Posts Tagged ‘curiosity’

Crossing the Finger (Crossed Fingers) – A good luck sign with Early Christian origin and deep symbology

Monday, January 21st, 2013

 

 

Why we cross the fingers good luck sign evokes Christ blessing and depicts cross with hand fingers

 

 

I had a small Skype chat today with my dear Indian friend of mine Happy. She is now in situation with uncertain outcome, where the Indian government has to approve her mother's application for Visa. As being uncertain she used the classical English saying: "fingers crossed – i cross the fingers". I was curious about the origin of Crossing the Fingers and thought for a second over how Cross-ing the fingers originated and how it visually looks like. It depicts a a X cross shape, also interestingly the X is the first letter of the Greek and Slavonic IC XC depicted on each and every icon of our Savior Jesus Christ. XC – stands for Χριστός (in Greek) and
XP-christ-church-slavonic

 in Slavonic, thus obviously crossing the fingers depicts also first letter of Χριστός – Christ  – Messiah (savior of the World). Having the insight I hurried to explain Happy, why I think people used to be crossing fingers when in situation with uncertain outcome.

Just out of curiosity I searched for Crossed_fingers and found it good explained in Wikipedia. After all, my assumption turned right, crossing the fingers is made not just out of old superstitious as many might thought, It was made on purpose by early times Christians. Crossing the fingers is an external expression of the Internal faith,hope,love and unceasing prayer that early Christians possessed.

Crossing the fingers was very popular in times, when Christians use it as a sign to recognize each other in times of persecution. The reason for crossing the fingers is that it resembles the Sign of the Cross. It is believed even  to this day in the One Holy Apostolic Church the Orthodox Church the sign of the Cross when being made invokes over one the protection and blessing of Christ. Sign of the Cross is being done in prayer in the Church in times of trouble in difficult life time events and when evil is faced. The crossed finger sign was also used as a secret way for Christians to tell each other to assemble for prayer and holy liturgy worship service. There is even symbolism in why people cross fingers with exactly those two fingers with which the gesture is done. In very ancient Church times Christians used to make the sign of the cross over their body using two fingers and not three.

Icon of Saint Paul from Ephesus 4-th century preparing to make the sign of the cross

4th-century icon of St. Paul the Apostle from Ephesus – Wall Painting

The sign of the cross when being depicted on one's body was done with the exact two fingers with which the crossed finger gesture is completed.

crossed fingers sign of the cross resembles the salvation of mankind through the Lord Jesus Christ's crucifix

Today crossing the fingers is a popular "good luck" invocation automatic reaction, most people who do it as not being realized Christian don't know why they do it they just believe it will be a magical mantra like which will give them good outcome of problem or difficult situation. It is little sad that we the modern people who think we know a lot and are smart or educated, didn't know even the basics of what made us the nations we're which in the biggest part was Christian faith kept by our ancestors for centuries.

How to get rid of Debian and Ubuntu GNU / Linux obsolete configuration files and system directories

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

debian_ubuntu-linux-get-rid-of-obsolete-files
I've been using Debian GNU / Linux on my Thinkpad laptop for almost 3 years and half. Initially the Debian version which I had installed was a stable Debian Lenny. As I was mostly dissatisfied of the old versions of the programs, I migrated to testing / unstable
Testing / unstables shipped program versions were a bit better but still back in the day I wanted to get advantage of the latest program versions so for a while I switched to unstable .
Later I regretted for this bad idea, after the migration to Unstable, it was too buggy to run on a notebook one uses for everyday work.
Then to revert back to a bit stable I downgraded to testing unstable again.
When Debian launched Debian Squeeze I set in my /etc/apt/sources.list file software repositories to be the one for the stable Debian Squeeze.

As you can see, I've done quite a lot of "experiments" and "excersises". Many packages were installed, then removed, some became obsolete with time others I just temporary installed out of curiosity. Anyways as a result I ended up with many packages uninstalled / removed , which still kept some of their directory structres and configurations on the machine.

Today, I decided to check how many of these obsolete packages are still present in dpkg database and I was shocked to find out 412 debs were still in my package database! To check the number I used cmd:

root@noah:~# dpkg -l | grep -i '^rcs.*$'|wc -l

Considering the tremendous number of packs waiting to be purged, I decided to get rid of this old and already unnecessery files for the sake of clarity, besides that removing the old already uninstalled packages removes old configuration files, readmes, directories and frees some little space and therefore frees some inodes 😉

Before proceeding to remove them, I carefully reviewed and all the package names which I was about to completely purge in order to make sure there is no package with a configuration files I might need in future:

root@noah:~# dpkg -l |grep -i '^rcs.*$'
...
After reviewing all the deb packages possessing the rc – (remove candidate) flag, I used the following bash one liners to remove the obsolete deb packages:

root@noah:~# for i in $(dpkg -l |grep -i '^rcs.*$'|awk '{ print $2 }'); do echo dpkg --purge $i done...
root@noah:~# for i in $(dpkg -l |grep -i '^rcs.*$'|awk '{ print $2 }'); do dpkg --purge $i done

First line will just print out what will be purged with dpkg , so after I checked it out I used the second one to purge all the RC packs.