languor.us

According to a handy Sanskrit dictionary from the library, the female equivalent of a guru (गुरु) is a gurvi (गुर्वी). This is confirmed to an extent in a couple of places. It is also interesting to note that guru literally means grave or weighty and is cognate with the English word grave.

KTorrent on the LTS release of Kubuntu—Precise Pangolin aka 12.04—is perfectly fine except for the fact that it comes only with version 4.1. Unfortunately, this package is missing a few features that I was looking for, especially the option to add magnet links via its web interface.

Upgrading from 4.1 to 4.3 (the latest version at the time of writing) is pretty straightforward if one is happy to accept PPA sources.

In Linux, replacing all instances of a string with another string is easy thanks to sed. A simple example is as follows:

To replace the string foo with the string bar in all .txt files:

sed 's#foo#bar#g' *.txt

This will replace the strings. However, it won't actually save the changes and will instead output the modified text to the screen. To retain the changes or, in other words, to perform the replacements in place within the file, use the -i switch:

While trying to edit a menu on a Drupal site, I found that none of my changes were being saved. Looking at the logs led me to the following error message:

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 144 Table 'cache_menu' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed: DELETE FROM {cache_menu};

Simply restarting MySQL did not fix things and it looked like I had to get my hands a li'l dirty.

I upgraded the Mollom module on this site from the 7.1.x version to the newer branch of 7.2.x and ran into a White Screen of Death (WSOD). Checking the logs pointed me to the Mollom error:

Class 'MollomDrupal' not found

It's tough to fix this as you might not be able to even log into the site to get to the admin page. Therefore, you will need to disable the module from the database.

Once you are able to log in, you should clear all caches from admin/config/development/performance.

Somebody asked me earlier today why a penis is also called a cock. I assumed that it had something to do with the rooster (the male chicken) being called a cock. While this is true, there's a little bit more to tell. Here's a brief investigation into the matter.

According to Etymonline:

Slang sense of "penis" is attested since 1610s (but cf. pillicock "penis," from c.1300);

Attempting to update flashplugin on Ubuntu Precise resulted in an error. Removing the package and reinstalling it resulted in the following:

I've long heard Brits scoffing at the use of the word buffalo for the the American Buffalo when it is actually a species of Bison. Here's a brief investigation into the matter.

Firstly, the entry from the American Heritage Dictionary has a remarkably informative history of the word, buffalo:

I was trying to describe the lyrics of a song today and stumbled when I reached a section with a bunch of "la la la" bits. I suppose I could have well just termed them as la-la-la bits, but seeing as to how I apparently have all the time in the world (not my words), I decided to see if there was something a bit more definitive that I could use. A wittle googling later, I chanced upon the answer.

After a recent server migration, I found that my MySQL instance was not starting up (on Debian Squeeze). A look in the logs revealed that MySQL was having issues with corrupt InnoDB tables and therefore refusing to start. A number of forums informed me to do the following.