patsy

Patsy!

Look what I found! :)

Through a link from this, oddly enough, in an article mentioning Stoli vodka, of which Patsy is an aficionado (because it's expensive, but it's vodka, I suspect; similar to Bollinger for champagne).

no-more-barcamp

No More Barcamp

I had been going to go to this thing. In fact, I'd been going to speak at it. Now I'm not. Pressures of time, and nervousness and so forth... Never mind. If there's one on in Dublin at some point when things have calmed down a bit, I might get to it.

more-wacky-television

More Wacky Television

Try "The Mighty Boosh" and "The Green Wing". They're both great fun. The Green Wing has that strange woman from Black Books in it. The Might Boosh is available more or less in its entirety on that icon of copyright infringement, YouTube.

story-of-my-life

Story of my life

So yes. Guys don't like me. I don't really understand why. I've spent the last four years of my life surrounded by gay guys, and watching everyone I know get with guy after guy after guy. And no-one wants me. Ever. I mean, okay, I'm ugly, but I'm not THAT fucking ugly. They go for the ugly fat guys over me. And at this point, I'm 21 and I'm finished college in a year, and I'm not getting anywhere, and I don't know what's wrong with me, and I don't want to keep going this way. And it's not as if I'm getting any bloody younger. All feels a bit hopeless, really.

space-blog

Space Blog!

Here's the blog of Anousheh Ansari, the private space tourist currently on ISS. It's really quite fascinating.

Also, bet you didn't know this existed!

And, the newly-formed Russian Space Force. Worth a visit if only for the logo. Another logo; ring any bells?The poorly written (official) article implies that social welfare is dependant on space military. Another oddity: the Russian ministry of defence's logo involve a crown. What's going on there?

how-shymaking

How Shymaking!

I just discovered a few bits and pieces I wrote when I was 16 or so on Sourceforge. A webcomic downloading thing and a database tool... Ooh-er. Nothing worse than seeing what you were like in the past, really, is there?

stumbleupon-oddness

Stumbleupon Oddness

Stumbleupon appears to be a site where people can link to interesting websites. Okay. So, today, I noticed that there were 50 RSS subscribers to this blog (the highest I've ever seen previously is 40, and 30 is more normal). So, I had a look at my stats. And found that 150 people had visited from something called 'Stumbleupon'. It turns out that I'm here. With the tags 'science' and 'cute'; clearly neither are an accurate description of this blog or of myself. Link added by someone who generally recommends various gay porn sites and similar. Now, I mean, I may be gay, but I'm hardly gay porn...

Very odd, altogether...

from-the-bbc-department-of-ir

From the BBC Department of Irrelevant Statistics

Shock, horror, eating crisps every day causes wobbliness.

From the article:

Figures from Mintel reveal that we eat a tonne of crisps every three minutes in the UK.

This would be enough to fill a telephone box every 43 seconds and an Olympic size swimming pool every 14 hours.

A telephone box? Why a telephone box? But what a mental image!

Time required to fill TARDIS with crisps is left as an exercise to the reader.

This is all in line with the apparent BBC news website content policy:

• Real news (wars, politics, crime, economy, etc.)


• Random horrid celebrity is arrested for cocaine/has their fifth divorce/has a hissy-fit about antidepressants/dies (yay!)


• The fat people will destroy us all! Within weeks, even the svelte-est supermodels will weigh as much as an articulated lorry.


• Global warming will kill us all, possibly as early as next Tuesday


• Readers' letters, generally from insane people


• Something painfully irrelevant happened in darkest Wales.

And remember, each headline must have at least one word in 'quotes'!

the-bygone-glamour-of-the-vic

The Bygone Glamour of the Victorian Age

I was taking a look at this list of American inventions on Wikipedia. Some highlights.

870 Pneumatic Subway Working in secret to hide his operation from Boss Tweed, who opposes it, Scientific American publisher Alfred Ely Beach builds a pneumatic subway under Broadway in New York. Beach's single subway car, which features upholstered chairs and chandeliers is driven along the 300 foot tunnel by a 100 horsepower blower.

1896 Automatic Hat James Boyle, of Washington, DC, makes public courtesy much more convenient for the modern gentleman. His new hat tips automatically.

Imagine the scene! Your automatic hat collides gently with the chandelier as you board the magazine's subway, powered by 100 horses blowing in unison. The journey across the road takes mere minutes!

1845 False Teeth Cladius Ash helps Americans get a better grip on what they're eating. He creates a new type of artificial dental wear featuring individual porcelain teeth mounted with steel springs.

Your teeth bounce gently on their springs, as you depart the subway.

1897 Player Piano Edwin S. Votey, patents his self-playing piano, which he calls the pianola. The instrument uses instructions recorded on perforated paper to drive a set of artificial wooden fingers poised above a piano keyboard. Later versions placed the entire mechanism inside the body of the piano, eliminating the fingers.

The piano-golem tinkles out a melody, its wooden fingers clunking pleasantly against the keys.

1901 Safety Razor King Camp Gillette, former traveling hardware salesman of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, takes the risk out of shaving with his new double-edged safety razor. By the end of 1904, he will have sold 90,000 razors and 12,400,000 blades, but he will die in 1932 with his dream of a utopian society organized by engineers unrealized.

No longer need you fear accidental decapitation while shaving! The piano-demon obliges, playing just the left hand for a few minutes.

Cochrane was quite wealthy and was the granddaughter of John Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat. She never washed dishes herself and only invented the dishwasher as her servants were chipping her fine china.

And, in any case, there was no room for servants on the subway, what with all the chandeliers. The piano did its best, but its wooden fingers did tend to swell...

Meanwhile, across the pond, the people of Britain languished in an automatic hat free dystopia. The servants had to do all the washing up on the subway, and thousands accidentally cut their head off while shaving every year. But all was not lost, for they had baloon mail! Letters delivered by hydrogen filled baloons; London reverberated with the sound of exploding postmen.

British invention continued apace, with the cat flap, the Spinning Mule (and its variant, the rotating donkey), culminating in the delvelopment of the Sinclair pocket calculator. London reverberated with the sound of exploding Soviet diplomats.

for-all-those-who-dont-take-p

"For all those who don't take proper precautions with meat!"

I shouldn't laugh, I really shouldn't.

Someone microwaves raw chicken-wings, eats them half-cooked, and is surprised when contracts salmonella. MICROWAVES them. Who microwaves raw chicken?

"For all those who don't take proper precautions with meat!" is my phrase de jour. In McCarthyist America, meat takes precautions with YOU!

I know that the only posts you people enjoy are the food-related ones.

dying-chicks

Dying Chicks

By injecting the eggs with dye. To produce festive chicks for Easter. Yes, really. Oh, and the farm insists that the dyes don't contain chemicals, by the way. Yes, indeed.

Apparently, people also do this with rabbits (presumably they are dyed after birth, though) but Google just turns up pictures of fur products.

From the same company, this leaflet is an odd mixture of cute chicken drawings and dubious practices outlawed in Europe.

Dyed adult chickens.

Also, dyed fish, by direct injection on dye into fish. Hmm. And laser-engraved fish. According to the company, they "only [use] low intensity laser beams."; no Death Stars here! Apparently, there's very little definite information available on just how fish are dyed; the ornamental fish industry is extremely secretive.

Found while searching for details: "It shall be unlawful to keep or harbor any bees in the city." I wonder is anyone ever brought up on charges of 'harbouring bees'?

In other chicken news...

I love Google, I really do.

betty-boop

Betty Boop

This is totally bizarre. It's a 'Betty Boop' cartoon from before serious censorship of such things came in.

oh-dear

Oh, dear

I'm not feeling very well, really. I'm tired, and I'm lonely, and I'm not at all confident about this coming (college) year.

I've clearly gone wrong somewhere, but I'm not sure where.

summertime

Summertime...

Summer holidays from college are over shortly. I'm looking forward to getting back, really. I'm stopping work soon, so I'll have a bit of a holiday. Which will be nice. It's been an interesting few months, though, and was certainly an interesting enough job. I've enjoyed it. May be mildly stressful for the next week or so as I get things finished off :)

Have also gotten into weirdly regular, regimented eating habits. Hmm.

I realise that this blog has gotten horribly boring, and I apologise.

theres-a-novelty

There's a Novelty!

Japan has just launched a spy satellite. I hadn't realised anybody bothered anymore.

youtube-popularity-appears-ra

YouTube - popularity appears random

This video has recieved over two million views on YouTube. That's one for every three thousand people, or more than one for every thousand people in the developed world. And why? I mean, it's a not-very-good ripoff of a musical.

Also this guy. Random old man talking on the internet - wildly popular.

Internet people are weird.

lisp-blog-now-has-comments-an

Lisp blog now has comments and RSS feed

I mentioned before that I'd started writing a simple blogging application in lisp. It now has comments and RSS feed. Slightly more in-depth description of changes here. All going well I'll be moving this blog over to it quite soon.

going-out

Going Out

Was out last night. Gay bars always make me feel terribly inadequate :(

Was fun besides that, though.

bla-bla-weight-bla

Bla Bla Weight Bla

Hmm, so the thinking about the calorific content of what I'm eating thing is working, I think, even if I didn't blog it religiously as I had considered doing (too much trouble, and very difficult to get precise calorie values). I'm now 65 kilos (143lb or 10.2 stone). Ho hum.

bilingual-blog

Bilingual Blog!

I happened to click on a link to this article (about dubious alleged secure browser (or Internet Explorer wrapper, anyway) 'Browzar'). Which is in both French and English, interleaved, on the same page (the blog, not the advertising platform). How bizarre! I can't imagine actually sitting down and writing such a thing.

yet-more-lisp

Yet More Lisp

If you're using tbnl on cmucl, you may notice an annoying pause on requests. You need to run (mp::startup-idle-and-top-level-loops) before starting your application. Don't ask me why; everyone says to do it, but not WHY you have to do it. Just thought this might be useful to someone. (Oh, apparently it can annoy SLIME).

The end result of this is that my Cheddar Gorge game now works sensibly. Yay! (It can handle 375 requests per second :) )

mysql-with-clsql-on-openmcl-a

MySQL with CLSQL on OpenMCL (also, SLIME and tbnl)

This is probably only of interest to lisp programmers and people who want to start using lisp.

OpenMCL is a free open-source Common Lisp implementation for the PowerPC. There are Linux and MacOS/Darwin versions. There's also an x86_64 Linux version, and possibility of an x86 version. It's about the only free lisp with decent MacOS support, seemingly.

CLSQL is an SQL interface for Common Lisp. It works with most implementations, and supports most common SQLs. Now, I wanted to have a lisp web development environment on my laptop (an iBook). Should be simple, right? Well, not quite. I wanted to use MySQL as a database. While MySQL is supported by CLSQL, it turns out that that support doesn't compile out of the box with OpenMCL.

So, here's how my environment's set up.

I'm using Emacs (in this case Emacs.App, a Cocoa implementation) with SLIME, a wonderful lisp IDE-type thing. (Demo video here). SLIME is easy to install; just follow the directions on the site.

You'll also need ASDF-INSTALL. OpenMCL comes with this, but it's not enabled by default. So, in your ~/openmcl-init.lisp file:

(require :asdf)
(pushnew "/Users/robertsynnott/lisp/systems/" asdf:*central-registry* :test #'equal)
(require :asdf-install)

Where you have made a symbolic link from the asd file for adsf-install (somewhere in the OpenMCL directory hierarchy) into the directory above.

TBNL's also handy enough to install, just do:

(asdf-install:install 'tbnl)
(asdf-install:install 'cl-who)

That'll install it, plus all dependencies, and also cl-who, a metalanguage for specifying HTML in lisp. (You can see it used here).

If you were using, say, sbcl under Linux, you might be able to get away with doing the same thing for clsql. Not here, though. First, you'll need mysql includes and libs. I'd recommend using fink to install these; they'll end up in /sw/lib/mysql and /sw/includes/mysql. Next, you'll have to download UFFI and CLSQL. Untar these somewhere. In clsql, in the db-mysql directory, modify Makefile so that it uses the correct library and include paths for wherever you've put mysql.

Now, modify your openmcl-init.lisp file. Add this:

(progn
(push "/Users/robertsynnott/lisp/uffi-1.5.15/" asdf:*central-registry*)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :uffi)
(push "/Users/robertsynnott/lisp/clsql-3.7.0/" asdf:*central-registry*)
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :clsql))

(progn
(in-package :clsql)
(setf *default-database-type* :mysql)
(clsql:push-library-path "/sw/lib/mysql/")
(clsql:push-library-path "/Users/robertsynnott/lisp/clsql-3.7.0/db-mysql/")
(asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'clsql-mysql))

The two push-library-path calls in the second block are interesting. They tell clsql where to find the binary libraries it needs. There's an older guide to getting mysql going on OpenMCL, which has the first one, but omits the second. I found that the second is required, at least for the versions of everything I'm using.

And that's it. You should now have a working clsql installation. There's a brief usage tutorial here.

web-developer-moi

Web Developer? Moi?

Remember that politics news aggregator I was talking about recently? Well, there was an article about it here. All very well, except for "...and Dublin-based web developer Rob Synnott." What?! I'm not a web developer. I have no wish to be typecast as a web developer. Web developers are people who either play with Frontpage/Dreamweaver, or create Macromedia Flash horrors, or do unmentionable things with PHP, or who use the word 'emergent' in conversation. I don't really want to be typecast in this way. Grr.

(NB: Mostly joking)