Cornerstone Software Ltd

My Nokia cellphone has “predictive texting” - where the phone attempts to match the best word for the sequence of digits pressed. For example, if I type in 74663 if comes up with “Phone” (5 button pushes instead of 10, often the improvement is better). This is quite good for clumsy texters like me who spend five minutes entering a two-sentence message.

It works most of the time, although there are a couple of words, usually short ones like “if” or “me”, which it gets consistently wrong. Sometimes it is a bit cute seeing the word develop as it makes the best guess on partially-entered words (eg along the way to “phone” it goes through s, pg, sin, sion, phone)

If the phone doesn’t have a suitable guess at what word I want, it beeps and comes up with a button labelled “Spell”, where I can use the old-fashioned way to enter the word.

Well, today I wanted to use the word “landline” (ok, maybe it’s not a word, but Im txting k?). So I pressed the required buttons: 52635463.

The phone’s suggestion: “landlgme”

No beep and “Spell?”. And I am at a loss to work out where it thought I was going with this one.

The only reason I thought this worthy of blogging was because I tried typing “landlgme” into Google to see what might happen. After all, it might be a famous town in Finland or something. And Google said:

Did you mean: landline
Your search - landlgme - did not match any documents.

Hurrah for Google. And of course, now if anyone with a Nokia phone tries to enter “landline” (or “janekind” or something), and then gets curious, they’ll be led straight to this blog post as the only search result. Perhaps even you who is reading it right now.

As usual when I struggle with the cell phone’s UI, I conclude I really should have just phoned the person I was sending to .. after all, my message in this case was essentially “Please call me”.

P.S. Yes, I’m aware the phone may not just use a dictionary to guess partial words, but I still don’t know what it thought it was doing.

Here’s one for Subversion administrators. If you set up the svnserve daemon you’ll usually need two configuration files. svnserve.conf lives in the repository’s conf/ directory, and has a setting pointing to a second file containing usernames and passwords, like so:

[general]
password-db = users.txt

According to the Subversion book,

The value of password-db can be an absolute or relative path to the users file

The way svnserve determines this is by checking for the first character of the path, if it is a “/” then it is an absolute path.

This is fine on a *nix platform. But how does this work on Windows? If my password file is, say F:/svn/users.txt, then do I specify one of these?

password-db = F:/svn/users.txt
password-db = /F:/svn/users.txt

As described on this (rather old) thread, neither of these work, giving an error message like ” svn: Can’t open file ‘F:\svn\repos\test\conf\F:/svn/users.txt’: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.”

Fortunately there is a solution - use a UNC path. On Windows, the prefix “\\.\” (or //./) represents the local machine, and the following works just fine, with no need to resort to any other tricks like setting up a network share, or duplicate copies of the password file:

password-db = //./F:/svn/users.txt