gyrmination

Dr. Koh: “You sound like a starving chicken. You need to sound like you are cutting someone’s head off with a knife. [slash!] You’re DEAD! [slash!] You’re DEAD!”

Just wasted a good chunk of time on an issue I had using Grails – “deleted object would be re-saved by cascade”. Turns out that among the associations you need to remove to clear this error are the bi-directional associations created using belongsTo . I removed belongsTo from the domain object being removed from another object’s list and deleted, problem solved! Incidentally the reverse link wasn’t necessary anyway.

I can describe the emptiness of you

She appears in a saffron summer dress
eats grapes and green things
But I don’t see her
only the absence that is created
the white space serves to give the faintest impression of an outline
Fullness shrinks, and dissipates

I bring hope and possibility
with circles in the sand
She brings the anonymous tide
washing away all meaning there might be

Completely.
Uncomprimising.

Desire itself is left no scraps for sustenance.

I wrote you were different then
I could touch the sneakers
adore the furrowed brow and adolescent books
She wrote it was a selfish vision.

I am a moonlit cloud
my passage is silent
the tulips are closed
Inviting amber glow of the corner boutique
a sign hanging on the door:
“Will be back”
A trace of frost recedes as I watch it.

In my dreams I am tender
and she is accepting
Her hair is loose.
Her hands are warm.
Her eyes are soft.
Her words are simple.
Struggle to delay the collapse of harmony
a goodbye kiss on bare shoulder

I realize as much as you are emptiness in me
as well I am absent in your world.
Though I am there as you pass
it is just the glimmer of an idea
quickly abandoned.

I recently was asked by a friend to help transfer files from a defunct computer to his new laptop. It appeared at the outset this would be a trivial affair; however I soon ran into difficulties. The key issue was that the defunct computer was set up with the Japanese language edition of Windows XP, with the filesystem formatted using FAT32, while the new system was an English language version of Windows Vista.

I soon entered a world of character code hurt – unbeknownst to me at the time, the filesystems of international editions of Windows are essentially incompatible with each other! Apparently, the set of supported filesystem character codes is fixed in each localized Windows kernel – short of installing Windows in that language, you will be unable to read any filesystems created using its character code!

Fortunately, Ubuntu comes to the rescue! Albeit not without some confusion and a healthy dose of wasted time. Here I outline the steps I took to copy the Japanese-encoded FAT32 filesystem content to an English Vista NTFS drive. You might be able to skip some of the steps, but I include them all for completeness.

1. Connect the FAT32 drive to an Ubuntu box.
2. In a terminal, change to the superuser (we’ll need to be root for most steps): sudo su
3. Mount the drive using the Japanese character code: mount -o codepage=932,iocharset=utf8 -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/temp
4. Copy the drive contents to the local drive. (You might be able to skip this step by copying directly to the USB drive.) cp -r /mnt/temp ~/backup
5. Did I say you needed a USB drive handy? Well, how else were you planning to transfer the files? We need to have an NTFS partition on the drive. I did this using GParted, so that I could have a FAT32 partition alongside an NTFS partition. GParted should be pretty straightforward to use – the only thing to note is that creating the initial partition tables will delete any existing data on the drive. We’ll also need NTFS write support. Install the following packages: apt-get install gparted ntfs-3g ntfs-config ntfsprogs
6. Run ntfs-config . You can cancel out of the first dialog, but make sure “Enable write support for external device” is checked in the second dialog.
7. Install the Ubuntu Japanese language pack, if you haven’t already. In Interpid: System > Administration > Language Support, tick “Japanese” and hit “OK”.
8. Verify the locale was added: locale -a | grep ja_JP
9. Set the LANG and LANGUAGE environment variables: export LANG=\"ja_JP.utf8", then export LANGUAGE=\"ja_JP.utf8" .
10. Make sure the USB drive is not mounted. If it was automounted, for example on /media, unmount it: umount /media/disk . If the FAT32 drive is still mounted, you can unmount that too.
11. Mount the USB drive specifying a Japanese locale: mount -o locale=ja_JP.utf8 /dev/sdf2 /mnt/temp
12. Copy the files from the local drive to the USB drive: cp -r ~/backup /mnt/temp/
13. Unmount the USB drive and disconnect it from the Ubuntu box, reconnecting it to the Vista box.
14. In Vista, perform a simple file copy from the USB drive to the desired location.

I hope this helps any poor souls out there put in the same situation as I was, for Japanese or any other multibyte language!

It’s one of those days I’m not sure if it’s Fall or Spring. Did I sleep through the winter last night? Piercing rays interplay with the tattered cumulus cloak, the breath is full of damp snowmelt. I feel a buzzing latency. Something will happen.