Sunday, July 20, 2008

To consolidate something ... not the same thing in every language

My native tongue is Dutch and I am fluent in French too. Lately I noticed something funny. Some people make a quite odd translation to Dutch of the verb consolidate.

The first time I heard it I thought that I was mistaking but it was repeated a couple of times during the conversation. Just to be sure I looked on Wikipedia where it is explained as the act of merging many things into one. So in the context of virtualization this would make sense.

If we have a look at the explanation that the Dutch dictionary VanDale gives we see as result "bestendigen" which means to continue, to remain in force.

So as you can tell not quite the same thing. I did some more research and noticed that google translate makes the same mistake.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

cp- i and mv -i are not so interactive

I've build a DHCP-server today on a VM using Ubuntu 8.04 just to play around with. As part of the exercise is hardening the system I found some odd behaviour.

To protect me from my own mistakes I thought it would be nice to alias the commands rm, mv, and cp and each time ask for interaction. This is when I noticed that the commands mv -i and cp -i actually ignore the -i. I've tested it with --interactive but the same here. There is no problem for rm.

I've reported the bug at launchpad and it is now known as Bug 247973.

Friday, July 11, 2008

First post

Hello and let me welcome you to my blog. Here you'll find a little intro about me.

Who is Erik Vanderhasselt?
I am a Belgian IT guy, born in 1981 and my fascination with computers started really to take off when I got my first and broke it in 48 hours ... the good old days :).

What do I do and where?
Currently I work for a Belgian IT company called Dolmen Computer Applications where I work as a system engineer DBA on MS SQL. My job consists of either doing projects or solving problems at our customers.

What can you find on this blog?
I'd like to talk about pretty much anything that comes to mind. Mostly IT related I am into more things than just MS SQL as you'll find out. Other interests are martial arts, cooking and so much more.

Most people ask my 1 question and that is why I like open source work on Ubuntu machines and work with MS SQL server for a living. Let me answer that for you. I enjoy working with open source and a database is just a database. The basic idea is just the same on Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL ... you want to store data and how it is done is facinating on each platform. It just happens that this job opportunity presented itself when I was looking for a new job.

Who is my targeted public?
Well I know that there are hundreds of blogs out there specialised in some topic and this is something I want to avoid. So my public are people who are into technology and like to exchange ideas.