Digenis.org

When will Yahoo acquire Technorati? Michael Arrington explains why the tag-based weblog search engine may be the next on Yahoo’s shopping list.

If you haven’t seen Art Lebedev Studio’s Optimus keyboard, do yourself a favor and go take a look. It’s freaking amazing.

Each key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at any particular moment. When you hit CapsLock, the display will show all uppercase letters, and you can easily toggle between languages and keyboard layouts. Add to that the capability of associating keys with certain controls for Photoshop or video games, and you’ve got one mighty powerful keyboard.

In high school, when I was most seriously studying Spanish, I always had a cheat sheet next to my keyboard. It told me where all the letters with diacritics were. When I started studying Russian and using it on the computer, I had to learn to type all over again. And those little stickers didn’t help all too much; with the amount that I use my laptop both the Latin and Cyrillic letters were worn off in no time flat (it left me with something like this, which was annoying as heck)…

You can bet I’ll be buying one of these when it hits the markets in 2006.

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, a 1999 editorial from the late Douglas Adams:

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’

Via Brownpau

I used to be the kind of minimalist guy that preferred barebones software. The bells and whistles weren’t that necessary and a shiny graphical interface was even less important than that. For me, a simple text editor was much better than whatever Macromedia Dreamweaver had to offer. The same went for music players. I’ve tried the whole lot and pretty much came to hate them all.

Then along came iTunes. By the time Apple released it to Windows, there was already a decent amount of buzz generated. I was a bit skeptical at first, but decided to give it a whirl since it would help me get some of the music I couldn’t find here in Russia. At first I was just using it to purchase music.

In the last year, though, it’s really grown on me. I’ve got to hand it to the folks at Apple, unlike my experience with WinAmp, the great new features in each update of iTunes have impressed me.

The latest version is no exception. When I bought the latest Dave Matthews Band CD from their music store, it came with a making-of video and a ‘digital booklet’. This was just one more reason to buy this particular album on the net. It turns out that the digital booklet is just the liner notes in PDF format. Starting with version 4.8 it seems that you can add PDFs to your music library. I have a bunch of mp3s of lectures and sermons with accompanying PDF notes/outlines, so this turned out to be a cool little feature for me.

There’s been a great deal of speculation as to what the future holds for iTunes and its video features. Will they sell music videos or even full-length films any time soon? An insider at Slashdot says, “No”. . .

Also, it was just announced this week that the forthcoming version of iTunes will support Podcasting. It’s not clear exactly how this will be done, but it sounds pretty spiffy.

What are your thoughts about Apple iTunes?

Earlier this week I thought of another possible theory behind the Russian naming of the @ symbol (earlier discussion can be found here). Until this point, the theories all focused on the connections with dogs. This is only logical, of course, because ??????/??????? means dog in Russian. However, ??????? can also mean trigger and, since several of the theories thus far rely on the symbol’s resemblence to a curly canine tail, it doesn’t hurt to mention that the symbol also sort of looks like the trigger of a gun.

Perhaps it was given the name because of its trigger-like resemblence, but as e-mail and the internet’s popularity grew people started to assume that the origin was related to dogs.

Bogus? Any thoughts? If so, post them at the original entry.

In the comments to my last post on Russian computer jargon, Connard asked why the @ symbol is usually refered to in Russian as собака (dog). I’ve always heard that it’s because the symbol looks like a curly canine tail, but curoisity got the best of me and I decided to see if the internet could give me any other answers.

Interestingly enough, even though most Russians call it собака these days, it wasn’t always known by that name. According to the Знатоки на Волге (scroll down to point #6), before the internet was around it was known as а коммерческое (commercial a) in literature, блямба (I hope a native Russian speaker can clear up this term, because neither Katzner nor Lingvo offer any insight) in the academic sphere, and as лягушка (frog) among engineers. Even in the early days of the internet this symbol was known by a different name in Russia; for a while it was called ухо (ear) and обезьянка (monkey, ape).

I’m not sure when it switched over to собака, but the internet offers plenty of theories on the origin of the new appellation:

• In the early days of computer games - before all the amazing, lifelike graphics of games like Doom and HalfLife - there was a little single-player dungeon game called NetHack. In the first version of the game, released in 1987, the graphics were quite simplistic and heroes in the game were represented by keyboard characters. A dog was represented by the @ symbol.
• There’s another (crazy) theory which claims the ’sobaka’ name comes from the fact that the English word ‘at’ sounds like the Tartar word for dog, and that a Russian, having realized this, decided to call the @ symbol ’sobaka’. This seems pretty far-fetched to me. As a matter of fact, a little online detective work shows that the Tartar word for dog is actually pronounced slightly different (more like [ejt]). Furthermore, the Tartar word for horse is pronounced [at], so if this theory’s line of thinking were true, why wouldn’t the symbol be called лошадь?
• This next one also seems an incredible stretch to me, but it was suggested at the Lingvo forum that in looking at the symbol @, two cyrillic letters can be seen: c and a, the first and last letters in sobaka/sobachka.

I suppose I buy the dog-tail explanation, if any. The animal association with @ seems to be present in many languages:

Afrikaans: aapstert (monkey-tail)
Bulgarian: Maimunka (monkey)

Cantonese: Gui (turtle)
Czech: zavináč (pickled herring)
Danish: snabel-a (elephant’s trunk) and grisehale (pig’s tail)
Dutch: apestaartje (little ape-tail) or slingeraap (swinging monkey)
Esperanto: heliko (snail)
Finnish: kissanhäntä (cat’s tail)
French: escargot (snail), though the word arobase is more commonly used

German: Affenschwanz (ape-tail) or Klammeraffe (spidermonkey)
Hebrew: shablul (snail)
Hungarian: kukac (worm, maggot)
Italian: chiocciola (snail)
Korean: dalphaengi (snail)
Mandarin: xiao lao-shu (small mouse)
Norwegian: grisehale (pig’s tail)
Polish: malpa (monkey), kotek(little cat) or ucho s’wini (pig’s ear)

Swedish: snabel-a (literally, a with an elephant trunk)
Thai: ai tua yiukyiu (worm)

Izvestiya Science asked its readers about @ and published a Freudian response it recieved, in which the author refers to the Cantonese word’s (gui, turtle) phallic nature, and tied it in with the possible (but still not as strong) vulgarity that собака can convey. It strays from the etymological perspective, but is still an interesting read.

If you want to read more about the @ sign, check out the following links:

Webopedia: The History of the @ Sign.
World Wide Words:
Where It’s At.

UPDATE (April 8, 2005): I’ve thought of another possible theory for the origin of the @ sign being called sobaka. Perphaps it’s a stretch, but if we’re talking about what the sign resembles, then couldn’t it just as easily have come from the Russian word for trigger (собачка)?

Not so long ago I wrote about the English internet acronym IMHO (in my humble opinion) sneaking into Russian computer jargon. Of course, in any field connected with technology it’s not at all surprising that we would see borrowings and calques from English. What was interesting is how the acronymn took a slightly different meaning from the English original and even developed a fully-declinable noun variant.

A few things in the last two weeks have brought Russian techno- jargon back to my mind, the first of which was an amusing limmerick posted over at LanguageHat (but which apparently came to him via Avva, and before that from Akuaku):

???????, ??? ? ??? ?? ?????
?????????? ????????? ???????.
??? ???????, ???????!
????, ?????, ???????!
???? ????? ? ????? ???????.

Noetica, a frequent commenter at LH offered the following English translation (also from LH’s post):

They made in the Urals, it’s said,
A PC that’s wooden, instead.
With no nails, just an axe,
And with cheap hardware hacks -
Like the mouse, which they caught in the shed.

She captured the idea well and the limmerick maintains its rhyme.

Anyway, what most interests me here is the use of ???? in reference to the computer’s hard drive. The word ???? usually means ’screw’, but, as LanguageHat points out, apparently the slang meaning came from the Winchester hard drive technology developed by IBM in 1973. Very interesting.

Also this week, in a conversation with my friend Andrei about connecting mobiles to PC’s to transfer files, I learned that Russians also use the word ????? (firewood) as slang for drivers. Then I noticed that Igor, on his LiveJournal, used ???? (soap) to refer to an e-mail he recieved. These two obviously come from the phonetic similarity between the pronunciation of the English and Russian words. I can’t think any more of this type of techno-slang off the top of my head. Anyone else know of some?

In a different category of internet word borrowing is the word ????????, which I overheard a few times last year at Moscow International University in reference to web browsers. Basically, it’s a calque from the verb ???????, which means ‘to roam, wander, or ramble’. Most people just say ??????? though, a transliteration of the English word.

If you want to learn some more Russian computer jargon, you can head over to the ????-????????? ???????? ???????.

As you can see, I’ve decided to integrate the Quicklinks feature (previously found in the sidebar) into the main content section of my blog. There are several reasons for this. First, it was causing some problems with the search engines. When the quicklinks were in the sidebar they were generated on every page of my site; the search engines would archive these pages, but since these links change on a regular basis people would be led to a random page where that content was no longer available. From my referrer stats I can see this happened often. Also, posting the links here gives me more space to elaborate on something I find, but don’t feel like writing a full-fledged entry on. You can also comment on these links now, if you feel so inclined. Plus, all the cool kids have done it.

I used Matt’s Asides technique to accomplish this.