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February 22, 2006

Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day: Soft drink brand names

I was reading a piece the other day that explained the history of several familiar brand names, including names of cold drinks. I was very amused when I came across the explanations for Pepsi and Fanta.

From the piece:

Fanta- was originally invented by Max Keith in Germanyin 1940 when World War II made it difficult to get the Coca-Cola syrup to Nazi Germany. Fanta was originally made from byproducts of cheese and jam production. The name comes from the German word for imagination (Fantasie or Phantasie), because the inventors thought that imagination was needed to taste oranges from the strange mix.
Pepsi- Pepsi derives its name from (treatment of) dyspepsia, an intestinal ailment.

I thought the Fanta explanation was priceless even though I am a fan of the drink, especially the pineapple variety. I am ashamed I hadn't noticed about Pepsi earlier but the explanation just spoiled it for me altogether. The next time I drink a can of Pepsi I am going to feel like I am taking medicine for an upset stomach. Mmmm... dyspepsia.

Posted by Vishy at 07:44 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2006

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: gravy

gravy./GRAY·vee/. Sauce that forms the 'background' of an Indian entree. Indians tend to refer to it as gravy rather than sauce (which is occasionally used to refer to tomato ketchup). Note that gravy can be vegetarian or not--unlike Western gravy, it need not be formed from juices that drip from cooking meat. Vegetarian gravies can be made of just about anything that blends together to form a sauce, such as tomatoes, onions, cream, nuts or coconut. Neither does gravy have to served alongside, say, mashed potatoes; the gravy forms an integral part of the meal.

When trying to figure out a entree they haven't heard of, many Indians tend to ask, "Is it dry or does it have a gravy"? A 'dry' entree would consist of vegetables mildly sauteed or tossed together with spices. A gravy entree would be like the stereotypical image of an Indian meal in most American minds: heavy, creamy and saucy.

Posted by Vishy at 11:18 AM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2006

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: crib

crib./krib/. To complain. In most observed cases though, it's closer to kvetching or whinging. According to the Indian English sense of this word, a crib sheet would be what Martin Luther nailed to the door of a Catholic church to start off the Reformation, and not a handy précis of several useful formulae to take with you to an examination room or a sheet of paper found in a baby's sleep area. Typical usage includes "Why do you keep cribbing and ruining my day, yaar?" or "She should simply stop cribbing and adjust."

Posted by Vishy at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2006

HOWTO: Make acts_as_taggable work with PostgreSQL

I recently had a chance to play with acts_as_taggable, a sweet little mixin written in Ruby for ActiveRecord/Ruby on Rails model classes that gets them associated with keywords (aka tags or metadata) with relatively little effort. This post won't be particularly useful unless you first read a basic tutorial about using acts_as_taggable.

My setup is centered around the PostgreSQL database product, even though MySQL is far more popular. When I followed the instructions in the tutorial above, I found that I was getting some fairly basic PostgreSQL errors which went something like:

column " posts.title" must appear in the GROUP BY clause or be used in an aggregate function: SELECT posts.* FROM tags_posts, posts, tags WHERE tags_posts.tag_id = tags.id AND ( tags.name = 'voip') AND posts.id = tags_posts.post_id GROUP BY posts.id HAVING COUNT( posts.id) = 1

Apparently this is a known issue in the acts_as_taggable project's bug tracker but when I searched for a patch, one was not available. With lots of help from Goynang on #rubyonrails, I've put together a patch that would make acts_as_taggable work properly with PostgreSQL. Hopefully this will be integrated into the main project soon, but until then, use it for your needs. I impose no restrictions on the use of this patch especially considering very little of it is my code.

Posted by Vishy at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)