RCSI GEP 2013 Facebook group. 18th of April, 2009 POST·MERIDIEM 07:42

I have a reasonable amount of Gооgle™juice here, so for those who are looking into it, this is the Facebook group for those who got a place at the RCSI Graduate Entry programme, starting 2009, graduating 2013:

http://​www.​facebook.​com/​group.​php?gid=71193943121

How it works with the places is that the North Americans will start getting offers presently, and those of us from the EU will begin getting them at the start of August. So I don’t think there are are any objections to the latter joining the group for the moment; it is super-useful for orienting yourself, sign up if this is relevant to you.

Search bug in Google Groups … Komm, süßer Tod … Goodbye Lenin! … Closures in C 8th of January, 2009 POST·MERIDIEM 01:34

Reasonably often, I want to search for a given string of text within Google™ Groups. This has sub-optimal behaviour at the moment, in that if the result you’re interested in is deep within a thread—see the first result here, for example—clicking on that result will take you to the first page of the thread, with no indication of how to get to the actual message you’re interested in without reading through the entire thread. Reading through the entire thread is not necessarily very attractive when there are four hundred messages, and when the search engine is supposed to do the searching for you.

I’ve found a work-around, though. Select the »Weitere Optionen« link (“More Options” in English) of given message in the group you’re interested in, then »Einzelne Nachricht« (“Individual message”) and copy the link. This will give you text looking something like http://​groups.​google.​com/​group/​sci.​lang/​msg/​c642b948e4cba605.​ Now go back to the search results page, and look at the address listed under the result you’re interested in—it’ll look something like http://​groups.​google.​com/​g/​df57fef5/​t/​89718702f2175a61/​d/​f626ed6270f2b9d5​ Take the text after the final slash, and use this in the “Individual message” link instead. So, in this example, the final address is http://​groups.​google.​com/​group/​sci.​lang/​msg/​f626ed6270f2b9d5​ And all’s right in the world. Well, in my corner of it. Apparently not in the corner of it that the Google™ Groups team inhabit.

Komm, süßer Tod, film, 2000. Director: Wolfgang Murnberger. A going-away present from Jóska, who spent eight years in Vienna before moving to Berlin, this is Austrian, and very clear about that. Its DVD case lists it as a comedy, first and foremost, but I wouldn’t list it as one myself, it’s a murder mystery first (in the same way that Snatch is a gangster film first and foremost). It is funny with it, though, the banter of the characters and the occasional absurdities of the plot do ensure that.

Goodbye Lenin! [2002], film. If you got back three months ago from three agreeable years in Berlin, speak German, have hung out with people from one-time Communist countries a huge amount, have listened to the Yann Tiersen soundtrack regularly for three years, have just drunk two bottles of wine, and have never seen this film before, this will bring you to tears. That is possibly not a very general recommendation, but, well, yes, this is a good film, and I should have watched it years ago. You should have too.

I wrote this ages ago, and I really should have posted it then. Anyway; this is how one writes a closure in C, non-portably (it works on the non-OS X machines I’ve tried; OS X seems to relocate file-static variables(!)): http://​paste.​lisp.​org/​display/​52083.​ It’s ugly and useless, but not impossible, despite what Paul Graham says, while giving as a counterexample some Lisp that fails to work as Emacs Lisp. (You would need a lexical-let and a (require 'cl) (unless you were sticking to XEmacs).)

PuTTY and Unicode non-locale keyboard input. 2nd of December, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 11:18

PuTTY is a fine piece of software, a terminal emulator that is very comfortable for Unix users, written by an expert in the Win32 API with, on Windows, the speed and size advantages implicit in that. It has excellent support for working around the odd server bugs that many people come across, for UTF-8 output (with any number of other encodings), and for pasting UTF-8 text, for tunnelling, and a huge range of things.

Something that annoyed me about it earlier in the year was that it did contextual shaping for Arabic characters, but not for Persian and Urdu characters, so when one typed a Persian په or a گاف, the letters that the Arabs used would be shaped correctly, but the Persian-specific ones wouldn’t be. I sent them a patch for this, and they applied it. I don’t know if recent betas include this change; I use a local build myself, which also includes the other change I’m about to describe, and which I’m not going to point you towards, I don’t want the responsibility of making sure that no-one trojans it for you.

Another change that I was interested was in involves keyboard input on Win32. I use a modified keyboard layout that makes many more characters available to me than the normal layout does, and this works well with most apps. Not with PuTTY, though; keyboard input is effectively limited to characters that can be saved in the current language code page, the characters that Windows thinks necessary to write the language you use, more or less. I’ve written a patch to address this, and sent it to the PuTTY people, but I haven’t got a response, so I’m posting it here, in case anyone with the same problem Google™s it. (Let’s hope that the keywords I’m using are good!)

Changelog entry (which the PuTTY people don’t use, but I like the practice):

2008-11-23  Aidan Kehoe  <kehoea@parhasard.net>
 
        * ldiscucs.c (luni_send): 
        Check for negative length and treat that specially, as in
        ldisc_send(). 
        * windows/window.c (WndProc): 
        Pass TranslateKey a wchar_t buffer, treat the text it returns as
        Unicode. 
        * windows/window.c (TranslateKey): 
        Accept a wchar_t* output buffer, not unsigned char*.
        Accept output_count, giving the length of the output buffer.
        Explicitly use swprintf and wide strings when manipulating this
        buffer. Call ToUnicodeEx instead of ToAsciiEx on Windows NT 4 and
        above, avoiding the problem that characters available in the
        keyboard layout but not in the keyboard’s associated locale get
        dropped.
 

The patch is available here, or in compressed form here.

Irish DNA database … Хаджи-Мурат … Diapedesis, Extravasation 23rd of November, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 09:45

We’re lucky enough to have Orna Tighe as one of our molecular medicine lecturers, and in the course of a lecture on methods of DNA and RNA analysis, she mentioned that the Republic of Ireland has a database of the DNA of everyone born in the country since 1970, stored at Temple Street Children’s Hospital. This came about because of two reasonable and not-very-shocking developments:

• Guthrie cards have been collected for decades; they’re used to screen for phenylketonuria (an inability to metabolise a common and important amino acid, easily treated with dietary changes, but leading to mental retardation if left untreated) among many other diseases. They are stored indefinitely, and have been used constructively to work out the prevalence of genetic diseases in Ireland, something important for clinical practice.
• PCR is a microbiological technique that uses the machinery of the cell’s DNA replication to generate many, many copies of an area of DNA molecule that the researchers are interested in. This makes it practical to examine in detail the DNA from a sample that may be just a few intact cells all these decades later; without it the examination of the few cells preserved would destroy them, not allowing the detail necessary for anything definitive.

Because Australia is the most competent of the post-death-of-the-British-Empire states, this has come up in discussion (and in use) there, but it doesn’t look like they’ve actually resolved it. I would be shocked to my core if the Republic has digitised the Guthrie cards or otherwise made them workable in the direction of a police state, but the data are there, it would be constructive to work out exactly what we’re going to do with them.

Chadschi Murat, Leo Tolstoy, autorisierte Übertragung von August Scholz. This is a German translation of one of Tolstoy’s last novels, about a Chechen rebel leader (and eventual supporter of the Russians) in the mid-nineteenth century. I bought it because I had seen it recommended for its action and the plot, but I was most impressed (probably in the matter of someone who has never read War and Peace!) by Tolstoy’s interpretation of the motivation and thoughts of the protagonists. It can’t really give much insight into Chechnya today—as far as I can tell, the Chechens today are like the Basques today, totally comfortable in the culture of the wider nation, but believing themselves different despite that, whereas the Chechens of the 1850s were like the Bantu at the same point or the Highland Scots in the 1650s; culturally very different in practice, very ill-at-ease with the wider society they were coming into contact with. I liked it; I’m not sure I’d recommend it to many people, it would depend on their own interests; reading the beautiful Fraktur it was printed in (first time I’ve read a book in Fraktur) was enjoyable, though.

Words of the day: Two today, and no explanation from me, just the two OED2 definitions:

diapedesis (ˌdaɪəpːˈdiːsɪs). Path.
[mod.L., a. Gr. διαπήδησις, f. διαπηδά–ειν to ooze through, f. δια– through + πηδά–ειν to leap, throb. In mod.F. diapédèse (Paré 16th c.).]
The oozing of blood through the unruptured walls of the blood-vessels.
1625 Hart Anat. Ur. ii. iv. 68 Such an excretion of bloud..is..called Diapedesis: that is, as much as a streining through.
1634 T. Johnson Parey’s Chirurg. ix. i. (1678) 216 That solution of Continuity..which is generated by sweating out and transcolation, [is termed] Diapedesis.
1866 A. Flint Princ. Med. (1880) 27 When the red blood corpuscles are pressed through the unruptured vascular wall, it is denominated hemorrhage by diapedesis.
1885 Lancet 26 Sept. 589 It is possible..that the mercury gains access to the circulation by a sort of diapedesis.
So
diape’detic a., pertaining to or of the nature of diapedesis.
In mod. Dicts.

extravasation (ɛkˌstrævəˈseɪʃən). [f. extravasate v.: see -ation. Cf. F. extravasation.]
1. Path. The escape of an organic fluid (e.g. blood, sap) from its proper vessels into the surrounding tissues; an instance of this.
1676 Wiseman Surgery 2 The Plenitude of Vessels..causeth an Extravasation of bloud.
1796 Morse Amer. Geog. I. 338 A stagnation and extravasation of the juices of the stalk.
1836 Todd Cycl. Anat. I. 400/1 The extravasation of urine.
1877 Roberts Handbk. Med. I. 28 Points of redness..due to minute extravasations of blood.
fig.
1685 Burnet Lett. (1687) 143 Such an extravasation..of silver, occasions a great deadness in Trade.
1691 Beverley Mem. Kingd. Christ 9 God having suffer’d..so dangerous an Extravasation of the French Power.
b. A mass or spot of extravasated blood.
1836 Todd Cycl. Anat. I. 52/2 On the substance of the extravasation there were a..number of spots of red blood.
1878 A. Hamilton Nerv. Dis. 19 The crura and pons are to be examined carefully for softening extravasations.
2. Geol. Effusion (of molten rock) from a subterranean reservoir; also, a deposit so formed.
1842 G. P. Scrope Volcanos 9 To permit an extravasation of some of the heated and liquefied and gaseous matters.
1864 C. P. Smyth Our Inheritance ii. viii. (1880) 144 Amongst the veins and extravasations of granite and basalt.

Checking in. 17th of September, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 01:00

A few things:

• My new phone number is 085 1343873; if you’re in Dublin, call and we’ll hang out.
• I’m really enjoying this course so far, I’m very glad I chose it.
• I received »Nackt«, a selection of readings from David Sedaris, with much of it repeated in German, as a going-away present at my workplace. It is fine, fine writing, and hilarious. Look it up!

Word of the day: apoptosis, programmed, expected cell death, in contrast with necrosis, cell death as a consequence of injury.