More than 2,500 years ago, Thales, one of the first Greek philosopher-scientists, predicted an solar eclipse.
Without the Internet, with no computers, not even decent pen and paper for a scratch pad he managed to use science to predict what, till then, was deemed to be the work of a god.
The eclipse duly took place as he predicted - probably on the 28th of May 585 BC
Here are some links about Thales and his eclipse.
Well, another reason I'm writing this blog is my studies of Greek. I want to learn Ancient Greek because it interests me and I think as as long as I'm studying the Classics, I may as well be able to read the language. Unfortunately, I seem to have some mental blocks...
So, As I review the stuff I should already know, I'll post it here.
I'll start with the Greek Alphabet.
| Upper Case | Lower case | Letter Name | English equivalent |
| Α | α | Alpha | a |
| Β | β | Beta | b |
| Γ | γ | Gamma | g |
| Δ | δ | Delta | d |
| Ε | ε | Epsilon | e |
| Ζ | ζ | Zeta | z |
| Η | η | Eta | e |
| Θ | θ | Theta | th |
| Ι | ι | Iota | i |
| Κ | κ | Kappa | k |
| Λ | λ | Lambda | l |
| Μ | μ | Mu | m |
| Ν | ν | Nu | n |
| Ξ | ξ | Xi | x / ks |
| Ο | ο | Omicron | o |
| Π | π | Pi | p |
| Ρ | ρ | Rho | r |
| Σ | σ or ς | Sigma | s |
| Τ | τ | Taf | t |
| Υ | υ | Upsilon | u / y |
| Φ | φ | Phi | ph |
| Χ | χ | Chi | ch |
| Ψ | ψ | Psi | ps |
| Ω | ω | Omega | o |
Note : Sigma is written σ in the middle of a word and ς at the end.
SOS would be σος
Obviously, Wikipedia has a big page about this.
It there is some problem and the Greek letters don't appear properly, please send me a note...
PULSE, for those who don't know, was a giant Tivoli conference which took place last week in Orlando, Florida.
Lets start with the crunch : The presentations.
Here's the PULSE Blog.
Here's a new IBM initiative : A Web 2.0 Tivoli Community
The new community space looks interesting. It's still very much a work in progress, but go there and look around.
Yesterday I installed a small ITM PoC (Proof of Concept) at a customer.
I arrived at their office at about 8:45... and waited at the entrance till 9:30 before the guy I was supposed to meet was located. I should have taken this as an omen.
How long should it take to copy a 4 Giga DVD to the customer's server? About 20-25 minutes I guess.
40 minutes after the copying started, I got a corruption-error on the DVD.
Signing dramatically, I sat down to burn a new DVD as the in-house DBAs started installing the database I had requested to be installed the day before. They couldn't even start the installation because the drive was hardened. Aha! Could that explain my copying misery?
They started a conference call with the system guys to remove the hardening.
It was now about 11:30.
I gave the customer my (newly burned) DVD told him to copy it to the server, unzip it and call me.
I fully expected to wait till next week for that call...
However...
At 13:30 I get a call - the DB is installed and the files have been copied.
I go back and what do you know?
Everything went swimmingly from there on...
By 15:30 I have installed the Tivoli Monitoring server and 5 agents are being monitored.
The biggest problem I had with the installation was the lack of an Adobe Acrobat reader so I could show the customer the documentation.
Just goes to show, what starts out as a bad day just might turn out ok :)
Robert
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