Spikey Pillow

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.

Programmable completion is a bash feature that does context sensitive tab completion, so it will only show files which the current command can accept. For example

unzip [tab]

will only complete zipped files. It also even knows how to tab complete "-" as an argument for most common commands. In case this seems like magic, it isn't, somebody painstakingly maintains a database of the valid arguments. These are all defined in /etc/bash_completion, all 9,000 lines of filename and argument specifications.

If programmable completion isn't already enabled, you can starting using by doing

shopt -s progcomp

But the problem is that sometimes it just isn't quite smart enough. I know what I'm doing, sometimes I really do want to open that random file in mplayer. Just because something ends in .part (thanks, firefox) doesn't mean it's out of bounds. So what to do when bash thinks it knows better than me?

1. Avoid programmable completion for the current command.

   To get default tab completion press

   M-/

   instead of

   [tab]

   This completes filenames, which is what you want 90% of the time. To complete hostnames and usernames there are other key combinations, listed here

2. I want out altogether.

   If you want to disable it forever put

   shopt -u progcomp

   in your .bashrc

3. I am root and never want my users to suffer this inconvience.

   If it's enabled in /etc/profile, or /etc/bash.bashrc, then comment out the lines that look like:

   if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
   
       . /etc/bash_completion
   

   If it's not enabled in either of these places, then it could have been turned on in /etc/skel/.bashrc or /etc/skel/.bash_profile. Your users got a copy of each of these files when you made them an account. There isn't any easy way to turn it off.