Beloved turbot

Gayu just attempted to translate the exclamation "Holy Mackerel!" into Hindi, but the closest she could get was "Honoured Fish". This reminded me of the (apocryphal) stories of early attempts at automated language translation. The often cited example was a translation of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" into Russian, then back into English, emerging as "The vodka is strong but the steak is lousy."

You can read more about the history of this example here: http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/MTNI-11-1995.pdf

What's up with Netflix's search engine?

Try searching for "Dieu a Besoin des Hommes" on Netflix. That returns "about 7717" hits. That's a lot. Google, for example, gets about 350 hits for the same search term, and that's the whole internet. Not only that, but nothing at the top of the list seems in any way related to the lives of 19th century ship-wreckers on a small island off the Breton coast (top hit: In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.)

I guess if Netflix does, in fact, stock this movie, I won't be renting it from them. I'm in no mood to search through 7717 hits looking for it.

Joyce. Beckett. Pitch 'n' Putt.

Best. Short. Film. Ever.



Thanks for the link, Justin :-)

Latest pump-n-dump

I've recently been inundated with spam emails to buy Angstrom Microsystems stock. I receive about 5 or 6 messages per day telling me what an unbeatable deal this is. A quick search shows that this isn't the first time this year that this has happened, either. Hotstocked.com has a entry from a couple of weeks back, with a follow-up from the CEO pleading innocence. I believe him. I'm sure this has nothing to do with the company, as pump-n-dump is a particularly common form of spam.

This is all rather odd to me, as I've had dealings with Angstrom before.

My first thought was: they're public? There's about a gazillion "never-heard-of-them-before" companies out there selling cheap linux boxes, clusters and storage solutions. I have to imagine that market is horrible to operate in: zero differentiation leading to razor thin margins, and the constant threat of the big boys, who you almost always have to partner with anyway to be taken seriously by the big accounts with money to spend.

A few years ago, the company I worked for (PathScale) entered a partnership with Angstrom. I don't remember the details, but it was most likely a reseller agreement so they could bundle our compiler suite and Infiniband HCAs with their hardware. Every year, our company attended the Supercomputing Conference. Side note: if you can ever wrangle a trip to go, I highly recommend it - as conferences go, it's a blast. We had a booth on the conference floor, and so did Angstrom. During the setup, one of the Angstrom engineers came by looking for help setting up our HCAs on their hardware. I offered to assist. After helping out, their sales engineer and I swapped business cards.

Here's a good rule of thumb for successful living: never ever swap business cards with a sales engineer. Make something up: "Oh, I left my cards at home. Sorry." Not long after I returned from the conference, I received several support calls directly from the company. I guess they felt they had their "in" to the company and could neatly avoid calling our actual support line. It really sucks to tell a partner not to bother you any more. Reminds me of that old pub sign: please don't ask for credit as a punch in the face often offends.

Swedish Skin Jobs

Nude for spectrum, printer, scanner and 10 hard drives

Big Ideas (Don't get any) from 1030 on Vimeo.