The education system in action

Take a look at this. Apparently, the teacher insisted that a kilometer was longer than a mile, and a kid corrected him/her. Result; kid gets detention, and the teacher says that even though the kid turned out to be right, he shouldn't have corrected the teacher.

Erm. That makes perfect sense, right? Respect for stupid people in authority is more important than actual facts, you see.

Benchmarking the new Hunchentoot Common Lisp Web Server

Version 0.15.7 of Hunchentoot, the popular http server for Common Lisp, was recently released, with the promise of significantly increased speed, due to improvements in Flexi-Streams.

Hunchentoot has always had speed issues with actually transferring data, due in large part to the slowness of the flexi-streams library it uses, so I was curious to see what the difference would be. In previous versions, time to send a page has been more or less proportional to the size of that page.

I conducted a rather naive, simple benchmark, comparing 0.15.3 (the version I previously had installed) and 0.15.7 (the new, fast version) on SBCL 1.0.15 for MacOS 10.5, using a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro. I was largely interested in the speed of sending data, so I prepared three pieces of data to send; a 14 byte string, a 300KB string, and a 600KB UTF-8 string (something copied off Google.jp, appended with itself a lot). These were stored in memory, and I used ab to see how fast I could retrieve them. Here are the results. (Available, and possibly more readable, on a separate page here.)

Update: There are now also results for the new refactored version of Hunchentoot.



As you can see, I also ran a comparison against Apache's file serving, and PHP. Unfortunately, the long string for PHP was rather shorter, as PHP doesn't seem to like really long string literals. I ran a Hunchentoot benchmark with the same string for comparison.

The results are interesting. First, for the tiny page, you can see that the new Hunchentoot is over twice as fast. Quite impressive. But for the big document, the new version is nearly ten times faster. I was shocked by this; I hadn't been expecting such a gain. The UTF-8 document is slightly faster again; I included it to check if flexi-streams was using a special fast mode for Latin-1, but clearly it isn't.

The results for the development refactored version are also interesting. Note that the long file results are considerably slower than the better Hunchentoot result, while the UTF-8 results are the same, and the short results are considerably better. I'm not sure what's going on here, but the refactored version is still in development, so may improve.

Apache, as expected, is much faster again; nearly another ten times. PHP, interestingly, is about the same speed as Hunchentoot, as far as serving files goes. This is pretty cool; it makes Hunchentoot extremely competitive for generating dynamic webpages, as Lisp, all things being equal, should be far faster at putting pages together, processing data, and so on; the single OS process nature of a Hunchentoot server also allows trivial caching and connection pooling and so forth.

There were a few other things I'd have liked to try for this benchmark, but didn't manage. First, I wanted to try the new, development version of Hunchentoot, which has been seriously refactored and should in theory be a bit faster again. Unfortunately, common-lisp.net is currently having technical trouble, and I wasn't able to get it from SVN. Update: I got it from here. Also, I would have liked to try it with SBCL on a Linux machine; the MacOS version of SBCL still has issues, especially with threading, and I do wonder whether that slowed things down a bit. That's also the reason I only used concurrency of 10 for AB, by the way; higher can cause SBCL for MacOS to drop connections, but there is no such issue with SBCL for Linux, and it manages to maintain decent speed with hundreds of concurrent connections. I don't currently have access to a suitable Linux machine which isn't doing anything else, though.

In any case, I think that these results show that Hunchentoot is very much ready to be used for real, high-traffic sites.

Apple in vast update shocker

The new MacOS X minor version update (10.5.3) is 420mb. That's an hour on a 1Mbit/sec line. Madness, just madness.

Oddly, it is apparently only 140mb for the 32bit MacBook; wonder what the difference is?

A sign of things to come?

On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the UK lost power, due to the unplanned shutdown of Sizewell B (a 1GW nuclear plant) and a 3GW coal power plant in Scotland. To put that in perspective, Ireland's total electricity production is about 6GW.

Now, that in itself, was no disaster. It only lasted a couple of hours. Surprising, though? I mean, power plants never fail, do they? Well, actually they do so quite a bit. It rarely causes a problem because there's sufficient spare capacity, generally around 20%. It was only a problem this time because two such large plants were involved.

Now, what happens when it becomes too expensive to maintain that extra 20%, or when fuel is not available for it? It mightn't be so very long; recall that we get a fair bit of gas from Russia, which has shown a tendency to arbitrarily turn off peoples' gas before.

Scary, eh? But what's being done about it? Apparently very little. Nuclear? In Ireland?! Don't be absurd!

Now, I realise that half of the Green Party would rather freeze to death than have their storage heater powered by evil, glowing green, electricity from a nuclear power plant, but must they really take us all with them, while we wait in joyful hope for the coming of the magic windmills?

AMD off in a fantasy world

Are they really allowed to say this? It's blatantly untrue.

Today in stupid technology news

America may be getting free wireless broadband all over the place! Complete with injected ads and content filtering (billed as 'family friendly'). I'm not sure exactly what the message is, here; no porn for poor people, perhaps? Given the high quality of most content filtering systems out there (they tend to be good at blocking out revoltingly lavicious sites like Wikipedia and BBC News), I doubt it'll be all that great.

It brings up an interesting issue, though; if the readiest source of th'Internet is rendered 'family friendly' by whatever obscure metric the provider chooses to use, with FCC approval, isn't there vast potential for abuse of the censorship? CDA 2.0, anyone?

Also, the EU is planning on shoving people gently towards IPv6 by 2010. Now, we all know that that is not going to happen. IPv6 is a convenient mechanism for breaking certain types of communication on MacOS; Erlang, for instance, tends to get confused about the loopback interface. That is all. What do we want? IPv6! When do we want it? When every single operating system, router and third party software package is upgraded or retrofitted to work properly with it, and not a moment before!

I mean, imagine. Suddenly Google vanishes for users of, say, BT, because Google is saying it does IPv6 and BT's routers are saying they can do IPv6, but Windows 7 or whatever merely believes it can do IPv6.

And finally, here, allegedly, is Windows 7. Could they take up any more space with giant start menus and toolbars if they tried? Notice, also, that the evil psuedo-menus merged hideously into the title bar from IE7 look set to become standard. When CDE (ancient, hideous UNIX window management system, beloved for many years by Sun) looks like a more attractive UI experience than Microsoft's latest, maybe, just maybe, that should give them pause?

Scary kids

On my way home, Dublin was full of kids. Drunk kids. At about 1 in the morning. I assume some school or other had its last day today. Bloody terrifying. For whatever reason, the ones from the suburbs seem to be worse than the locals when they're in town.

It's funny; in the time I've been living in the city center, often going home at unsociable hours, I've never felt threatened by anyone over 20. It's always the kids. Irish kids, at that; you hear a lot about the evil violent foreigners from the right-wing loons who adorn our newspapers, but I've never seen it myself.

This isn't a groundless fear or anything, either; they can act pretty threatening, especially late at night. As I mentioned earlier in the year, one of them robbed me with a knife.

What I wonder is do people get a bit more sense as they get older, or is it just a ripple of anti-social behaviour moving up through society? I hope the former; quite frankly I could do without 30 year olds roaming the streets in packs blind drunk and shouting at people in a few years. As it is, most older people are more or less aimiable drunks.

Our society's obesity epidemic has its charms, though. If you simply maintain a brisk pace, whole groups generally can't keep up.

23!

So, I'm 23 now. Weird. Don't feel any different, particularly, but it's a slightly scary number. I'm also finished college just under a year; again, that is odd.

I didn't do much for my birthday; just sat around at home, really. I'll probably do something next weeekend, instead.

Twitter Trouble - main database down

Twitter's certainly having a lot of trouble, lately. Today, apparently, their main database had a bit of trouble. Now, first of all, I am a little surprised that a service on Twitter's scale has a main database, as such. What does it do? I'm also very surprised that it was allowed to reach a state where it had too many connections; given that they're using Ruby on Rails, they should, I believe, have control over how many worker processes there are total, and thus be able to set this to something that their database can manage.

Beyond that, though, am I the only one a little surprised that they're not using simple, boring ol' MySQL Master-Slave replication? It's not rocket science, and should probably save them in the case where the master dies; just promote one of the slaves.

You have to wonder just how competent the implementers are, really.

Quote of the day

"It's not pervy; it's sexy and beautiful. It happens to be rubber."

Oh, indeed.

Poor, poor, Amercia

So, apparently, Obama smokes, or did smoke, or someone who looked a bit like him smoked in a dream, or something. Somehow, I suspect that this will tend to put people off.

Get ready for America under old man McCain (also mad, though not remotely as mad as noted traffic attractor Ron Paul), without even the minor comfort that he'll probably die during his term; according to the above article he's still hale and hearty. Unlike Obama, who will most assuredly die from the quarter packet a day he allegedly may or may not have smoked. I mean, imagine! That's as much as your average pensioner smokes! If not more less!

In commemoration of the Balmer Egg Incident

Iz Hungary!

Impressive feats of Javascript

From noted Javascript lover Google's Google Code blog (which is really quite interesting, except for this sort of thing), an absolutely mad Javascript error.

That's about a third of it. It seems to be the entire blog in Javascript evals.

The Lisbon Treaty - how will you vote?

Ireland will be the only country to have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which replaces the failed European Constitution and will, if signed, change the functioning of the EU.

Here's a quick summation of what Wikipedia has to say on the matter:

• Central Bank and euro given official recognition.
• Court of Justice slightly strengthened.
• Reorganisation and television display of Council.
• 18 month Presidency.
• Council of heads of states separated, voting procedure changed to reduce excessive power of small nations.
• President of Council elected.
• Power of Parliament increased.
• Minor changes to roles of national Parliaments.
• Council made smaller, re-arranged.
• Somewhat coordinated foreign policy.
• Consolidation of various bits and pieces.
• Enlargement barriers removed.
• Method for nations to leave.
• Solidarity on disasters, energy supply.
• Laying the grounds for a potential defence agreement, but with no obligations.
  

To me, all of this looks reasonable, sane and good for Europe and for Ireland. I'd hope that it would to most people. It'll give more power to the Parliament, a generally reasonable democratic body, and the Court of Justice can also generally be relied upon to make sensible choices.

Of course the funny thing about this referendum is that nobody knows what it's actually about. People have this vague, nasty idea that it is about tax or war or something. The poster campaigns going on at the moment are rather interesting. There are basically two sides; on the Yes side are the major political parties, and various other groups. On the No side are Sinn Fein, bits of the Green Party, and various other other groups.

The 'Yes' posters are generally some politician (including Enda Kenny; I'd almost vote No just because of that) telling you to vote yes. The 'No' posters generally tell you that voting Yes will cause tax hikes, job losses, and lead to war. Really, the Yes people would be far better off just telling people what it was about; the No people should probably continue in their scare-mongering.

I'll be voting Yes, of course; I think that it's the right thing to do. However, I do worry that the Nos will prevail, simply because no-body knows what it is about, and thus people are quite cautious of it. Sinn Fein's faux-patriotic bullshit on the subject won't help, either; they have quite a bit of support these days.

What way will you be voting? And how have you come to this conclusion? First person to say they're voting No because of the (I think) Sinn Fein poster telling us that people died for our freedom gets a slap.

Britain perhaps getting a bit police state-y?

Someone was arrested for holding a placard calling noted cult the Church of Scientology a cult in front of their London head office today. Possibly under incitement to hatred; I'm not sure.

Is it me, or is this a bit much?

Less than a week left...

Being 22. Terrifying thought, really. I'm 23 on Sunday. That somehow seems quite old. I'll have been finished college a year in a few weeks. It's flown by.

On the plus side, for the first time in years I won't have exams on my birthday! I'll probably be having some form of party at some point, but obviously not on Sunday.

Horrid Clothes

Well, you know I'm a bit of a coward at buying clothes? Anyone who buys these needs to be a little more of a coward, I think.

Yes, I read Gawker Media's blog for women. It's fun. Get over it.

Women as chattels; not just for Islam anymore!

Men! Ever feel envious when you read the news and see that Saudi Arabia has just executed another woman for having seen a man out of the corner of her eye? Ever worry that your son's child bride may not know who's boss? Ever worried that those silly little women are beginning to think of themselves as, well, people? Then this just may be for you!

So, there exists something called a 'Purity Ball'. Just the name tells you this won't be good, doesn't it? A purity ball is where fathers, stepfathers and future fathers-in-law promise to 'guard' their daughter's 'purity'. The daughters, from kids to college-age girls, come as their dates. Where's this happening? Saudi Arabia? The Middle Ages? Well, close; Colorado in the United States. That is, it's happening in all of the more Christian-overrun parts of the US; the article I read focuses on Colorado.

A quick Google BlogSearch shows that most people are, rightly, either making fun of this or damning it. But then there's this:

Young women should not be viewed as sex objects to be exploited, but as regal princesses to be cherished and protected. And father knows best.

It gets worse:

One of the most memorable highlights of the ball is when the fathers stand in the middle of the ballroom and form a circle around their daughters standing all aglow in their lovely ball gowns. The fathers place their hands on their daughters, and together we pray for purity of mind, body, and soul for generations to come.

And then they throw them into the volcano, as I believe virginity fetishists are wont to do.

Rather she will be saving herself for a real loving man just like her strong daddy. A man who will respect her and knows that the package is clean and new and pure. Something worth waiting for.

Or worse.

In an age when so many children think their parents “aren’t cool”, It’s refreshing to find young girls who want to “date” dad.

Oh, dear. Have the FBI been notified?

Amen Roy Ubu! I bet you that when Sam Brownback takes that little filipino daughter of his to her Purity Ball she will be beaming with joy. Lord knows she probably won’t understand one word of what they are saying, but she will just be happy to be on a date with her daddy.

Sam Brownback seems to be another loony presidential candidate, and there's no indication that his 'little filipino daughter' is mentally disabled; presumably she won't understand one word because, well, those foreigners don't talk proper, do they? It's genetic; they can't help it, the poor things.

And then it goes from comments from the dim to comments from the evil:

Why do you think there is such a thing as rape? Its really when the girl’s lust drives her to sin and then she LIES to get out of it. GOD KNOWS what she did and her punishment is to HAVE that baby, perferablly one of those deformed ones that she can take care off for the rest of her life. That would be a suitable lesson for the other girls to learn.

Why is it that Christian extremists sound so like a paedophile ring? Ugh.

Back, then, to the less creepy New York Times.

The Wilsons organized what was considered the country’s first father-daughter purity ball 10 years ago, as their oldest girls entered adolescence.

Yep, this isn't just some awful Middle Ages thing that hasn't gone away; it is new. Bush, what hath thou wrought?

“Something I need from dad is affirmation, being told I’m beautiful,” said Jordyn Wilson, 19, another daughter of Randy and Lisa. “If we don’t get it from home, we will go out to the culture and get it from them.”

Eek!

But studies have also shown that most teenagers who say they will remain abstinent, like those at the ball, end up having sex before marriage, and they are far less likely to use condoms than their peers.

Oh, what a surprise. My, I am shocked! God must be turning in his grave!

Stephen Clark, 64, came to the ball for the first time with Ashley Avery, 17, who is “promised” to his son, Zane, 16. Mr. Clark brought Ashley, in her white satin gown, to show her that he loved her like a daughter,

Arranged marriage! Not just for the heathen anymore either!

If most teenage girls would not be caught dead dancing with their dads, the girls at the ball twirled for hours with their game but stiff fathers. Every half-hour, Mr. Wilson stopped the dancing so that fathers could bless their daughters before everyone.

The above quote is absolutely not to be read into! Not if you want to sleep tonight, anyway.

Isn't it odd that as America tries to carry on a war against Islamic extremists, it turns into more of a religion-addled nuthouse itself?

Note that that Wikipedia article on the subject has 'Covert incest' as a related item. Unfair, perhaps, but that's sort of how it looks...

HP and the evil customer service robots

That'd be the printer maker, not the adolescent wizard.

[voice gender="'female'" age="'18'"][mood type="disgust" level="5"...

(Those square brackets above should be triangular, but as mentioned in the footnote, Blogger thinks that they are very special and refuses to escape them, as it does all other such naughty, HTML-breaking brackets.)

I am disgusted with you, to level 5. EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! But first, let's go to the mall!

You see, HP has filed for a patent on customer service robots which can be rude to people! With the power of XML! Evil androgynous robots, when they're ecstatically happy!

Welcome to HP's brave new world. I, for one, welcome our new laser printer-obsessed overlords.

Update: It begins already. Blogger normally escapes XML properly, but tried to render the evil robot instructions above as XHTML! Why, if anyone had attempted to print the article, the evil robot subroutines in their LaserJet (part of PCL, I believe) might have been activated! A narrow escape... for now.

Blogger's Beers

An event which I was meant to be going along to yesterday, but in the end was too scared to go to because I'm no good at identifying people I've only seen in pictures, and because it was in a big scary bar which I've never been to before.

Sometimes I suspect that my life would be far easier if I was a little more reckless...

Silly Sunday project of the week

Today, I was writing a Common Lisp library for Erlang's binary communication protocol, much like JInterface for Java and py_interface for Python. Not done yet; there's a lot of messing around with EMPD and so forth, but it could be interesting. It would allow creation of fake Erlang nodes in CL, and thus easy, type-aware RPC between the two platforms.

Fun with Clozure CL

Clozure CL, previously called OpenMCL and with a complex history involving Apple and the JPL and so on, is a Common Lisp platform for Linux and MacOS on the PowerPC and 64bit x86 platforms. I used it last year a bit on my iBook, but just as a normal Lisp environment. The other day I took another look. It turns out that it now has a very decent Objective C bridge.

How decent? Well, reproducing Apple's Currency Converter Cocoa example takes about 20 minutes, with a distributable application as the end result. The code involved is actually simpler and terser than Apple's Objective C code, and you can use Interface Builder.

It would actually make quite a nice platform to develop GUI Mac apps. There are a couple of hitches; first, the distributable results work out to about 20MB compressed. This one isn't really such a problem in this age of fast internet connections, but it's unfortunate. The other issue is a bit of a deal-breaker for most people, I suspect, for the moment; there is no support for 32bit x86. This means that results won't work on Core Duo (as opposed to Core 2 Duo) Macs, or on any Intel Tiger machine. The good news is that there is apparently a 32bit version on the way.

All in all, it's very interesting, and could well be the first free Lisp which makes it really practical to produce normal desktop applications.

It also has a simple IDE which could potentially be great (it already has an amazing inspector), but for the moment needs work.

Are you mad?

Then you'll love Intel's absurdly-named SkullTrail platform!

Basically, it's a dual-socket Xeon system for the lunatic gamer market. With 10 USB ports. Ten!

I'd be impressed if a computer based on this came in at less than 10,000, and it's clearly aimed at mad gamers, rather than anyone else. Some people have far more money than sense...

India, India, Uber Alles

(Oh, ok, I'll stop with the fascist-implications-from-old-German-anthem thing now.)

So, apparently someone in India was arrested, and could be jailed, for being rude about some politician or other. On Orkut; apparently Google helped the authorities out a bit. Who's evil now?

Irony from the article:

You can have an opinion about anyone in a free country like India, even someone as important as Sonia Gandhi, but if you are not careful about the way you give expression to it, you could land in serious trouble.

By the way, Bertie is a dreadful old trout. See? That's a (well, semi-) free country. India, clearly, is not.

I've always worried a bit about India. We hear so much about it being a new up-and-coming country, but it really is terribly backward on many social issues. Of course, these days all that is tolerable; we put up with China, for goodness sakes.

Dublin Oddities of the Week

Seen in Dublin this week:

• A UPS van making a delivery to a FedEx office. Or possibly vice-versa.
• A nude lorry driver. On Monday, when it was absurdly hot. It's actually entirely possible that he was wearing underwear, but his ample stomach covered all. Ewh.
• Apartment building with giant bloody microwave transceiver on top. Like the Irish Broadband one, but a couple of meters high. Possibly it is an apartment building/data center.
  

TV introducing contextual advertising, decades after I thought it did

From the New York Times:

Ever smile while watching a movie on TV because, say, you just saw the scene from “The Godfather” when Vito Corleone leaves his office at the Genco Olive Oil factory and a commercial comes on for Bertolli olive oil? Turner Entertainment Networks wants to turn those coincidences into sales opportunities.

Er, aren't TV ads targeted towards the programmes they're shown between already? When I watch Sex and the City, I see lots of ads for beauty products. When I watch cookery shows, I see ads for food. I'm almost certain that this has been happening for a very long time.

"And if you spit at Bush, we'll EXECUTE you"

Apparently, a man has been jailed for 35 years spitting at a policeman in Texas. Yes, really.

Why?

Oh, because he was HIV positive, so it was assault with a deadly weapon. Of course, there's no evidence that HIV has ever been spread through saliva, but the Texas justice system has a well-known tradition of brain-dead-ness, anyway. People are arguing that the man thought that his spit would be infectious, but that doesn't seem to have been reported, and even if it was it should be sort of beside the point. If you pray to some god or other that (say) George Bush gets eaten by a tiger, that isn't assault with a deadly weapon, even if you believe that it might come true.

So, remember, if you have any dangerous disease, don't visit Texas. They're entirely likely to decide that you can die of being looked at someone with breast cancer, or something.

Question for Texan lawyers; if a shop unknowingly sells someone salmonella-infected spinach, and they die, can the owner be done for involuntary manslaughter? Because that would make WAY more sense than killer AIDS-spit.

I'm sure it will be overturned on appeal, but really, at this point, the US needs to invest in a press department for its justice system. It's all very well for the justice system to be entirely unjust, as in this case, but if it makes you look insane in front of the rest of the world, it's a problem.

ASA versus the expensive HiFi cable industry!

I've mentioned the whole 'super-expensive magic power cable will make your audio equipment sound better/computer faster/fridge colder (really)/whatever' thing before. I am, of course, sceptical. Vendors of these devices generally claim that while results can be easily heard, they can not be objectively measured with instruments, which should be very suspicious in itself.

Anyway, the UK Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint against one such company, on more or less the basis I've mentioned; audio distortion can be measured, and the company did not provide credible evidence that people even thought that the thing sounded better; proper double-blind tests would indeed be somewhat convincing, even if they would possibly undermine electronics as we know it.

Funnily enough, the offending device is one of the cheaper ones; it only costs 30 pounds. You can pay thousands for these things. It will be interesting to see what impact this decision has, though; advertising magical cable properties without substantiation is very common.

Fun iPhone app

Here's a Wikipedia app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. No, it's not a specialised browser; it actually has the whole of Wikipedia (from 2007) as a file. Not much use if you have an iPhone with a data plan, but very nice on an iPod Touch. It does, I'm afraid, take up 2GB, but such is life.

Highly recommended if you have a jailbroken iPod Touch.

LinkedIn gets weirder

LinkedIn (like Facebook, but for job-type stuff and without apps) now tells you who's been looking at your profile:

And if you have a paid account, it'll tell you about all of your viewers! Yay!

Ooh, odd. I'm particularly mystified by the European Parliament intern.

LinkedIn, by the way, also has those weird Javascript-y links which break middle-click behaviour. Yuck.

Britain, Britain, Uber Alles (with homeopathic quantities of Ron Paul!)

Was just looking at the Wikipedia article on the BNP, Britain's premier scary fascist/white supremacist party. The talk page is particularly shocking; evidently people who can more or less string a sentence together support them these days!

I'm enormously grateful that we don't (as yet) have a comparable political group in this country. They are evil.

There is, of course, humour in every situation; just imagine the Queen's Speech under a BNP government! "My Government and I have now relocated 80% of the nasty foreigners to camps in recently reclaimed County Poland. Any of my previous speeches, where I seem to cuddle up to the darkies, were made under mind-control by executed Communists such as Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, et al., and should be disregarded." [Fade out, to Rule Britannia with montages of smiling blonde children and tanks.]



And then, there's this. A white supremacist blog, supporting the BNP, on Wordpress.com, with one of that host's trademark Scientology ads. (Yes, I know they're Google's, really.) I am, I'll confess, a little worried that Google's algorithms think that Neo-Nazis will also like Scientology; it makes that scary cult even scarier. And the author seems to be a fan of noted crazy failed presidential candidate Ron Paul! Argh, all the mad people in one!

Wordpress.com becomes EVEN CLASSIER - child-porn-implying ads

I've babbled at length about Wordpress.com before. Well, they've really outdone themselves now.

First, wank.wordpress.com reports that anti-Scientology blogs are showing Flash ads for Scientology. Now, quite frankly, I'd prefer not to see those anyway; I don't think advertising an evil cult which includes mad ol' Tom Cruise is in the best taste.

Oh, but you ain't seen nothing yet. It appears that they're now showing ads on 'mature' blogs; generally Google doesn't allow this so presumably they have made an exception for Wordpress.com. But what ads. Here are some ads on a perfectly normal ad about the world's largest penis (in China, apparently):

Please note the top ad. The one for 'Puberty Pictures'. Ewh, Google. Ewh. I don't think I shall be starting an adult blog on Wordpress.com...

Clinton, Clinton Uber Alles

A charming interview with Hillary Clinton. "... among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans..."

Lovely. Just lovely. Incidentally, do non-black, non-white people exist in America for political purposes? Or did they never get around to giving them the vote?

BBC in Scary Cherie Photo Suppression Shocker!

A couple of days ago, I noticed this article about Tony Blair secretly controlling Gordon Brown, presumably in much the same way as Maggie secretly controlled John Major in later episodes of Spitting Image. I was immediately drawn to it by the wonderful photo of Cherie Blair, so bookmarked it. Cherie Blair is of course Tony's crazy wife; you can read about her wacky exploits here.

Have a look. The photo's pretty pedestrian, eh? And well it might be, because the BBC replaced the original with boring stock photography. The original was... brace yourself... a larger version of this:

I assume that all of this is part of the media conspiracy to imply that Tony and Cherie are actually humans, and not evil robots possibly designed by the Spitting Image version of Margaret Thatcher. Think about it. It makes sense.

Bonus: Here, we see the tragic results of XP Service Pack 3 being applied:

My Super Sweet 16 - oh, the horror

There's this horrifying show in MTV called 'My Super Sweet 16', in which a revoltingly well-off kid has an absurd birthday party, and make it very clear just what a horrible spoilt git they are. It's really shocking, but with that sort of train-crash, can't look away quality.

I wouldn't know much about the topic, mind you; I, regarding other kids as more objects of fear than companionship, never actually had any friends in school (those people who insist that school is the best years of your life are obviously dangerously insane), and in college (where people, in my experience, are rather more grown up, saner and less vicious) my birthday rather inconveniently tended to fall during end-of-year exams. Generally the day of a digital logic exam, by some bizarre, sick coincidence. In fact, this year will be the first that I can sensibly do something for my birthday, but the thought of being 23, horrifying as it is, is putting me off a bit.

Sweet 16's primarily an American thing, but MTV UK did make at least one series; one of the episodes is about Lorcan from Blackrock. That'd be Blackrock in Dundalk, by the way; I know, I was amazed too. He's horrible. It's really shockingly awful, and well worth a watch. I realise I'm a bit late here; it was a minor Internet sensation in Ireland a while back. Oh, well. For some reason, although all the other episodes are available to view on MTV's site, this one isn't out in the open; the first part of it is hidden away on their site here though.

He turns out to also have a bebo (knowledge gleaned from aforementioned Internet sensation), but I won't direct you there; you see, the young, well, they don't spell like us. My eyes still ache from punctuation used as letters.

The worst of it is, the very most dreadful of the UK/Ireland ones seem to be better than the US ones; in the US series, a fit of temper should be expected if the birthday present (generally a car or similar) is worth less than $50,000. Really. Welcome to the new, scary, consumertastic society!

And yes, I am watching a lot of crap TV this weekend, thank you for asking.

The Apprentice more embarrassingly stupid than usual

So, I'm watching the Apprentice; it's a guilty pleasure of mine. It's a show where people who incorrectly think that they are good businesspeople compete to win the approval of Sir Alan Sugar, the man who repeatedly tried to introduce overpriced, underspecced email consoles to Britain, at a time when people could buy a perfectly good personal computer for the same price. So, really, the person who makes the most absurd decisions should win.

The task was to buy a list of items in a Marrakesh souk; one of them a Kosher chicken. So... one team bought a dead chicken, then tried to have it blessed in a mosque. Because that's what Kosher means, obviously. I mean, there's stupid, and then there's, well, this.

Update: Alan Sugar was just as horrified as I was at their horrendous stupidity. The best bit; one of the members of the offending team was Jewish, and had put on the first paragraph of his CV that he was 'a good Jewish boy'. Now, I'm a not very good Atheist (of nominally Catholic background) boy, and I seem to have a better idea of what Kosher means than him. Admittedly, I do collect random information about nonsense, but still.

Odd Google Talk feature - say hi!

As you can see, I now have a 'say hi' widget on my blog sidebar. It's a new Google Talk feature which will let users of your site talk to you in a web browser window. It seems quite clever, but so far no-one seems to have used it. Well, one person did, but they disconnected before I answered.

Give it a go. :)

Yahoo(!) Fail(!)

A bit of advice for all the giant web companies out there; don't allow this to happen to your major, popular, high-profile services:
Been like that for the past 20 minutes or so. I mean, do they want to lose their userbase?

Banking in the FUTURE!

I just looked at my online banking, to see this withdrawal:


Please note that this withdrawal happened next Monday; it can anticipate my actions!

Actually, of course, the withdrawal was yesterday evening, on my way home from work. I realise that banks don't really believe in weekends, but it's still a bizarre way to present it.

Blogging from MacOS Dashboard

Oh, what fun! You can get a little widget from Google's site; it's lovely.

Heartily recommended.

Have you bought YOUR chip company yet?

Everyone's doing it! Within a few days of each other, both Sun and Apple bought a chip designer. Apple's makes low-power PowerPCs, Sun's makes (imaginary, as yet) low-power x86s.

Funnily enough, before the Apple/Intel deal, it was widely expected that they would use processors from said PPC designer in their laptops. Interesting... Apple, of course, have kept their options for fleeing to another platform quite open; just about all Apple applications are still compiled for PPC and Intel, which forces developers to consider endian issues and so forth, and a move back to PPC would be particularly easy. However, Apple seems to have most-favoured-vendor status with Intel at the moment, so a move at the moment doesn't look likely. Still, Apple has been known to dump chip makers rather publicly and violently (Motorola over the G4, IBM over the G5), so maybe they're keeping their options open.

Sun's move is more obvious. They bought a low power x86 company. They have a low-power many-cored UltraSparc (T1/2/2+/3) themselves, and would no doubt like to improve it with IP from the acquisition. They might also be interested in making many-cored, low-power x86s, stealing a march on Intel and AMD.

Interesting, nonetheless. I wonder who will be next to buy a weird chip designer? I'm sure Sun is eyeing Azul...

More marvels of captioning from Wikipedia

From the world's premier collection of chairs (yes, I know I'm stealing this from the Register, but Valleywag has been doing so too, lately, so I feel justified), comes this wonderful caption:

Well, yes, so it is. Quite frankly, they shouldn't have bothered.

Forget dodgy links; Ron Paul is the new SEO

For the last few months, Google has been seriously cracking down on link sale and so forth. So, how's a respectable dodgy website owner to manipulate search engines and draw visitors?

A few days ago, I mentioned Ron Paul, noted scary American presidential candidate, on this blog. Within hours, the rather boring article had about eight comments, including one from someone who seemingly thought that I was Ron Paul. In all, about 150 people visited through searching for 'Ron Paul'!

It's clear, then. This is the way to get traffic. Simply pepper everything with irrelevant references to popular weird people. As Ron Paul would say.

AMD in embarrassing admission

AMD's announced that it's bringing out a 12 core chip.

The 2010-destined six-core "Sao Paolo" processor and 12-core "Magny-Cours" will incorporate DDR3 memory and an additional HyperTransport 3.0 link. Magny-Cours will use two six-core die in a multi-chip package.

What's funny about this? Well, AMD has been harping on for years about how dreadful it is that Intel's 2 and then 4 core chips were not 'true' 2 and 4 core chips, but rather two 1 or 2 core dies in a multi-chip package. It was basically their entire marketing campaign for the current Barcelona chips. Ah, well, the shoe's on the other foot now, eh?

Intel should have an 8 core chip (a 'true' 8 core chip, as AMD would have said last Thursday) in the same timeline; maybe they can shove two in a package and call it a 16 core.

Desirable Doodads

Wants:
It's an FPGA development board. I used to love this stuff in college; it'd be quite nice to have my own one to play with.

It's the time to buy one, of course. What with the anaemic dollar, it works out at less than 100 dollars. Hmm...

Disturbing UI message of the day

You know how Apple is famed for their wonderful UI design? Well, they don't always hit the nail on the head, it would seem. From the iPhone SDK installer:
Yargh! In fact, it really means that it is installing MacOS 10.5 development tools, but it is one scary way to put it.

In fairness, though, the new version of XCode is quite the prettiest IDE I have ever used. You should see the code completion! And as for the electric brackets... stunning, simply stunning. Brings a tear to the eye.

Sadly, I do most of my proper work in Eclipse (CUSP and ErlIDE), which isn't so pretty.

TechCrunch in Bad Grammar Article Retraction Shocker

The following, from Michael Arrington's frighteningly enthusiastic blog TechCrunch, appeared in my RSS reader recently:

Set those TiVo’s, folks. Michael just taped a segment for tonight’s Charlie Rose Show.

Note the horrible, wrong, bad, naughty apostrophe. There's also a missing full-stop and some weird dashes, but, quite frankly, they pale in comparison.

When I clicked, to see if people had noticed (TechCrunch readers aren't all the sharpest pencils in the box) I noticed that the article was gone. Just gone. Vanished, like an old oak table.

Whether the deletion was to cover up crimes against English, or just to conceal the fact that Michael Arrington will be appearing on television (they have special camera lenses for the occasion; they can last as long as thirty-seven seconds without shattering) is not, at this point, clear.

Just in case you don't believe me, some evidence. The title bar for the above link:

And the title bar for a non-existent link which would be rather entertaining:

What's going on here, exactly?

Duck sex and international politics

SMBC is a rather fun web-comic. Today's strip:



Oh, so true, so true.

Optimism!

For the first time in some months, I actually feel rather optimistic about life; previously, I had this nasty sense of impending doom; you know how it is. Or maybe you don't; anyway, I get it pretty frequently.

In particular, I had gotten sick of the whole computer thing and was regretting not doing some sort of absurd arts thing in college. That seems to have lifted, now; I am, however, left with a lingering distaste for the whole silly Web 2.0 hype.

Right, next step, go to gym, buy new clothes, and get on with life. I know I've said this stuff before, but I seem to have a little motivation now.

TinyURL in Ron Paul shocker!

You know TinyURL? The URL-shortening service? Guess whose site it links to, on its front page.

Yes, that's right. Noted dangerously insane libertarian politician Ron Paul.

Oh, dear. It's always nice to find out that major, important Internet services are run by crazy people, or at least by people who support crazy people in national elections...

I'd call for a boycott, but Ron is doomed, anyway.

Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby

So, Twitter is allegedly abandoning Ruby on Rails. I must say I'm surprised at this; while it (RoR) is clearly no speed demon, is it really bad enough that they have to run from it like that? Somehow, I can't imagine that RoR alone is the problem; I suspect that there may be some underlying brokenness which they are, for whatever reason, unable or unwilling to deal with.

Apparently, they're looking at PHP or Java. Oh, god, more PHP. Why won't it just die? Hate, hate, hate.

No Erlang mentioned, even though it is theoretically more or less ideal for this sort of application. I hear that they looked at it before, but it was too difficult for them, or something; this is mentioned in the now-famous Scaling Twitter presentation.


Ah, remember when Ruby on Rails was the future, and could do no wrong?

In Soviet Britain, letters post you!

I just saw an ad for the Royal Mail. Which ended in referring to it as 'the Peoples' Post Office'.

I suppose it's a backlash against the whole Consignia thing, really.

Automattic embarassments again

Yes, I know I go on about this stuff far too much. I happen to find it rather amusing. Do feel free to skip it.

So, apparently Matt Mullenweg wrote a rather silly post responding to the Coding Horror post on Wordpress being a bit crap, scalability-wise, in which he implies that people who take issue with Wordpress's stupid, stupid, stupid treatment of the database are idiots. Then he deleted it, probably because it made him look a bit reactionary and mad. Now, in the post he mentioned that his blog was doing fine. From a post on his blog:

Now, call me dangerously insane, but to me, half a second to generate a simple web page sounds like a hell of a lot.

I tend to suspect that a lot of the problem with Wordpress is that Matt (who wrote it, or at least forked it, in the first place) thinks that he is a good developer, and thus seems to try to dominate development; you can sometimes see this in action on the mailing list.

Now, the other matter. A while back, Automattic bought something called Gravatar. It's apparently a service which shows user images beside comments, or something.

In the last few days, Automattic finished re-writing Gravatar. In doing so, they seem to have removed support for PNGs. PNG is a lossless compression format for images, which supports transparency and so forth. For small images, especially drawn images, it can be quite a good choice; JPEG will almost inevitably introduce some distortion, and it does not support transparency; transparency is rather useful for this sort of thing. Matt's comment:

Super Coco: Gravatars are meant to be images, the fact that animations and PNGs were allowed was a bit of an accident. (Neither scales well.) Sorry about that.

Argh.

They really, really need a PR person. Now.

Organic craze, meet food shortages

For the last few years, we've been caught up in an organic food craze. It's all over the place, not just in specialist shops. My local Centra (newsagent/convenience store) sells organic mushrooms, for goodness sakes.

Now, that's all very well, and I'm sure that the consumers are very happy that they think it's improving their health and/or saving the world. There is one issue, though.

Organic food, in general, has lower yields per unit area, and often requires more labour and water. In recent months, for a variety of reasons, food prices have been rising sharply, to the point that in some developing countries costs of living have doubled. Even in the west we're seeing it a bit; shops in the US and London have been rationing rice, for instance.

I suspect that organic food will be far less chic if it results in lowering total food production to the point where there are serious shortages.

Getting WAY too excited about FPGAs

From the Xilinx WebPack (the weirdly-named free version of their FPGA development environment):


Really, no-one should be that excited about a cheap FPGA. Especially not someone wearing a shirt and tie.

Actually, why do companies like Xilinx feel the need for this sort of ad at all? Potential customers will probably be doing their research, and are highly unlikely to be swayed by a crazy grinning blond guy.

Truth, from XKCD

This is, unfortunately, very true. Very true indeed.

*Dies of heart attack*