Yet Another Linux Blog

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation — think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough –
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

I wrote earlier about a trick to improve image quality for DVD playback with mplayer. The next thing I wanted to work on was to prevent any skipping of the video due to scratches on the disks. The idea is to copy the DVD to the hard disk first, then play it from there. Here’s the naive way:

dd if=/dev/hdc of=/tmp/dvd.iso
mount -t iso9660 -o loop /tmp/dvd.iso /mnt/iso
vlc dvd:/mnt/iso
or
mplayer dvd:// -vop lavcdeint -dvd-device /mnt/iso/


The “-dvd-device” option is described in the mplayer man page, with a note that says “Note that using -dumpstream is usually a better way to copy DVD titles in the first place (see the examples).” and the example says: “mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile title1.vob” I’m not sure why this way is any better or worse. I also tried the vobcopy program as described on this helpful Gentoo wiki page: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Backup_a_DVD and in all three cases you can watch the movie, e.g.
vlc dvd:/tmp/title1.vob
vlc dvd:/tmp/TITLE (from vobsub)
vlc dvd:/tmp/dvd.iso
With the mplayer dump command, you only get the title, not the whole dvd, which saves a lot of space.

I keep running into that error message on my Mac at work!

Turns out the default max number of processes is not friendly to those of us that like to have LOTS of terminal windows open. Luckily, another sysadmin has already written up a nice post on where to change the limit: echo “limit maxproc 256 512″ >> /etc/launchd.conf

I’ve dealt with the Infrant ReadyNAS products in the past, and there seemed to be no real competition. The ReadyNAS NV+ is a nice (relatively) quiet, low-power, (relatively) easy to use appliance with 4 SATA disks.

Today I stumbled across Synology and their Cube Station CS-406[e]. It’s nice to finally see someone else making the same type of devices. However, according to the Newegg reviews, the ReadyNAS is a slightly better unit. It has a nicer and sturdier case design, a larger fan and slightly faster performance (probably means it has a faster CPU). And the ReadyNAS has come down in price a bit since I last looked at it, too.

Of course, there’s always the DIY alternatives like FreeNAS or just plain Linux, but you can’t deny the advantages of a smaller, low-power, pre-built appliance. The DIY solution would look like this: parts list.

If you’re trying to install 64-bit Ubuntu on an Asus P5B of some kind, use the alternate install CD and not the regular one. Here’s a helpful thread: 4GB RAM on Asus P5B

I just wanted to put a link to a great visual tutorial for GNU Screen: http://blogamundo.net/code/screen/ Although the tutorial barely scratches the tip of the iceberg when it comes to screen features, it’s a great start. The kuro5hin article linked from there goes slightly more in-depth. Of course, the man page is the place to go for more info, or you can read the manual via info.