is something I love to do when I have some 30-60 minuts of time and I find it really funny. Now, I have listened myself to these pieces afterwards and I can tell you they are not exactly "beautiful", but there are some occasional nice moments and, as something for myself, I find it funny to apreciate the way I try to apply mathematical sequences into music with both a touch of acoustic and metal (opeth rulz) :)

Anyway, this is probably just plain stupid so please don't take this as something serious :)

First pieceSecond piece

the computer is your counselor

The computer. Supposedly cold as a stone, emotionless. But on occasion developing a sense of counselor. That occasions, I confess, are rather terrifying.

For instance, the following happened this morning while I was trying to copy-paste some items from kdevelop to my terminal. I must have done something wrong, for kdevelop stalled for about 10 seconds while performing this task. But after this period it finally printed its output. But interestingly, instead of pasting the name of the command-line variable I was looking for, the procedure pasted two times the sentence "creo que no es bueno ser nerd", which is spanish for "I don't think it's a good thing to be a nerd". Thanks god it didn't take much to remember the source of these words. They belonged to an msn chat I had yesterday. Otherwise I guess I would have been very scared :)

However, this still raises some technical issues. How come that the mouse copy-paste procedure recalled this line which belonged to the day before? Well, I guess it must have been one of the last things I read yesterday, and after that the machine hibernated, so it is not entirely impossible. But anyway. it was a funny moment to witness

but after all, am I a nerd? ;)

more frightening sporadic HD errors

So, there I am this morning, booting my ibm x40 laptop when I get the unfamous /dev/hda2 was not cleanly unmounted message during linux boot. Off to a root shell. ok. what happened? All right, I remember. Another one of those sporadic Input/Output errors, yesterday night... What's causing them? Nobody knows. Why does the HD report IO errors just somtimes, but generally works 99% when manipulating those files in directory X?

However, things are more weird. 'Tis my first time with fsck required due to errors. In general the Input/Output error had always remounted filesystem read-only (as it ought to) and after reboot everything had worked flawlessly. Until today.

So I drop to this shell and shortly refresh my knowledge on e2fsck and badblocks. After looking for a while I decide to e2fsck -c -p -v the partition. It starts to work, recreating the journal, but then tells me to run a manual e2fsck (ie, without -a or -p option) Well, it's not the first time this happens to me, so no reason to fear. So I go on with e2fsck -c -v and start recovering inodes, readjusting filesystem consistency and so on for hundreds, if not thousands of inodes. Yes, I confess there were so many errors that in the end I didn't check anymore what inodes I was repairing. So I just pressed "enter" until the job was done. I only stopped once to consider if repairing the /etc directory could be a problem. But that's not a question to think a lot. In any case, until the filesystem is not repaired it will not be possible to boot. So I also repaired that one. But not without implications

After repairing and seeing that badblocks did not detect a single bad block I reran with e2fsck -c -c -v to see if the non-destructive read-write check would find some bad block. But still there was no bad block to be found. So weird.. I thought. Isn't there supposed to be some problem if I get continuous Input/Output errors on some inodes? Or what else does a readlink() call do? Anyway. Disk repaired. Next Step: Reboot

So I select linux on the prompt and start to boot. After a short while it is clear that something is not working. I have an interesting init: NO INITTAB message. So I try to enter manually the runlevel. Let's say: 3. But all this did was freeze command line and allow no further input. So I repeat the procedure. But now it's time for linux single user mode.

Once dropped off to the root shell I look at the root filesystem. Everything's fine, so let's look into etc. cd /etc returns /etc: not a directory. WHAT?!?! file /etc returns English ASCII text WHAT?!?!^2. And vi etc shows an interesting xml file interleaved with some non-sense binary data. Definitively something is not quite right when /etc is an XML file and all your configuration file are stored as recovery inodes in the /lost+found directory :) Thought I may recover from /lost+found. I entered, but: Welcome to the jungle!

Fortunately, after seeing that I would not be able to live without a reinstall, I was able to backup most of my critical data. And it was thanks to my Windows partition, as linux was very firm in its intention of not letting me mount the usb mass storage devices, despite it allowing me (apparently) to load the kernel module. Connecting the devices just did not add anything to dmesg output, nor did it activate the device lights. All I could do is move my sensitive data to the windows partition and reboot from there.

I'm reporting now about 12 hours after incident. As system administration was also unable to find errors in the hard drive (what the hell!) we opted to reinstall the original setup, without the manually installed kernel that I had added from suse's ftp (we're using novell GNU/linux in our company). But I'm still wondering in how far a misconfigured system with a standard kernel (used as default in a more recent distro) would end up generating Input/Output errors. Maybe a race within readlink()? But did I see this error always with readlink()?? I can't remember. This has happened to me about 5 times now (all of them after I installed the new kernel). If the problem is hardware then I'll just wait some weeks until it resurfaces. And then the diagnostic will be definitive. Any ideas anyone??

Well, hope you liked my catastrophy-story with happy-ending.
Next time I'll better ask Cthulhu for inspiration

Comeback! and い碁 translation :)

今日は！

Yes, it's been a very long time since I last updated my blog :) Well, after so many tries I'm starting to suspect that blogs and me don't relate too well :D

But enough of that. Last week I've been working on a small translation of a GO text to test my ability as translator and also to learn some GO. Translating is not an increadibly funny task to do, but it was not as painful as I thought. However, it was painful in the complexity. After having studied 2 years of japanese my level is still pretty pathetic. But it's fun, so complaining is not justified here.

So, what I did is try to translate the first page of one of Asahi's articles about the 31th meijin (those articles appear regularly published here) These articles are far too complex and long considering my nihongo ability so I'm more than satisfied with trying to translate one out of all 8 pages!

After my first try I have to confess that the results are not good. More than half of the sentences leave me with questions related to meaning and grammar! But, on the other hand, I guess that these GO texts are as complex as I will find in regular japanese (if not more).

Before starting, here is the structure I used to translate. It's very simple: First I post the original paragraph. Then the translation. Due to the complexity of the task, I need to add many comments. Those are within brackets and follow a 'TN:' sign, which basically means "Translator Notice"

So, let's start with this article. For an sgf of the match this article refers to, clic on this link

Hope someone finds this enjoying
Till next time!

azathoth

--------------------

This is a partial translation of the article 四天王対決 which appeared on 04/04/06 in the Asahi Shinbun (igo section) This is only the first page. Original url is: http://www.asahi.com/igo/meijin31/12/

いまの囲碁界の最前線で活躍する四天王同士の一戦。対局前から盤側でワクワクした気分にさせられた

In the World's GO front line there is currently a batlle going on among the big four. Starting even before of the matches, there is a feeling of excitation/nervousness going on in the vicinity.

両対局者に張栩、羽根直樹を加えた四天王というフレーズは、彼らがタイトル戦に登場するたびに浸透した。最近はライバル同士がタイトルをかけて争うことも多い。

Both players (TN: referring to Takao Shinji and Yamashita Keigo) along with Cho U and Hane Naoki, who form the so-called four Devas (TN: or just the big four?), are going to battle for the title (TN: refers to 31th meijin title) (TN: This sentence ends with something about appearance and osmosis which I don't get). (TN: I also don't really get the next sentence. It looks something like: "Recently, the rivals have lacked in titles, but there are many disputes"?? )

日本棋院は今、４人それぞれにふさわしいニックネームを選んでいる最中という。記者はそちらの決着にも興味津々だ。「カミソリ」「殺し屋」「コンピューター」「宇宙流」（誰のことか分かりますか？）のような、ぴったりの愛称を期待しよう。

Now, the Nihon Kiin is said to be in the middle of choosing nicknames respectively for the 4 players (TN: それぞれ is used here in a way I don't understand). The reporters are very interested in the decision. Who is who? (Nicknames follow:) 'Razor' (カミソリ) 'Professional killer' (殺し屋), 'Computer' (コンピューター) and 'Way of the Cosmos' (宇宙流) (TN: all this is so weird :) Did
I get anything right?)

本局は２月中旬、ちょうど山下が棋聖に復位する１週間前に打たれた。うれしいことに、タイトル奪還目前の集中力そのままに、本局に臨んでくれた。開幕２連勝の好調高尾も気合十分だ。

In the main office (TN: the meaning of 本局 translated here as "main office" doesn't make much sense. This meaning comes from wwwjdic. My kanji dictionary doesn't contain this compound), during the second third of February, Yamashita (山下) had restored his Kisei Title, just after having been beaten one week ago. (TN: I don't understand the grammar of the next sentence. Here is a try:) Happily, the title recovery happened with the same ability to concentrate as before. (TN: I don't understand the following, also. A try:) With two promising consecutive victories, Takao (高尾) is also showing plenty of
fighting spirit.

黒７のハサミに高尾の白８は変化球。黒は９とコスんだ。周囲の石の配置は違うが、ここで昨年の名人戦七番勝負第２局 （張名人—小林覚九段）を思い出した読者は相当な通である。似た場面で小林は黒９をＡで応えていた。

To the hasami (pincer) of black at 7, Takao answered at white 8 with a 変化球 (henkakyuu, ie, change of speed). Black at 9 is a cross-over. The arrangement of surrounding stones differs, but this position reminds to last year's seventh game of the second round of the Meijin (Chou-meijin versus Kobayashi Satoru 9-dan) (TN: not sure whether it was the 7th game of 2nd round or the other way round, but anyway). In that game, Kobayashi anwered the cross-over at A.

この進行を記者室で見て、「いろんな打ち方があるんだね」とつぶやいたのは、たばこを吸いに来た小林だった。

In the reporter room, after seeing this advance there was a mutter "varios ways to follow, right?" (TN: this sentence ends with something about kobayashi and smoking tabacco which I don't get)

白１０は２８分の考慮で打たれ、白１２ツケから２０までのワタリをめざす。白１０は結果的に本局の最長考だった。黒１１は、白１２以下を事前に察知してのひと工夫。どうせ固めてくれるのなら、狭い黒Ｂよりもまさる理屈だ。

White 10 came after 28 minutes of consideration. White 12 to 20 aim at a crossing. Because of the result it is aiming at, White 10 deserved the lengthiest consideration. (TN: I have problems with the following sentence. I interprete the following:) Regarding black 11, white 12 has a sense of going below (black 11) early. (TN: There is something about the word "scheme" (工夫) that I didn't understand in the context) (TN: The following sentence is also quite complex. What I extract does not have much meaning:) In case he gets fortified, surpassing theory says that a narrow black B is not better.