Agronesia

The Indonesian language has this weird construction of phrases that seem like verb phrases but can actually be noun phrases. For example, the phrase “makan malam” (literally “to night-eat”) looks like a verb phrase, and it is indeed so in the example sentence “Kemarin saya makan malam.” (I ate dinner yesterday). However it can also mean the noun phrase “dinner”, such as in the sentence “Makan malamnya sangat sederhana.” (The dinner was very modest). Using the standard grammar to change a verb to noun, one expects it to be “makanan malam” (night food) which isn’t the case.

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After the announcement of Diablo 3, I got worked up to know more lore of the world of Diablo. Recently I finished reading “The Sin War: Birthright” which is written by Richard A. Knaak. Chronologically, it is the first among other novels.

It happens 3000 years before the events of Diablo I. The world of Sanctuary is actually created by angels and demons tired of the eternal war between the High Heavens and the Burning Hells. The first inhabitants of the world, called Nephalem, are actually “children” of angel and demon. They turned out to be more powerful than either of the parents, so the magical Worldstone was used to inhibit their power. The story in this book centers about the unleashing of this magical power inside Uldyssian ul-Diomed, first stimulated by a demon Lilith for her own purposes.

Some points of cultural interest:

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I just did some reading about subordinate clause because I need to write about it for my Indonesian Japanese language learning blog Yumeko. It seems that in English and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) we need relative pronouns such as who, which, and yang:

Nick gave a handful of potato chips to the dog who was sniffing around the picnic tables.

Nick memberi sejumlah keripik kentak ke anjing yang sedang mengendus-endus di sekitar meja-meja piknik.

On the other hand, the subordinate clause in Japanese has the same form as its independent clause:

It means that in Indonesian and English the underlined clause cannot stand on its own as a complete sentence while the one in Japanese can.

On the consistency in the grammatical structure of describing nouns, English isn’t consistent. Look at these three examples of how a simple adjective modifies a noun:

blue book (MODIFIER HEAD)

buku biru (H M)

青い本
aoi hon (M H)

We can see that when subordinate clause is used, the English language switches to use the H M structure.

The last interesting point is that the Indonesian subordinate clause above can directly function as a noun phrase without any modification:

Did I misanalyze?

“Wake up you.. wake up! We have to get out of here!”
- Imoen, Baldur’s Gate II

At long last, I have regained enough strength. Thanks for all those wishing for my my recovery

My recent sickness was probably from overtiredness, coupled with the currently very cold weather here. My schedule is actually to sleep at 10 PM every day, but most of the time I slept after 00:00. The lack of sleep piled increasingly more and at some point my mortal body just couldn’t bear it. Cold, vomiting, you name it…

A little tip for you if you get a cold. When things are in order, I always prefer to let the disease heal naturally. But when an emergency measure is required, Panadol seems to take care of the job. After you take one, it literally drains the consciousness left in you so you sleep and while you sleep you’ll sweat a lot as if having a nightmare. But it does seem to work wonder in getting rid of the cold faster.

So, well, I’ll try to get enough sleep from now on. Sleeping at 10 and waking up at 5 should give me a sufficient 7-hour rest (what’s yours?). Ah, and more exercise as my good old friend Tri said.

Anyway, my pal Wim posted his final paper a while back, and that only reminded me to do the proper final ritual for mine also, which is to unleash it on the net. It’s a web-based Japanese IME and I’ll try to prepare it the following days.

I got sick, so I wouldn’t be able to update this blog for probably several days. Let’s just hope things will get sorted out soon.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

I just got a stomach problem some days ago, and that made me think about the types of stomach problems that exist, and ones that could possibly exist! The principle that I will use here is the inherent symmetry in the universe. On the large scale, we have day and night, male and female (OK, OK, female and male!). Going deep down we have G with its pair C, and A which loves T (sometimes U comes to wreck their relationship though). We even have the electron and positron pair! Whew…

OK, first we have nausea which causes vomiting:

See, the food goes out from the stomach through your mouth. Do we have its counterpart? Of course, that eating!

(If you can see where where this conversation is heading and doesn’t feel comfortable, please do not continue)

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When you switch to a Linux distribution, you might be a little frustrated by how hard it is to get a virus running on your system. However, don’t worry because once you familiarize yourself with building a program from the source, it’s actually not difficult.

Get the URL to download the virus source code (Google it!), and then type these commands:

wget http://malware.agronesia.net/virus/rontok.tar.gz
tar xzvf rontok.tar.gz
cd rontok
./configure
make
make infect

Some distributions like Ubuntu makes it easy by using a package manager. Go see their documentation!

(idea from the comments at Slashdot)

I found this card game Xeco with ecosystem as its background topic, so you’ll have real animals instead of made up monsters. If you know Yu-Gi-Oh!, then yeah, the basic idea is to fight with our card, but the gameplay is different.

Somehow they have an Indonesian mission (a pack of cards?):

Go Indonesia!

(but why in the earth do they put ™ to the right of the word “Indonesia”? It’s my country’s name dammit!)

But we have to buy it, either in a USA real shop or online. It would be great if they provide the files for us to print ourselves :P.

I missed the news a few days, but here it is… The sequel for one of the most lovable RPG game universe…

Diablo 3 (they even have gameplay videos!!!)

I remembered downloading the beta version of Diablo 2 and we can only play the barbarian in it. I’m sure Blizzard will make a Diablo 3 beta also :). Anyway, many people don’t like the cartoonish art direction. Those people conjured a more dark and gothic modified screenshots, and I must say that I very much prefer the dark ones (samples: 1, 2, 3).

Aaah, Diablo 2 was so ADDICTIVE, especially if played together with the /players 8 switch :)… (What I liked most is Sorceress using ice :))

We did it :).

In total 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 on the designated download day and it has now hold the world record for the most software downloaded in a day :).

But frankly I kinda hate FF3, it hangs when it loads Java… \(O.o)/

Anyway, you can see the download statistics presented in a Flash map here.

It’s interesting, the tiny country Singapore got 129,957 downloads, almost rivaling this giant country of nothing Indonesia which only gets 143,283. Japan did more than 1.3 million downloads.

The Indonesian ISP business have lots of room to grow assuming all areas will reach the internet usage density of Singapore, Japan, and the likes… Let’s not just become a nation of farmers, but a nation of Linux-using internet-savvy farmers!