Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 10, 2016 23:54 UTC (Thu) by lkraav (subscriber, #76113)
Parent article: Making WiFi fast

You guys are all missing the most important question: why does Dave have an Estonian word Täht ("star") for his last name?

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Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 11, 2016 1:13 UTC (Fri) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link] (7 responses)

Heh. I have varied explanations for my last name.

1) My family's spaceship crashed in estonia in the late 1880s. Since the tradition there was serfs' last names were their job (e.g. "Joe Plumber"), thus, we named ourselves after a "star or planet", and have been trying to get off earth ever since.

My hobby is asteroid exploration, as it happens.

2) Ever type in just "Taht" into nearly any word processor, and watch it respell it to "That"? Yep, well over 30% of the documents I have to sign have screwed up my name, and I've watched people really struggle to get past the autocorrect to get it right. I filed bugs with every spell checker maker (in the 80s and 90s) with an algorithm to fix this, none deployed it (Anything without a period in front of it and a capital Taht, don't respell). The bastards!

Thus the umlaut.

3) It's a good test of i18n capability and interop with various protocols and tools.

4) I used to be a death metal fan.

I am glad I could clear this mystery up. Back to WiFi!

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 11, 2016 6:55 UTC (Fri) by lkraav (subscriber, #76113) [Link] (1 responses)

ACKACKACKA

(because min. 10 char ACK needed here)

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 11, 2016 16:44 UTC (Fri) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link]

Of possible interest is the pathological piece I wrote while wrestling with who I am today. This epiphany is why I'm now "dave", and not "mike" taht - and it's where Ham the analogy came from: http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003_06_08_the-edge_archive....

I've cultivated out of the box thinking ever since, in myself, and everyone.

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 17, 2016 10:06 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> I filed bugs with every spell checker maker (in the 80s and 90s) with an algorithm to fix this, none deployed it (Anything without a period in front of it and a capital Taht, don't respell). The bastards!

WordPerfect had an incredibly simple fix for this, in response to all sorts of problems.

1) Let the user dictionary correct a word to itself, eg "MSc == MSc".

2) The user dictionary is the first one consulted.

3) As soon as any dictionary or rule fired, terminate all further checking.

Fixes ANY and ALL spellcheck problems :-) (Oh, and this was back in WP5.1 for DOS, if not earlier.)

Cheers,
Wol

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 17, 2016 21:19 UTC (Thu) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link] (3 responses)

In the vast majority of cases you want the spellchecker to automagically correct taht to that.

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 17, 2016 23:44 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Yes but the vast majority of words which are capitalized and not at the beginning of the sentence are proper nouns which are often spelled differently from regular words.

Examples: Kaycee, Maryanne, Marianne, Marian, Britney, Britnee, Destynie.

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 18, 2016 4:47 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> In the vast majority of cases you want the spellchecker to automagically correct taht to that.

Speak for yourself :-)

In every single imaginable case I do *not* want any spellchecker to automagically correct anything.
I'm very happy for possible errors to be highlighted and for probable corrections to be only a gesture away. But if I ever make an error (whch I do), I want it to be *my* error, not a machine's.

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 18, 2016 20:49 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

So, you have "Taht == Taht".

Okay, it won't pick up a mis-spelt "that" at the start of a sentence, but when was that ever "proper" English". :-)

Iirc the complete rule, WordPerfect ignored case if the dictionary entry was all lower case. As soon as you had mixed or upper case, it had to be a perfect match.

Cheers,
Wol

Making WiFi fast

Posted Nov 11, 2016 12:20 UTC (Fri) by osma (guest, #6912) [Link]

I'm glad you asked it, since I was wondering the same!