Spikey Pillow

Lick here to find out.

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.

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.

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.

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

Milk that tastes almost not quite like Homo. Does it come from specially selected cows? Or perhaps they are milked by particularly effeminate farm hands? So what does Homo taste like? Well, I was disappointed to discover it tastes just like Hetero milk.

This summer I will be mostly sitting in the sun, selling strawberries by the side of road, writing Haskell code, and reading Introduction to Algorithms.

Ok, so that was the dream, now let's take a look at the dream to reality mapping.

This summer I will be mostly enjoying the Canadian summer, hanging out in UWaterloo, writing Java code, and reading The Intel Optimisation Manual.

But this is not a bad thing because it means I have been accepted for Google Summer of Code. Yay. I will be working on the Jikes RVM (formerly known as Jalapeno). The Jikes RVM is a Java virtual machine intended for research into VMs, like adaptive optimisation, garbage collection, etc. It's implemented in Java. I will be working on the instruction scheduler, taking the PPC scheduler and adding support for x86, as well as hopefully improving its performance.

However, if you are one of the thousands of students not accepted, don't feel bad. Just know that the internal selection process can be very, very arbitrary (I will possibly elaborate on a A Tale Of Two Google Apps later).

We got something in the post today calling itself Local News for Terenure. Apparently the most exciting thing to happen in the village is that you can now turn right in the village outside of peak hours.

You've gotta love suburbia.

Google ads just seem to be getting sillier and sillier. The other day someone was trying to sell me a multidimensional database on gmail. What exactly a multidimensional database does is unclear.

Today, I was looking up a quote from the bible to express my dissatisfaction with the world*. Here is the google ad that was on the site.

No, the answer wasn't the surprising thing.

* No particular reason, it's just one of those days. Here, by the way, is the quote:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ok, I promise no more religious references.

I was really looking forward to carbonated coffee, I mean what could go wrong? Coffee is great, fizzy is good, it seemed like a plan. Well the thing is Coke Cola Blāk isn't just carbonated coffee, it's carbonated coffee with coke and something else. A combination of coffee and coke alone couldn't possibly spawn the evil that is this drink.

I wrote the above three months ago but didn't post it because I was missing something. I just didn't know exactly what it tasted like, until now. Something terrible happened this morning. I went downstairs to make some coffee in my fancy-shamncy coffee machine only to discover that it had been on since yesterday morning. So about two cups of coffee had been slowly concentrated into a thick tarry mass.

That is what Coca Cola Blāk tastes like, burnt caramelised coffee that has been sitting in the machine for about week. Does anyone actually enjoy this? What were Coke Cola thinking? So many unanswered questions.

So finally, I stopped being homeless and no longer have to sleep on couches and in guest rooms (thanks kgmf) and motels. I'm sharing a pretty nice house out in suburbia. It's all very pleasant (lots of trees, no bums), apart from the fact that we have no network connectivity aside from dial up. Since Smart Telecom rather unfortunately took a nose dive last month there hasn't really been much choice of DSL providers, particularly when you need a rather high download quota (the average cap size for any reasonably priced DSL package is 40GB). So we decided to sign up Irish Broadband, since they have no download cap. Well, I guess I can summarize our experience by saying it's week 6 after moving in and we're still using dialup. Irish Broadband's customer support department seems to only tell customers things that will make them feel happy and warm, with complete disregard for reality. So now we're waiting, with the most meagre of connections, for Imagine to set up our DSL line.

I hoped and prayed in the deepest part of my heart that I would never configure my modem, but, alas, here some instructions on how to access the internet 1998 style if you have a Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop. (Non-nerds can stop reading now if they haven't already.)

Lots of people have documented elsewhere how to get Linux to work nicely on this laptop, but none of the have the joy of using dial up so there are no instructions on what drivers to use for the internal winmodem.

The lspci output for the modem and soundcard looks like this:

00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 03)

That's not entirely helpful, Intel AC'97 isn't specific enough. If you go get the scanModem script from the linmodem site it will tell you which actual drivers are needed.

PCIDEV=8086:24c6
CLASS="Class 0703: 8086:24c6"
NAME="Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM "
Vendor=8086
Device=24c6
SUBSYS=1179:0001
SUBNAME=" Toshiba America Info Systems Unknown device 0001"
SUBven=1179
IRQ=11
Test="./scanModem test 8086:24c6 1179:0001"
SOFT=8086:24c6
CODECd=SIL27
COD=SIL
TYPE=ALSA
SLMODEMD_DEVICE=modem:1
PORT="modem:1"
Driver=
DRIVER_=
KDRIVER=
ASOUND=
CODECp=SIL27
CODEC=
COD=SIL
HDA=
IDENT=slmodemd
TST=

This SIL27 part tells us that you have to use the ALSA AC97 modem drivers with the Smart Link slmodemd helper.

If you have ALSA correctly working you should see output like this in dmesg. (If it is compiled as a module you may need to do 'modprobe snd-intel8x0m' first).

ALSA device list:
  #0: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 with AD1981B at 0x34000800, irq 11
  #1: Intel 82801DB-ICH4 Modem at 0x1400, irq 11

If the modem isn't showing up as a device under ALSA you may need to enable support for it in the kernel. You'll need a kernel version >= 2.6.5. The ALSA modem driver is listed as experimental: Intel/SiS/nVidia/AMD MC97 Modem (EXPERIMENTAL) but so far I haven't had any problems with it. These are the kernel config parameters that need to enabled:

 SND=y
 SND_INTEL8X0M=y 

If ALSA is correctly detecting your modem, next you need the Smart Link Soft Modem software. You can get the precompiled binary, which makes installation as simple as sticking slmodemd into /usr/sbin. Otherwise it comes with fairly comprehensive compilation and installation instructions.

If you run slmodemd as root with
slmodemd --alsa
it will it will create a device node for the modem in /dev/ttySL0. You just need to tell wvdial, or whatever dialer program you are using, to use this device and everything should be ready to go.

Last week I visited Sardinia for my sister's wedding. Which I might add was very nice, and yes, the dress was beautiful. (Incidently, it had a slit up the side almost to the top of her leg. Apparently the natives were scandalised that anyone could get married while exposing their leg. Of all things! However, we didn't let such trivialities stop us from getting on with all the marriage stuff like heartily singing psalms in Latin.)

Sardina produces it's own wine, along with other drinks such as the infamous grappa. Sardinia also consumes a lot of it's wine. This is a typical wine store. Are those re-furbished petrol pumps? I can only hope not.

I made my first submission to the flickr group Stick Figures in Peril.

It's from the side of a strange looking railway car next to the university airport.

This is my favouritest flickr group, before I saw it I never got the whole flickr thing. The comments and interpretations are hilarious, you never realise just how much we take the meaning of these signs for granted.

I mean, should we be protecting our children from houses on giant sleds? Or watching out for falling cars?

However recently the group has appeared on digg, boingboing, etc. so there has been a slew of submissions, and very few good comments. If you look at the earlier photos there are some very funny ones.

I may post some of my favourites later, but now I had better get back to work.

Although I've only been here for a couple of weeks I kinda miss home. I spend a lot of time walking around the countryside and it reminds of being at back in Wexford. The countryside here is really similar to Ireland, lots of green fields, trees, etc. In fact, the Indiana countryside is probably more vibrant than Ireland (emeralde isle, my eye!*).

So I've come up with a couple of ways of feeling less homesick.

Watching technolotics. Technolotics is a vid/pod cast about tech and political news made by a couple of people from Trinity. It's really funny and if you read slashdot you'll find the stories pretty interesting. (Btw, Gareth your hair was better before you got it cut ;p).

Technolotics made me feel a bit less homesick, but then I found an even better method. Listening to Today FM's live stream. It's exactly like being at home: the accents, the lame jokes, all those ads for SSIAs. I could almost smell the hobo pee*. In fact it reminded me so much of what it's like back in Dublin that suddenly I am glad to be here.

*For any foreigners, 'my eye' is an Irish exclamation which essentially means, 'yeah, right' or 'as if'. I like to use it just because it sounds so silly.

*Living on Townsend St, only about 20 metres away from the geographical centre of Dublin has given me a rather tainted view of Dublin life. There is a methadone clinic I pass everyday on the way to college, which happens to coincide with the daily distribution of chemical goodness. Every morning I awake to the sounds of drunken or soon to be drunken skangers yelling at each other. On the way to the shop at night I have to go down Fleet St, passing by the refuse point for Independent Newspapers and the Westin Hotel. So I am required to scurry down the street holding my breath while trying not to step in the trails of hobo pee. I know this isn't what city life is about but sometimes I just can't get over the fact that people are pissing outside my front door. Vote Sarah for public urinals!