Arnout's Eclectica

Trying to notify my manager of a few upcoming days off using Microsoft Project Web Access, I got:

Microsoft sure has interesting ideas about "administrative projects"...

I'm slowly making my way through the posts at languagehat, a linguistics weblog which I discovered a few days ago.

In a comment on one of the articles, someone mentioned that entering 2665 on a mobile phone with predictive text input spells both "book" and "cool". Which got me thinking about what other collisions there might be...

So, after taking Grady Ward's Moby word list, and writing a few lines of C#, here are my favourites:

• acquire = baptise
• equitable = fruitcake
• hormonic = insomnia
• mature = obtuse
• mudsucker = overtakes
• navaho = obtain
• pervert = request
• piebald = ridable
• pigmaker = signaler
• september = sequences

And for Dutch (using this word list):

• afgrijselijk = begrijpelijk
• aftakking = bevalling
• amortisatie = constipatie
• deeltallen = edelvalken
• emmer = fonds
• gesloopt = herkomst
• puber = stads
• starheid = subsidie
• tijdvak = vijftal
• uniek = vogel

A few weeks ago, I came across a word I'd never seen before. That's not really a reason for a post, you might say. True, but since it happened two times on the same day, in two very different books, I present to you: sprezzatura – the art of casually hiding artfulness. I like that notion; ars celare artem, and all that...

Sprezzatura Sighting #1

A reprint of Paul Ford's "Processing Processing" in "The Best Software Writing I", a collection of essays on software. It's quite a varied collection, and definitely not all of it was to my liking. My favourites: Paul's article and Eric Lippert's "How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?". And of course, Chunky Bacon...
You can find the complete list of essays at Joel Spolsky's site. Most (if not all) of the articles are available online, but I prefer reading books.

Sprezzatura Sighting #2

"The Meaning of Tingo", a fun little book with interesting words from all over the world. Something to read in small doses, but very entertaining.

In another post, I provided a VB script that outputs the status of the guests running on a VMware Server. With a tiny modification that script can be used within Sysinternals' BGInfo, to display this information on the host's desktop:

In order to do this, change the line "WScript.Echo s" to "Echo s". In BGInfo, create a VBScript Custom field, by clicking "Custom...", "New...", selecting "VB Script file" and entering a field name and the path to your script.

VmCOM is a COM-based API that allows you to control VMware Server from your own software. As an example, the following script displays the status of each registered guest:

Option Explicit
Dim cp, server, vmCollection, vmName, vm, s

Const vmErr_VMBusy = &H80040215
Const vmExecutionState_On = 1
Const vmExecutionState_Off = 2
Const vmExecutionState_Suspended = 3
Const vmExecutionState_Stuck = 4

Set cp = CreateObject("VmCOM.VmConnectParams")
Set server = CreateObject("VmCOM.VmServerCtl")

server.Connect cp
Set vmCollection = server.RegisteredVmNames

For Each vmName in vmCollection
   Set vm = CreateObject("VmCOM.VmCtl")
   On error resume next
   vm.Connect cp, vmName
   If Err.Number = vmErr_VMBUSY Then
      s = Basename(vmName) & ":      BUSY"
   ElseIf Err.Number <> 0 Then
      s = Basename(vmName) & ":     ERROR"
   Else
      On Error Goto 0
      s = vm.Config("displayName") & ": " & State2Str(vm)
   End if
   WScript.Echo s
next


Function State2Str(ByVal vm)
  Select Case vm.ExecutionState
      Case vmExecutionState_On
         State2Str = "       ON"
      Case vmExecutionState_Off
         State2Str = "      OFF"
      Case vmExecutionState_Suspended
         State2Str = "SUSPENDED"
      Case vmExecutionState_Stuck
         State2Str = "    STUCK"
      Case else
         State2Str = "  UNKNOWN"
   End Select
End Function


Function Basename(ByVal path)
   Dim pos
   pos = InstrRev(path, "\")
   If pos > 0 Then
      Basename = Mid(path, pos + 1)
   Else
      Basename = path
   End If
End Function