Spikey Pillow

Just got my first project at Sun released, for early access anyway. (Ok, my actual first piece of code was a bug fix, but it was literally one line, so that hardly counts.) It's a bit of an obscure one, it lets you use VMware's virtual desktop infrastructure from Sun Ray thin clients. So what this means is, (apart from Sun Rays being awesome) you can use your virtual Windows PC from your Sun Ray. So you get all the smart card, host desking, and security for free.

VMware has this SDK which lets you programmatically control your virtual machines, clusters, etc. But, it is pretty awful. It all centers around the Great Managed Object Reference. There any many ways to great your grubby developer hands a Great Managed Object Reference, but most of them involve sacrificing a chicken over your TraversalSpecs and SelectionSpecs. But let's not get into that now.

One thing I love though is way VMware were not satisfied with the usual ternary logic for the system status.

Status	Description
green	The entity is OK.
red	The entity definitely has a problem.
yellow	The entity might have a problem.
gray	The status is unknown.

Status good, bad and unknown I can just about live with, but system might have a problem? Maybe, I will just execute some code to deal with it.

Lick here to find out.

This American Life is a weekly radio show I started listening to last year when I thought I was going to be living in the US. The show consists of stories about weird or life changing experiences. It can be a bit white, liberal, middle-class at times. But, there are some really memorable shows that I want to share with any poor people reading this. So, when I start talking about the armadillo in the bath, you don't think I'm a psycho.

(You can stream the shows directly from the site or download them using the instructions here.)

307: In the Shadow of the City Act 1
This is about a Polish guy looking for adventure, who ends up shipwrecked on an island in New York harbour. He has to devise all these castaway style tricks to stay alive, all the time the Empire State building is just across the harbour. And there are duck shoes, listen to it for the duck shoes. Also, he thinks that badgers have deep hidden secrets.

154: In Dog We Trust Act 3
This guy lives with his mentally retarded brother and his brother's pet armadillo. Unfortunately, the brother gets mad one day and tries to drown the armadillo. Luckily, those things are amazingly resilient. This story is fiction, and thank god, because the ending is really fucked up.

268: My Experimental Phase Prologue
Nancy Updike convinces herself for two years that she is a lesbian. She comes out to all her friends and family, and gets involve in gay rights activism. However, it turns out she just hates men. Un-coming out can be pretty embarrassing.

Kalashnikov Vodka is coming to Ireland in the near future. General Kalashnikov stated in a press release that his goal is to fully satisfy the needs of all real men. The AK-47 was just the first stepping stone in his path for dominance of the male-orientated industry. By 2012 he hopes to have established his own chain of brothels nationwide. The General asks you to express your devotion to Kalashnikov Global by submitting your poems about vodka, guns, and women on the friendship page of his website.

What architecture would you target? Obviously the answer is the JVM...

Oh, and yes, Fortress is very growable.*

*Growable is an actual real word, I checked.

OpenSolaris have a new grant program where they are sponsoring undergrads to do research on OpenSolaris. Research includes anything from writing a new device driver, porting OpenSolaris to a new architecture, new userland software, to improvements to existing programs. You don't even have to be a coder, they are also looking for documentation and training materials. The scope is massive. There is a list of suggested projects and accepted proposals.

The deadline for applications is Thursday May 15th, so you've got about a month to get a proposal in. You also need a faculty member to sponsor your application. The grant is $5000, and the time line is: applications submitted by May 15th, successful applicants announced on June 16th, project end on Dec 16th.

For more info you can sign up to the mailing list here.

PS. If you're not an undergraduate you can still apply for the Community Innovation Awards

Typing or playing a musical instrument in church uses more energy than vigorous sexual activity, according to calorie-count.com.

This site lists the calorie requirements of various activities, grouped into categories like: 'Religious Activities', 'Lawn & Garden', 'Volunteer Activities', and 'Sexual Activity'. (Note it is sexual activity, singular. Apparently there is only one approved method.) According to the site the most strenuous sex is said to require 102 calories per hour, lagging well behind other activities including:

• 258: Walking, 3.5 Mph, Brisk Speed, Not Carrying Anything
• 102: Typing: electric, manual, or computer
• 122: Studying: including reading and/or writing
• 156: Washing dishes/cleaning kitchen
• 170: Sitting playing an instrument at church
• 204: Cleaning at church
• 136: Eating/talking at church or standing eating
• 136: Walk/stand combination for religious purposes

Maybe it's best not to take this kind of advice from mid-westerners.

Use Only Your Nose to Install an Oracle Database (How-to Video)

aka Oracle for the insane

I always ask myself when choosing a DB, can I install it while wearing a straight jacket?

Wikipedia went down today, it was like losing an arm. It's up there with Google in the list of sites that change how you use the internet. It's funny the way you can instantly tell whether an article was written before the emergence of Wikipedia or not.

My new favourite site is wiki-how. Apparently its main use appears to be teaching teenagers how to french kiss.

But aside from that, you can learn how to lube a bicycle chain, catch a duck with your bare hands, or to write a screen play, and how to cope with difficult social situations, like how to get your dad to stop picking on you and that perennial problem: how to deal with your ex boyfriend who happens to be a co worker.

Digitally Imported is a nice radio site with a big selection of electronic music stations. There are some genres I am not familiar with, for example Goa-Psy Trance, Future SynthPop and Gabber. Future SynthPop was pretty pleasant, something you could really DDR to, if that's your kinda thing.

However, Gabber is an entirely difference story. It is something which is probably best used only for psychological warfare. The station was playing someone called Rob Da Rhythm and Twisted & Brainfire's darkside. It sounded like a 1980s SCSI harddrive about to go into terminal read failure, mixed with the melodious sounds of a dot matrix printer furiously producing conspiracy theory flyers. It just kept grinding and grinding in metallic agony. I wonder does Rob da Rhythm work on a construction site. There's nothing like jack hammering concrete all day, coming home and listening to some hardcore Gabber. So you too can appreciate what it feels like to be a beaten to death by a relentless floppy drive determined to read those bad sectors I saved a couple of clips. Believe me, there is a hell of a lot more where this came from.

Clip 1 Clip 2

I've currently got a contract writing code that is destined for the mainframe. If anybody else is looking for a job at nice, stable financial institution I've found the perfect thing. This site has a list of interview questions and answers for JCL, CICS, COBOL and DB2; all the skills a young person needs to replace all those retiring mainframe programmers.

Autumn has arrived, that magical time of year when the leaves wither and fall from the trees, when a bitter icy cold starts to predominate, and when the rich emigrate to California.

As a consolation, most TV shows are resuming in the coming months, so at least we'll have something to do while trapped inside huddling up to the radiator.

So, here for your viewing pleasure is a schedule of when some TV shows are resuming.

Family Guy	Sun, September 23	Season 6: Blue Harvest
House	Tues, September 25	Season 4: Alone
Stargate Atlantis	Fri, September 28	Season 4: Adrift, Part 2
American Dad!	Sun, September 30	Season 3: The Vacation Goo
Dexter	Sun, September 30	But it it will be October 14 until an episode that wasn't leaked is on air
Scrubs	Fri, October 25	Season 7
Battlestar Galactica	Thurs, November 24	Season 4, last season. Apparently the director blames last season's atrocities on the Sci-Fi channel, who put pressure on him to make more standalone episodes. He says he won't make the same mistake this year.
Dr Who	Sun, December 25	Season 4: Christmas Special: Voyage of the Damned Damned indeed, Catherine Tate, from last year's Christmas special, is going to be the companion for the next season.

Leave any additions or corrections below.

Human military paralyzed

Big and scary to be replaced with cute and fuzzy.

It has recently been revealed that the robotic forces are launching a new strategy for world domination.

This is the first activity from behind robot lines since 1999, when they abandoned the old strategy of "overwhelming and terrifying force". Military analysts believe the timing of this tactical reverse was not a coincidence, coming on the heels of the release of The Matrix. It has been widely speculated that the robots were embarrassed into hiding, after letting us come up with the Matrix idea first.

However, leaked robotic memos reveal that they are planning a new offensive, dubbed "Insidious Cuteness". They plan to release thousands of sleeper agents into the heart of human territory, using cuteness as a disguise. Extensive research having shown that human are incapacitated when confronted with things that are small and fluffy. An anonymous military source commented: "This is completely unprecedented, our response plans are all based on the plot of Matrix Revolutions. We're screwed."

A video shows how the robots plan to begin their offensive in Japan, the Japanese believed to be the most susceptible to cuteness.

The robot's disguise technology has advanced significantly since early attempts.

First Attempt

1980s agent, none survived in the field for more than a few minutes. They were easily taken down with flame throwers due to excessive use of hair spray.

Early Cute Agent "creepy as fuck"

Robotic designers fail to realize eyes are an essential part of passing for cute. Also, appearing less like a Japanese space-ghost would help. All prototype models were melted down.

Dog or badger, still can't decide

A rejected proposal for infiltration via pet adoption centers.

Update:It begins

Robot Cannon Goes Berserk, Kills 9

A quine is a program which outputs its source code when run. They are essentially useless, but pretty cute. This is what a quine looks like in English:

"quoted and followed by itself is a quine." quoted and followed by itself is a quine.

This might be easier to read if it is written as Bob quoted and followed by itself is a quine. Letting Bob stand in for quoted and followed by itself is a quine.

Quines are named after Mr Quine, surprise, who was a logician and philosopher. He used the same sort of trick to recreate the liars paradox without using the word this. For completeness here it is:

"yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

On to the programming, here is quine in haskell:

main = putStrLn $ (\x -> x ++ show x)"main = putStrLn $ (\\x -> x ++ show x)"

And here is one in python:

s="""print 's=""%s"";%s' %('"'+s+'"',s)""";print 's=""%s"";%s' %('"'+s+'"',s)

Worst abuse of quoting ever? Perhaps. I wrote it before I discovered repr (backticks) makes this a lot easier.

Once you get the hang of it quines are pretty easy to write. They basically need a way of quoting or escaping a string so code inside it will not be interpreted, and a way of outputting the quoted and unquoted string. For the record, locating and reading the source code from disk or something similar is usually not acceptable.

There is of course the infamous shortest quine in the world that was entered in the Obfuscated C Contest. It consisted of a completely empty file which when compiled, produces a program which outputs the source, i.e. nothing. This was deemed an abuse of the rules too hideous even for the Obfuscated C Contest, so they changed it so that the source must contain as least one byte. From the author: "While strictly speaking, smr.c is not a valid C program, it is not an invalid C program either!" Hmm, taking a look at the makefile he doesn't even call gcc on it, the empty file is just copied and made executable, so it will be interpreted as an empty shell script.