Recent blog entries for mdillon

cameron : any piercing that is being done with any sort of gun has already gone wrong. find a professional piercer that uses hollow surgical needles and you'll not only avoid some pain, but you may just heal correctly.

raph, you're the man. there's nothing i love more than HREF's with trailing slashes where needed to prevent wasted 301 errors (that may be hyperbole).

caolan : i studied linguistics for a few years, and as far as i know, there are no languages that are conventionally written from bottom to top.

in addition to the left-right, right-left, and top-bottom writing conventions that you mention, the only other conventional style that i'm familiar with is called boustrophedon (Greek for "turning like oxen in plowing"), which is writing that reverses direction each line.

after an initial period of being right-left about 2500 years ago, Greek was typically written in the boustrophedon style for a while before finally settling on left-right around 500 BCE. inscriptions in this style have also been found in Semitic languages, Etruscan, Latin, Ethiopian (Ge'ez), and Runic (Futhark), among others. apparently, it was a rather popular and widely failed experiment.

now that i think about it, even English is conventionally written bottom to top sometimes. the situation i'm thinking of in particular is traffic instructions in the road bed, where from above, the text is written from bottom to top (at least everywhere i've every travelled, which is limited), while the words appear sequentially to a moving commuter. there are doubtless other situations where bottom to to writing is the norm.

key: advogato

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M/ZH>R,J5-^Z*2%V3`6&9>1=D84>,CN?P8(@WG0S?ZZ.F:Y?^$'X8%>E6HKD&
MNL4#%&@\U8BIC,DXE4O_@"[X0=QD5=#>&8)=41O52CAA(KIYM).WV9L8_83&
MT4(Y6,,87[O32X$N[]D@=&H8IX)!"?=3;?P6]$]`W&)TY?SG6C^JZKM"?!\+
5'7I23<&[JU9+EG!%ML@_UZB:/348
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end

i'm glad to see there are other Latinists on advogato. i'm a little rusty, but perhaps i'll get up the nerve one of these days and post a diary entry in latin.

the updated latin lexicon mentioned by schön is:

Egger, Carolus. Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis. Civitas Vaticana: Libraria Editoria Vaticana. ISBN 88-209-2239-8.

it is an Italian -> Neolatin lexicon. perhaps not surprisingly, i can't seem to find anyone selling it online. it may be out of print, although i doubt that since Vol I was published in 1992, and Vol II in 1997.

hmm... the UC Berkeley library seems to have both volumes, so perhaps i'll have my brother check it out for me to peruse.

began work on fixing the drastically broken LineGuides plugin for jEdit.

a number of releases back, jEdit gained the ability to have a split view of a buffer in a single window. unfortunately, the column guides drawn by the LineGuides plugin only work with the first text area in the view, so for months, the plugin has only been marginally useful for some people and breaks badly when the view is split and unsplit.

i plan to fix this problem and release a new version with a couple other goodies within the next few days.

attended performance of Requiem at UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall last night. i would definitely recommend that anyone near berkeley with any interest do their best to attend the second show tonight. be aware, though, that tickets sold out fast, so get there early (i think the show starts at eight).

praises be unto Iain, who doth so oft cause me much mirth.

praises also unto dria's photo gallery, which i found quite pleasing aesthetically.

: \

An individual destroys himself and his works as a way of getting back at the society that doesn't understand him and hasn't afforded him a place.

hmm... at least i'm no longer a dimwit...