'ize Vs 'ise

A long time since I posted anything potentially useful. I guess that I have not discovered much over the last few months!

This started irking me more than usual today so I found the reasons why this happens with your spell check in MS Word. A bit of a detraction from my usual Networking and Linux related gaff. Also literally just a copy and paste from http://www.shaunakelly.com



"Word spells words like 'organize' with American spelling"


In Australian English, Word will mark 'center' and 'color' as errors, but it accepts both 'organize' and 'organise' as correct.


Many Australians spell words like 'organize' with -ise. But the dictionaries prefer -ize.


I think I'm right in saying that the Macquarie Dictionary (which has become a kind of de facto standard of Australian English) uses both, but prefers -ize.


There is no entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for 'organise' or 'agonise' or similar -ise words. The OED says:


"…in modern French the suffix has become -iser…. But the suffix itself …

is in its origin the Greek [ ], Latin -izare; and, as the pronunciation is also with z, there is no reason why in English the special French spelling should be followed, in opposition to that which is at once etymological and phonetic. In this Dictionary the termination is uniformly written -ize."


Given that lots of people use -ise, but the main dictionaries either use or prefer -ize, I guess it's reasonable for Word to allow both as correct.


For what it's worth, my understanding (largely based on the etymologies in the big OED) is that the British had one of their routine love affairs with the French in the 19th century. It was then that the Brits abandoned the -ize words in favour of the French -ise. About the same time, they stuck an extra 'me' on the end of program to make the truly awful 'programme'. (As far as I know, we don't have telegrammes or anagrammes, for example!)


So 'organise' and 'programme' are French spellings. The real "British" spellings are 'organize' and 'program'. But the Americans had long since left home with the old British spellings before the British adopted French spellings. And so today many people see the -ize spelling as American!

Blogger is fucking pants.

Have a link instead - http://www.unix.com/unix-dummies-questions-answers/185203-sendmail-weird-local-delivery-problem.html

Need For Speed - The Run

Haven't posted in a while so pinching my post from the EA forums about my troubles with my Graphics cards!!;

I like to think that I have a pretty decent rig; Dual Nvidia GTX 560Ti's, 8 Gig of serious RAM, Core i5 2600k etc... Also, running Windows 7 and all things seem pretty stable.

Kinda enjoying this game when it works but getting it to not crash has been a bit of a nightmare. I won't even go into the lack of 3D support....

Anyway, got fed up this evening and decided to post. I managed to get the game working relatively well after disabling my SLI (lame!) and turning down the resolution to something I would hope that my rig could handle - 1280x1024. This stopped the constant random crashing at the start of every level or at least reduced to every now and again which wasn't so bad.

I've just made it up to the Nikki and Mila level (end of Level 2) and straight after the cut scene, as soon as it fades back into the game it crashes every time. I'm not sure what to try next as I've tried tweeking the graphics settings down even further and still having the problem. Essentially I cant play the game as I cant get this level to start!

I have never seen a PC game with this many severe bugs and I've been gaming since day dot.

PS, Sorry, I also forgot to mention that I am experiencing the same Nikki and Mila crash before AND after installing the PC patch that came out 3 days ago.

Cheers



[UPDATE!!!!]

So I think I have resolved this issue finally. Though not exactly sure what the cause was. I'm leaning towards blaming my Gigabyte 560 ti OC's unstable factory overclock. After much headache installing temperature monitoring software and getting this working in-game Nvidia released the 295.73 drivers in late February. It may have been a bug in the previous drivers or it may have been the (factory) overclock. After installing the 295.73 drivers I managed to get past the Nikki and Mila stage and thought all was running well but still suffered momentary crashes.

I was playing another game and was experiencing similar crashes now and again. Trawling the Nvidia forums I stumbled across a 560 thread and noted a lot of people having the same kinds of problems mostly with BF3 (another frostbyte engine title). A lot of talk of increasing the stock voltage to over 1.000 volts but CRUICIALLY underclocking the card from it's factory overclock to the standard 822/1900 (instead of 900/2004) speeds. Once I had done this NFS seems A LOT more stable. I have not had a single crash on start up (used to happen first time, every time requiring me to start the game twice) nor in game crash. Not very happy that (albeit overclocked) card is released and is completely unstable. You would think that these things would ship and be relatively stable out of the box??

Anyway - posting an update so that this may help others..

Cheers

Delete your Linux history without leaving a trace!

Alright,

Second entry almost a full month later!

So, a while ago whilst I was trying to SSH into a Linux box from another Linux box I accidentally pasted the password into the console. Oh noes! Me, being the security conscious person I am, decided to delete the command via the # history -d [line entry number]. This of course leaves an entry in your history showing that you have deleted a line. Oh noes, Someone will see this and think I've been up to no good!

So I thought that I needed a way to delete a line from the history file without actually leaving this trace behind. The solution to this problem is this;

# history -d $((HISTCMD-1)) && history -d [line entry number]

Of course you could also use this command to run another command without it getting logged to the history file if you were so inclined;

# history -d $((HISTCMD-1)) && [type_your_command_here_and_execute]

Thanks to Mr b0nd for this awesome tip - http://www.garage4hackers.com/f28/linux-history-how-avoid-getting-logged-1032.html

OK - Let's try and get this started - Linux History Event Designator or Exclamation Mark!

Hi!

I started this blog with the intention that I could use it to keep track of useful IT related things that I pick up along the way as well as so that other people perusing the Internet may stumble upon them and possibly find them useful as well. I had a bunch of things back logged and half-stored in my (poor) memory and have now decided to ditch them and just post what I learned today.

So, today I was on the phone to a vendor trying to troubleshoot some problem that has been causing me grief for a very long time. Anyway, this Tech Guy is on the WebEx and I'm watching him doing all kinds of awesome debug. I'm particularly impressed by his mysql prowess (I must learn more about it!) but anyway, he goes and types "!wa" (minus the quotes) into this linux based appliance and I kind of recognise that what this has achieved is to search through his history of commands and then execute the last command in history that starts with "wa...".

I thought this was particularly awesome rather than using the arrow keys or the history command to go through your command history to find the massive line of code you just typed and wanted to type again without actually typing it!

A simple hint and perhaps obvious to some but I know for one, that I've looked through the Manual Page for the "history" command and never noticed this before. But look, there it is;


Event Designators

An event designator is a reference to a command line entry in the history list
! Start a history substitution, except when followed by a space, tab, the end of the line, `=' or `('.

Also, this blog came up when I searched google for [linux exclamation mark history] ;

http://www.codejacked.com/command-history-linux-mac-os-x/

Right, so that was the first disjointed post. And I probably will not post anything more! Let's see shall we?

OMG - I have a blog that no one will ever follow!

My First Post!