Diacritiques

You borrowed this great CD from a friend, and your computer has a CD burner. Should you? Shouldn’t you? The London News Review has a flowchart that may help with your predicament.

Via Synapse

Bill Poser wonders on Language Log whether it is possible for someone who has learnt a foreign language from books only, without ever hearing it spoken or indeed any access to another speaker of the language, to achieve fluency while adopting an erroneous pronunciation that is so deeply ingrained that even subsequent daily exposure to native speakers can’t correct the idiosyncratic pronunciation. This happens to a character from the novel Shibumi by Trevanian.

Two remarks come to my mind.

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A friend pointed me to the International Dictionary of Literary Terms (DITL — Dictionnaire International des Termes Littéraires), which is a project by a group of researchers from the Université de Limoges. A small disclaimer: Even though the welcome page indicates that “the articles are in either French or English at the discretion of their authors”, I have yet to find one in English.

Tristan Nitot (se) demande comment dire « Holy shit! » en allemand, l’office fédéral allemand pour la sécurité informatique venant de recommander Opera ou Mozilla/Firefox. Ça dépend de ce qu’on tente d’exprimer. Pour extérioriser des émotions purement négatives, « Verdammte Scheiße! », « Mist! » ou moins scatologique, « Verflixt und zugenäht! » feraient l’affaire. Si, en revanche, l’énoncé porte plutôt sur la […]

First bugs. My permalink structure is /category/year/month/postname/. The rewrite rules generated by WP contain the following lines, any of which gave me a 500 Internal Server Error: RewriteRule ^category/(.+)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA] RewriteRule ^category/(.+)/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&paged=$2 [QSA] RewriteRule ^category/(.+)/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA] […] RewriteRule ^(.+?)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)/trackback/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&year=$2&monthnum=$3&name=$4&tb=1 [QSA] RewriteRule ^(.+?)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&year=$2&monthnum=$3&name=$4&feed=$5 [QSA] RewriteRule ^(.+?)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&year=$2&monthnum=$3&name=$4&paged=$5 [QSA] RewriteRule ^(.+?)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&year=$2&monthnum=$3&name=$4&page=$5 [QSA] RewriteRule ^(.+?)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&year=$2&monthnum=$3&feed=$4 [QSA] RewriteRule ^(.+?)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$ /index.php?category_name=$1&year=$2&monthnum=$3&paged=$4 [QSA] RewriteRule ^(.+?)/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/?$ […]

I didn’t have a changelog at the old site. The still valid and active site, I ought to say, because this one will take some work. It will go life when and only when Everything — plugins, permalinks, layout — works satisfactorily and I know how to safely redirect everyone who might have or find […]

J’ai indirectement fait allusion aux standards du web, en mentionnant les CSS qui, avec la langue xhtml forment le couple sur lequel se basent les normes en vigueur de la conception de sites. A ce sujet, deux ressources précieuses en langue française: Pompage, site dont la mission est de « traduire en français certains articles importants des […]

Lire la version plus longue de ce billet en français. I’m famous! All right, not really. But Creative Commons write on their blog about their new and improved search engine. And test it with the request “Show me all photos of Paris that I can make derivative works from and sell afterwards”. Result: the first […]

I had seen this before but lost the link before I could blog it. Luckily Carthik stumbled upon it as well; he even has a picture. This is about an American company that makes backpacks and bags and, if I remember correctly, sells a sizeable portion of its production in Canada, and maybe (hopes to […]

This is the third time the following has happened to me. I see a particularly obscure headline in the feed aggregator I use for reading news and blogs (Bloglines — I am quite happy with the service) and of course hasten to blog it. But checking the original on the news outlet’s site leads […]