eBay buys StumbleUpon

eBay has, for reasons of its own, paid a quite outrageous amount of money for crappy community links website StumbleUpon.

I probably should be nicer about StumbleUpon, as it has sent a fair bit of traffic my way, but really, it's awful.

Previously, eBay bought Skype, of all things, again for silly money.

What will eBay buy next? Novell? The Falkland Islands? General Dynamics? Who knows!

Oh, no! It's the USS Halibut!

In 1959, the US launched its first guided missile nuclear powered submarine, the USS Halibut.
It was involved in various secret-spy stuff before being scrapped in the 80s. Great name, though.

An unusually good crop from BBC

Every day, BBC News has a list of the most viewed and most emailed news stories for the day. A few highlights from the current list:

"German drives down subway stairs" - Apparently, this has happened before with the same station.

"Microsoft unveils table computer" - Well, they did indeed, but it sounds rather surreal.

"Iron Brew adds fizz to sausages" - Trust me, you don't want to know. The culprit had the idea in the shower.

"Skull of missing accountant found" - Again, not really funny, but an interesting headline nonetheless.

Tesco Value Language

Tesco has issued employees with a booklet which will allow old people to understand what young people are saying. I really hadn't realised that this was much of a problem; surely it could be solved more simply by the old person asking the young person to speak in actual English.

The joys of mod_deflate

For the past few months, I've been using mod_deflate for my FindMeATune site. It's an Apache module which compresses pages before sending them to the client, where supported by the client. (The better-known equivalent for Apache1.3 was mod_gz.) The advantages, of course, are reduction of data transfer volumes, and that it speeds things up for people with slow connections.

Now, the disadvantages. I noticed that at peak usage times, Apache memory usage would increase greatly, and the swap file would be much used. This of course, could cause horrible, crippling slowness. At first I suspected that the database was at fault, because the problem manifested in high IO-wait loads. But seems to have been mod_deflate. Apparently, this seems to be kinda-sorta a known issue, and I'm sure it's possible to get around, but for the moment, I don't really have the time. So I turned it off.

The results were really quite dramatic. No more horrible load figures, no more delayed pages. Bandwidth usage up sixfold, to about six gigabytes a day. And page views by real people up from about 25,000 a day to 30,000 a day. It's fortunate, in many ways, that the company I rent the server from recently raised prices by ten euro a month, to compensate for raised electricity prices in Germany; they threw in a higher transfer allowance while they were at it.

I don't, by the way, plan to leave it like this forever. Once my exams are done I plan to finish re-writing the site in Lisp; it turns out that someone has just written a stream-based compressor for the Lisp webserver I'm using. So I'll give that a shot; it may work out better than mod_deflate, which apparently waits 'til the page is finished, then compresses it and sends it back in one go. I'm also planning to move to a slightly heftier server; something dual-core would be nice. The current one is an Athlon XP, and does show its age a bit.

Bill O'Reilly, noted horrible liar

Ever seen Bill O'Reilly on television? He seems to be a manifestation of all that is wrong and defective in American media. He's incredibly popular, very unpleasant, and seemingly a compulsive liar. (For instance, he quoted an imaginary French newspaper to back up claims that the boycott on French goods he had called for was having an effect; French exports to the US actually increased during the period). He's also one of these people who seems to like to blame scantily-clad rape victims for their own rape. Lovely. He seems to prefer shouting at people and calling them 'liberal' to actual debate. The list just goes on.

Unsurprisingly, he appears on Fox, the TV network which rather improbably uses the slogan "Fair and Balanced". As far as Fox people go, he's probably actually one of the more reputable ones; one of them goes on about saving the 'white race', while another was arguing that global warming is a myth and that passive smoking was safe while receiving large chunks of money from the oil and tobacco industries.

What worries me is that presumably some people watch and actually believe the nonsense he turns out. For that matter, some people probably watch Fox 'News' under the illusion that it is actually a news channel.

Ironically, O'Reilly on members of a watchdog group: " They will never set foot, not only in my program, but at Fox News Channel, because they are dishonest, inherently dishonest." I was rather under the impression that that was a prerequisite. :)

Banning Straights in Australia

An Australian gay bar has banned heterosexuals, on the basis that they get a lot of hen parties and such, apparently. This seems like a strange move; what would a gay bar be without the odd hen party, after all? Interestingly, the article says that it is the only gay bar in Melbourne; bizarre if true.

A bonus (approximate) hen party quote, from Black Books.

Fran: (In reference to a hen party) Oh, it will be wonderful.
Bernard: I very much doubt that, as its name contains 'hen', the prefix of doom.

Those wacky, wacky Poles, again

Remember noted crazy corpse Jerry Falwell's crusade against the Tellytubbies, a few years back, on account of an alleged gay character?

The Poles are at it now, too.

This shouldn't really be overly surprising; remember the visit of the rather dim Polish Pres. to Dublin, where he babbled on about the scary gay people? Poland also tends to ban gay rights marches, and wants to ban discussion of homosexuality in schools, too. Shades of Maggie Thatcher, it seems; I wonder will the Poles have a Poll tax soon? One of their MEPs was good enough to note that homosexuality can be cured by spiritual means, a belief held only by the most cretinous and braindead of Bible-Belt Americans.

Poland seems to have gone from communism into a state of Catholic batty-ness; as we know from our own history here, there are few things more dangerous than the bloody Catholic church poking its nose into matters secular.

22 somehow feels a lot older than 21

It was my birthday on Friday; I am now 22. Old! Or so it seems. I suppose, really, that is isn't; I'm probably less than a third the way through my life. Still, I'm no longer even vaguely a teenager; weird.

It has long been a joke of mine that I generally go for guys (generally, also, without success, of course) who are under 25 in age and BMI (Body Mass Index; weight over height squared in SI units; 18.5-25 is the "normal" range). Not entirely serious, though I wouldn't generally find overweight guys attractive, but I am now closer to the high end of my age range (18-25) than the low one. May need updating. Hmm.

A glimpse of the past... and the future?

When I got off (the train; take your filthy minds elsewhere) in Pearse Station today, it was full of thick, black, unpleasant smoke. For a second, I wondered if there'd been an accident of some sort. And then it dawned on me. One of those steam trains that they occasionally run as a nostalgia thing had been through. Not pleasant, but it possibly gives a little taster of what a Victorian industrial city was like.

The interesting question, though, is this. In fifty years, will we look back in horror at the polluted cities of the twenty-first century, as electric cars or trains or whatever whiz by? Or will we look back in nostalgia as we sit in Athlone or somewhere under a cloud of smog, with coal power plants pouring out fumes and Dublin somewhere to be visited in a boat, clusters of half-submerged buildings crumbling into the Irish Sea? Something in-between? Will we hit this much-talked-about technological singularity somewhere on the way, and live in ways unimaginable at the present? Will we all be dead of nuclear war, or meteorite hit, or disease, or starvation?

Of course, right now, we can't know. We do, however, sit on a turning point; if there is one thing that is certain, it is that things will have changed very dramatically in fifty years, one way or another, as our fuel supplies deplete and global warming continues. It's an interesting thought experiment, at any rate.

How to Find a Husband

Just saw the first episode of a hilarious show on one of those silly channels which Sky lists under 'Lifestyle'. In it, an obscure TV presenter sets out to find herself a husband, having 70 dates in 50 days. She has all manner of advisers, and is completely and utterly mad. Great fun.

As a bonus, a Google ad on the show's website:

What on earth? I wonder what setting on the washing machine should be used?

Lies About Computers; a revision attempt

As you'll probably know if you know me, I am at best an indifferent student, and never really got my head around the whole studying madly thing. So, anyway, as an experiment, I'm going to summarise concepts here, on this blog.

Sadly, I no longer do electronics; thinking up surreal and counter-intuitive analogies for capacitors and similar is an art-form. ("Think of the capacitor as a water pump and the inductor as a senior Bishop", etc.).

Anyway, it will no doubt all be horribly inaccurate, so don't believe any of it.

Madeleine McCann hysteria

You'll probably, at some point in the last few weeks, have noticed a news story about a three year old who disappeared when her parents left her alone with her two year old siblings in a hotel room in Portugal. It covered Sky News entirely for a good week or so at least, to the point of displacing other, objectively more important, news. Millions of pounds have been raised to look for the child. A chain email was sent out by a family member looking for help (about the first time I've ever heard of one of these 'help me' chain letters being authentic).

So, why all the fuss? Sure, it's very sad, but children go missing all the time, and we never really hear this much about it. Some have suggested that it is because the victim is young, white, from a wealthy background and vanished in a foreign country, but that alone doesn't really seem to account for it. Has there been some change in the way the media handle this sort of thing, I wonder? In future, will we be swamped with missing child stories? All very strange.

Madeleine McCann hysteria

While it has died down a little now, the publicity surrounding the Madelein McCann thing

Superconductors in the War on Terror

New York is getting a superconductor-based electricity grid so that terrorists will find it difficult to sabotage power. So now, instead of destroying power distribution centres, they will have to destroy the refrigeration units which keep the superconductors at the appropriate temperature, or simply wait until those break down on their own. Right, so...

By the way, the current record-holding high-temperature superconductor only operates at below -135 degrees Celsius. I'm sure that it should be no problem to keep a large electricity grid constantly below that temperature, no matter what...

Collision detection for the ample gent

Have you ever noticed that many very fat men go about like they're normal weight, completely unaware that their belly may be knocking people over as they go? It's by no means universal, but it does seem to be quite common; it happens a lot on crowded pubs and so on. They just seem to be unaware of the extra space they take up.

When getting my train, yesterday, I arrived at the station just before it was about to leave. Which would have been fine. Except that a fat man who had just gotten off had seemingly decided that the best place to stand around for a minute or two would be in the door from the station to the platform, causing me, and everyone else trying to get out, to miss our train.

Oddly enough, women don't seem to do this, and the people who do this only seem to do it when it inconveniences others, not when it puts them at risk. How often do we see the headline "Man's beer-belly sheared off by passing bus", after all? Almost never.

I have also noticed that a disproportionate number of fat middle-aged men in suits don't believe in queuing. Again, I don't know why this is, but they often just barge into the middle of a queue in shops. Possibly they know that people find them vaguely intimidating.

I had better stop talking about this now, as I do not wish the phrase "eaten by a Fat Supremacy extremist" to appear in my obituary.

Genital enlargement quackery for the unambitious

I recently received a vaguely interesting piece of spam, offering "seven solid inches", or similar wording. Now, really, if you were signing up to the ludicrous scam that is chemical penis enlargement, you might surely be inclined to go for one of the ads which promises results significantly outside a standard deviation from the mean?

I wonder is a small guillotine included, for the presumably significant proportion of the population for whom the promised result would not be an increase?

Still, possibly the scammers in question are hoping that the ad seems somehow more plausible than the usual run. Will we soon see Nigerian email scams offering rewards of "tens of dollars" for assistance in moving money, and magic weight loss pills which promise to remove as much as eight ounces of fat? There may be something to be said for the "stupid, but unambitious" market segment.

Killer microwaves, again

There's more scare-mongering about killer microwaves from mobiles and WiFi starting up again. Interesting article here.

I will never, ever, forget seeing a protest against a proposed mobile mast. Most of the protesters had apparently come in their cars, and some of them were smoking. I wonder had they any idea of the irony involved?

The tragic effects of Wikipedia overdose

I think it is clear that this commenter (blog post here) uses Wikipedia a lot:


Note the 'links'. Is that how a reference will be signalled, in future?

VHDL for Nuclear Power Plants?

I was a bit unnerved to see that nuclear power plants use programmable logic devices. I wonder is the software written using that fabulously buggy Xilinx toolkit that crashes every five minutes?

The offending device had a dodgy network stack, shutting down a power plant and costing billions. Apparently, nuclear power plants use Ethernet, now. (Really.)

Possibly someone just got tired of clicking things on the annoying little menu which controls synthesisation and simulation. :)

LinkedIn

I was just reminded that I have an account on a rather odd social networking site called LinkedIn. It's a bit like Bebo, but for work stuff, more or less. It also looks much nicer, though that's hardly a great accomplishment.

You can add me here, if you're on it. It's a bit pointless, but never mind.

Making USENET Difficult

Did you know that when you are posting to USENET, you can set an expiry time for your post? I'm not exactly clear on why someone would want to do this, but it makes old USENET threads on Google Groups almost unreadable in some cases, for missing bits.

On a related note, web forums need this feature, to make them less pleasant to use.

Trigraphs, or, how to confuse your colleagues

When C first appeared, it was unusual in many ways. One way that it was unusual was that it made heavy use of many symbols which computers at the time didn't necessarily have.

A solution was, of course, required. The solution? Trigraphs! That is, combinations of three characters to represent exotic symbols like curly brackets.

    Trigraph     Equivalent
========     ==========
??=            #
??/            \
??'            ^
??(            [
??)            ]
??!            |
??<            {
??>            }
??-            ~

Aren't they lovely?

But it doesn't stop there, oh, dear, no. First, they made their way into the vast, labyrinthine C++ standard. And now, C99, the new (well, eight-year-old) C standard which no-one bothers with, has both trigraphs and digraphs. Digraphs are, of course, a two-symbol equivalent.

To compile a program with trigraphs, pass the switch '-trigraphs' to gcc. Remember, any compiler which doesn't implement them is non-compliant!

Silly Google!

I was using a Google service today, when I got an expired security certificate!

I suppose these things happen, but you'd really think that it'd be something they'd be careful of.

Jerry Falwell is dead! Yay!

Thus perish all enemies of sanity.

Falwell was the one who said that September 11 was the fault of gays, abortionists, feminists (yes, feminists) and so forth, and in earlier days he was all for segregation. He campaigned against gay rights in Florida. He was keen on recreational suing - in fact, he even accidentally improved freedom of speech protections in the US! (The Supreme Court found against him). He didn't believe in global warming; God wouldn't have it, but frankly it would have been rather shocking if he had, all things considered. Oddly, he's pro-Israel; it seems a bit out of kilter with the rest of his views.

He also thought that HIV was a punishment from good ol' God for homosexuals. Lovely. Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe heart attacks are God's punishment for crazy bigots?

This may seem a little petty. Consider, though, that the man was one of the leaders of the US religious loony fringe which is increasingly gaining influence in that unfortunate nation's politics. The world is better off without him.

Edit: In case you needed further proof of the man's marble shortage: "I do not believe the homosexual community deserves minority status. One's misbehavior does not qualify him or her for minority status. Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc., are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status." Women aren't really particularly a minority...

Channel 4 Video on Demand - Nice idea, horrible implementation

Channel 4 recently launched a video-on-demand service; you can view shows over the Internet any time you want to. It's a nice idea, and it could have been great.

Recently, I was watching 'Property Ladder', a great show in which really stupid people renovate houses to make money. After the programme ended, there was a note that the week's episode was freely available on 4oD, the video on demand service. As I often miss the show in question, I decided to have a look at this.

First off, there is no MacOS viewer available. This is a shame, but as the system uses Windows Media Player 10, there is no real solution for the moment. So, I started up Windows XP in Parallels (a virtualisation environment for Intel Macs).

To start with, I had to install WMP10. This was a typical Microsoft installation; took about half an hour, and required a reboot. Okay. Then, I was allowed to install the setup app for 4oD. It detected that I didn't have the .NET 2 runtime, and prompted me to download. I clicked 'yes'. Nothing happened. I clicked 'yes' again. After a minute or two, two .NET installation thingies appeared in the background. Went through the installation procedure for that, which took a while. Continued. Eventually, 4oD was installed.

I launched 4oD. Computer muttered to itself for a while, then informed me that I was missing DRM stuff. Clicked on the 'install' button, and after a while, all was well.

Finally, I was allowed use 4oD. It's effectively a website in a special window, but without niceties like a 'back' button. Highly confusing interface. I eventually tracked down the show I wanted, out of a selection of about fifteen free shows. At that point, I was told that I'd have to register. Now, I know that they like to be able to track who's watching what, but really, asking people to complete a largish form is a good way to drive them away; it might make more sense to give out the free content and only require registration for the paid stuff. Did email confirmation bit.

At this point, I should mention that the 4oD interface was painfully, horribly slow. This seems to be a problem with it rather than with the virtualisation; other large applications run quickly, and Media Player, when I finally got to it, worked fine.

Eventually, I was allowed to see the show. I clicked 'watch'. This launched an entirely external WMP window, hiding the 4oD interface. I sat through a couple of ads, then the show started.

The actual streaming was really quite good. It's (at least for this show) at 400Kbit/sec, so it should be fine with most 'broadband' services. You can jump to any point in the show fairly instantly, like Google Video but unlike YouTube. The video looked okay; images were lovely and clear, though motion was a little jerky.

The thing is that if this was nicely implemented, and easy to install and navigate, people would love it. Back-catalogues of many shows are available at about 99p per episode, which really isn't that bad, especially when you compare it to a DVD. As it is, though, you'd probably go half-mad trying to find and play these shows, and I'm not so sure that many people would bother. A clear case of having great content and concept, but badly messing up the user interface.

There is some hope for the future, though; a lot of the infrastructure is more or less the same as was used for BBC's iPlayer trial, and BBC has promised improvement, and a MacOS version, there. There are also apparently set-top boxes which can play 4oD stuff, presumably mostly limited to the UK.

It is tempting, though, to compare it to services like iTunes video, which seem to do more or less the same job (with different content) far better.

Death of a Salesbot

A few months after being relegated from the list of links above the search box, Froogle, Google's price comparison thing, seems to have been gotten rid of, and replaced with "Google Product Search (beta)". So die all under-performing Google services; remember Google Web Search API and Google Answers (beta)?

Another reason not to like Windows

The College Windows XP machine I am currently using just froze up for ten seconds (entirely; no Start menu etc.) because I posted a comment to a blog. That is surely not normal?

Sports Center

Trinity has recently acquired a new sports center, complete with gym, swimming pool, and so on.

First off, the swimming pool is great. I've been every day for the last three days; I think I'm addicted now. Before that, I hadn't been swimming in about five years; it's amazing how it comes back to you. I've even managed to ignore my fear of being semi-naked in front of people, for the moment; I expect that this might be a problem if there was anyone I knew there, though. (I am terribly self-conscious, and still subconsciously convinced that I am fat.) You have to wear one of those silly swimming caps, annoyingly; I was never sure exactly what they were for. Something to do with hair, possibly.

The gym is actually very much like the old one, but slightly bigger. For the moment, the machines are arranged in a bizarre jumble, but apparently this is a temporary measure, dictated by where the power outlets are, or something. There are a few new and weird treadmills, which I had difficulty using; I'm very used to the old ones. In any case, though, now that there's a swimming pool, I doubt I'll be using the gym that much; I always hated it, and swimming is just far more fun. Rather inexplicably, there are ads for Aldi on the walls.

Then there are the changing rooms. These are weird. For a start, there are at least three sets for each gender; one for the pool and two others. There are no towel hooks in the showers; this apparently will be fixed, but for the moment it's quite annoying. There are random toilets everywhere. The swimming changing room is unisex (with cubicles; the others are more open) and an absolute maze. The drinking fountain in the pool gives out hot water. Not warm, hot. I worry that it may be off-flow from the sauna (which I haven't ventured into, and don't really plan to) or something. Overall, it's a bit like the designer had seen photos of a gym, but wasn't really clear on what it was for. I'm reminded of the fake room at the end of 2001 - A Space Odyssey.

The War of the Pseudo-Lemon Chemical Flavoured Water

Delicious 7-up, now diluted so that you don't have to taste it as much. I am reminded of this. (An old cookery book telling you how to baste a roast in 7-up, and such, in case you weren't going to click. You will now, of course. Yes, indeed.)

Sprite, however, have decided to skip over the unfortunate issue of their product tasting like a chemical accident entirely, instead concentrating on the idea that people who like to drink Sprite don't care for underwear. Sounds vaguely unhygienic.

Filth!

I suspect that I have an irredeemably dirty mind, at this point.

More Election Posters

Dear Sinn Fein,
I have but one thing to say about your candidate for Dublin North-East.

Aaaargh.

Presumably, the postering budget didn't stretch to a professional photographer.

Rathfarnham in Illicit Poster Shocker!

I was briefly in college today, to go to the swimming pool. While getting stuff from my locker, I noticed that someone had been good enough to litter every single noticeboard with copies of a non-college-approved poster.

This happens a fair bit, of course, despite being verboten. What was interesting here was the nature of the poster.

Who thought that this would be a good idea? I can't imagine that there's much of a market for parish fêtes in Trinity's science block. I wish people wouldn't do this sort of thing; it does create a lot of clutter, and in this case, covers a number of legitimate and important posters; the outline of the latest SU referendum was half-covered, for instance.

Anti Trinity Ball

A few of us, believing that the Trinity Ball wouldn't sell out for a while (on the basis that it never does) didn't get tickets the minute they were available. At which point, of course, it promptly sold out. So, last night we had an anti-Trinity Ball party, where we drank and prayed for rain. That was fun, and it did indeed rain!

And now, some pictures.

Me in ridiculous borrowed sunglasses.


Eco-toast! Imagine.

The Angler Fish of the Roads

First, a bit of background. In Dublin, most new traffic lights now make noises to indicate whether you can cross; a slow beeping means "don't cross", while a low rapid beeping/pulsing means "cross". The traffic light system at Sutton Cross is one such.

I was at it today, and had half-crossed to the reassuring low rapid pulsing sound, when I noticed that there was also a slow beeping. And then, I noticed that the low rapid pulsing was coming, not from the traffic light, but from the small, elderly Fiat waiting at the lights. The car was attempting to lure people to their doom.

I wonder, actually, who, if anybody, would be considered to be legally responsible if a blind person (for whom the noisy lights were, of course, designed) was killed due to the Death Fiat's traffic light imitation? The traffic light company? The driver? The maintenance people? Who?! Who will save us from these infernal machines?

Twitterbuzz Pagerank

I was amazed to discover today that the Google Pagerank for my newish (and now sadly neglected) website TwitterBuzz is 6/10. (This is apparently rather good). Possibly I should start selling links from it to unscrupulous SEO people.

I wonder how many years in hell one gets for each link sold?

Michael Woods reveals himself

As I mentioned before, until recently all Fianna Fail posters in my constituency bore a picture of Bertie, and only Bertie.

Possibly in response to Bertie's amusing decoration adventures, Michael Woods has now rolled out his posters.

Possibly, he shouldn't have bothered; the poster makes him look a bit Bond villain-ish.

Rainbow Flags

The rainbow flag is, of course, most noticeably used by gay people (six-colour version). A seven-colour version, sometimes with PACE written on it, is often used by peace campaigners. The year I started college, Trinity LGBT society had their stand next to the Socialist Workers Party; both had a rainbow flag. Apple computer used to use an apple-shaped one. (It is often suggested that this is because Alan Turing, noted computer pioneer and gay, killed himself using a cyanide-laced apple, a la Snow White. There doesn't seem to be any evidence for this, though, and it is surely a bit macabre?) And so on.

Apparently, the 'International Order of the Rainbow for Girls', a sort of Masonic Girl Guides, used to use one too; they had to change it because it was 'stolen'. The author of that comment seems rather pissed off about it, but really, the Freemasons are worried about the effect the scary gays (, socialists, iPods, et al.) are having on their reputation? Ask the average person on the street which they find more frightening.

Go on. Now. That's your homework for this evening.

The last bastion in the War on HTML Email

At some point in the mid 90s, someone realised that HTML could be embedded in email. Unfortunately, they evaded the Stupid Ideas Police long enough to tell someone (I think Microsoft, though that may have been MS Word documents as emails, which would be even worse) about it. And so, we entered into a decade of huge, ugly, pointless HTML emails. Many were the backgrounds used, yea, also the hideous fonts and improbable colour combinations.

In these enlightened days, HTML email seems finally to be dying out, apart from in email sent by the geriatric. Many new mail tools don't even provide HTML editing; it seems strange to remember that only recently, it was hard to make Outlook Express do anything but.

However, all is not entirely well. Trinity's Student Union emails, typically horribly written nonsense sent out to every member of the student body, keep up the old traditions.

It could be worse; I'm pretty certain that it had colourful backgrounds last year, and the year before the headings were in Comic Sans. Within a fleet decade, it may be rehabilitated; hopefully something can also be done about the tendency to elect SU Presidents who don't understand apostrophes.

Boring Fridays

Well, this has been a boring day. I had been hoping to be social, but no-one really seems to be around. At times like this, I worry that everyone is off having more fun than I am; silly people. I never did quite get the hang of weekends, especially long ones, like this.

This is part of why I worry so much about finishing up college, by the way; most of my social life is still college related, and I'm not quite sure just how social lives work in the real world.

I think I might go to the college gym, now. I haven't been in the new one yet, so that might be interesting, and might even, if I'm lucky, hold off the inherent horrible boredom involved in using the gym; I don't know how these people who spend a few hours a day there, and actually enjoy it, manage. I just go to avoid wobbliness.

Final year project report handed in

Inevitably, of course, things went wrong at the last minute. As predicted, the printer had (subtly) taken its revenge; it printed the required two copies interleaved with each other. Why, I have no idea; I certainly didn't tell it to. Also, my laptop's battery died while writing the CDs; this confused the poor thing and made it think that it was 1970.

Anyway, all is well now, and the project handed in. Due to the second reader having an extraordinarily long last name, there was almost no room on the signin form for me to sign my name, but that's a minor detail.

To answer a previous question, my project involved writing a compiler for a (simple, made-up) high-level language, targetting VHDL, a hardware description language.

Also, Latex is great, though it's one of these things, like IRC and vim commands, that I only bother to learn parts of as needed.

Final year project report done

I just got my final year project report done today. What a relief. The only issue is that it had to be printed. I subsequently forgot to check it. Now, as you know, printers are one of the chief enemies of mankind, along with rural radio stations and the Gas Board. It is entirely possible, even probable, that the printer decided to shift into ancient Parthian or something for at least one of the copies. Stupid thing. Sadly, I left the print-out in town, so can't check now.

After that, went to the George with friends, one of who was subsequently (allegedly) assaulted by a lesbian for his drink. It was full of indecently tall skinny blond people; don't know where they're coming from. I resent them enormously, naturally; I've never been too satisfied with my genes. A friend of a friend went from flattering me to kissing someone every five seconds. Bizarre night, all told.

The Perils of Outsourcing

This blog tells the story of a programmer whose job was outsourced. But it's not any old story. He started a startup, whose business model appears to be to get people to work for free.

First product: computer-programmed VCR. Not just using IR, mind you (he's proud of this) but with custom-designed chips tacked on. He got hardware engineers to work for free, which seems to me to be quite an impressive accomplishment.

Then, there was the second product. Here's where things start to get a little peculiar. The second product is not clearly described, but appears to be some sort of magic program (written in Lisp!) which will produce algorithms, thus speeding up software development thousands of times. Or something.

He had two rounds of fundraising; in the first, he sold his car, and in the second, someone actually invested 17 thousand dollars in his ideas! He also keeps muttering vaguely about an inheritance; not sure what the story is there.

Reading through the whole thing is fascinating; it just seems to get madder and madder. He posts about 10 articles a day. He's also utterly incapable of spelling 'conquer'.

Some of the better quotes follow.

Komodo Dragon will run on either a cluster of PS3s or a Cray or
IBM supercomputer and generate 1M + algorithms per second.
Translation: 1 million algorithms per second.

The purpose of Komodo Dragon is to generate algorithms at
lightning speed and create the structure of software so that
any project (even exceeding 1B lines of code) could be viewed
in 3D at all levels.

He loses the source code - it's on the laptop of one of his star developers. (Remember, he is not paying these people).

Here, he compares himself to Newton and Einstein, saying that he has no equal. Hmm. Is this an example of what the more nauseating variety of American calls 'affirmation'?

I think he may be turning into Archimedes Plutonium.

I will admit that working on Komodo Dragon is fun and exciting
because everyone deems it impossible. Once again, it's not
impossible, the solution only needs to be discovered. Even a
worm hole defies the logic of travelling beyond the physics
limit of a photon of light which travels at 186,282 miles per
second.

Oh, dear, it's Paul Graham's fault:

I think that Dr. Paul Graham should get the congressional medal
of honor for being an advocate for Lisp.

What?

If I hadn't started Big Bear then Brontosaurus
and the idea of creating the algorithm engine to
speed up and streamline software development
wouldn't have emerged from the swamp of the code
that was incomprehensible

.
Remember, he's not paying them:

The key, I think, is finding the right engineers
with passion to follow through and do what they
say they are going to do instead of making
excuses.

"Lisp isn't easy to grasp. It's deep and strange." - MUCH LIKE YOURSELF, THEN.

"I have to pay rent soon" - Yay! (Apparently, he currently lives with friends for free, or something).

More mad-person-from-sci.physics-talk:

Secondly, I want to marry a woman
from Boston. Women on the West Coast just don't
look like the woman from New England.

Eh? Do they use babies, or something?

I was also pondering how the roads are salted on
the East Coast and that turns me off.

HE GROWS TIRED OF LISP:

Lisp is the most awkward, backwards, and alien
programming language I've ever encountered.

And more tired:

When I write code I don't want to have to think nor deal with
the tiny details of how to represent a statement. Most of
Lisp is pretty backwards and nonintuitive. I have a history of
changing that which I don't like and I'm changing Lisp so that
I can control it so that it doesn't control me.

His ideas of being rich include being able to go to Starbucks every day, and owning a Honda Civic.

Here's one of his job ads.

Okay, that went on longer than expected. Anyway, suffice to say that I'm glued to my seat with anticipation for his next post. Oh, I do hope he keeps it up! I've subscribed, and I suggest you do the same.