Spikey Pillow

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.

Lately I've been reading about mainframes as I have to write this wonderful essay about whether or not they have a future. Joy. Here are some odd terms I've come across.

Kneecapping

Let's try not to make our sysadmins sound like homicidal maniacs.

"Some mainframes have models or versions that are configured to operate slower than the potential speed of their central processors. This is widely known as kneecapping, although IBM prefers the term capacity setting, or something similar."
From the Red Book

Parallel Sysplex

We have to make this sound insanely cool.

I guess the suggestion to call it a Mainframe Cluster didn't go down too well in the board meeting. However Parallel Sysplex has all the key features of an awesome tech name: it's made of a several other tech words merged together to give something which sounds cool and expensive but is completely meaningless. I mean, what is a Sysplex? Hmm, if Googlers work in a Googleplex, does that mean we keep our sysadmins in a Sysplex? I know I'd sure like to work somewhere with a name as cool as that.

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.

Recently Ebay's Google ads have been trying to sell me quite strange things:

You too can have your own traveller kid or animal slaughterer. Unfortunately if you follow the link there aren't any knackers for auction at the moment. Maybe later.

I was looking for Nithin on flickr, I wasn't aware he was available on ebay.

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.

sjf:    So why don't they use a less ghey build system?
andrei: Who is 'they'?
sjf:    The maintainers.
andrei: There are no maintainers...
sjf:    Just Jeff?
andrei: Us.
sjf:    We are the maintainers!?!?!?!
        Argghhhh!!!
        I've submitted _myself_ to dailywtf.

Here's an example of some of the delights of the Scheme to C compiler. I didn't write this. I can only assume that it was written by some one back in the days of yore when DEC was a real company and not a back office at HP, or where ever it is today.

Yes, 50 arguments are all anyone would ever want to pass to a function. And not only did they write each case 1 to 50 out by hand, they did it twice!

Scheme to C

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!

Wow, four posts in and it's my first lame personal post.

Gnome are starting a program like Google's summer of code, except it is just for women. They will be hiring some female undergraduates to work on various gnome open source projects. If the project is sufficiently completed they will be paid $3000.

I was planning on applying for Google's soc because open source looks good to employers, it shows initiative and enthusiasm for coding. As well soc would let me do some decent work on open source, something I've wanted to do for a while but have never got around to.

But then I got the job in Indiana and figured I would be too busy for another simultaneous jobs (taking the lesson from last summer). However it turns out the job so far hasn't been too time consuming and, admittedly, I've spent a lot of time slacking.

There is another reason I didn't apply for soc and why I am reluctant to apply for gwsop, I feel like I should be out having a life. My big sisters always tease me, and say that I'm too much a nerd, that I should be out living the sex, drugs and rock n' roll life style. I kinda feel that way too, there's only so much time left in college and there are some things that are harder to get away with when you are a responsible bill paying adult.

It could be in the long term that gwsop would help, I mean we all want to be the uber geek *cough* I mean red hot coder. But then I figure I have the rest of my life to write code.

If anyone thinks I should do otherwise there are 3 days left to apply for gwsop.

I finally got around to reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Amazingly, it tells us that if your languages supports returning procedures then you can implement any datatype. As an example here is how you would implement lists, well pairs really, using only procedures.

(cons constructs a pair from two elements, car returns the first element of a pair, cdr returns the second element of a pair.)

(define (cons x y)
  (define (dispatch m)
    (cond ((= m 0) x)
             ((= m 1) y)
             (else (error "Argument not 0 or 1 -- CONS" m))))

(define (car z) (z 0))

(define (cdr z) (z 1))

Here is a shorter and more mind twisting version:

(define (cons x y)
  (lambda (m) (m x y)))

(define (car z)
  (z (lambda (p q) p)))

(define (cdr z)
  (z (lambda (p q) q)))

In case you don't like lispy languages here is a python version:

def cons(x, y):
    def dispatch(m):
	if m == 0:
	   return x
	elif m == 1:
	   return y
	else:
	    raise "Cons: argument not 1 or 0: %s" % m
    return dispatch

def car(z):
    return z(0)

def cdr(z):
    return z(1)

Or the shorter, scarier version:

def cons(x, y):
    return lambda m: m(x,y)

def car(z):
    return z(lambda p,q: p)

def cdr(z):
    return z(lambda p,q: q)

You can do this for numbers as well, so don't even need your language to provide an integer type. You can use Church numerals, but at point things just get silly.

So I'm sure you're all wondering what I flew half way around the world to do.

Well, I'm working in Purdue University. My supervisor is a big scheme freak, so all my work will be in scheme. At the moment I'm writing benchmark programs for the Debian programming languages shootout using Stalin, which as well as being an agressive soviet dictator is also an agressively optimising scheme compiler. Allegedly it is faster than any other functional programming language implementation, so us interns are given the job of proving it. It's not expected to beat Intel cc, fortran or gcc, but should beat ocaml, mlton, haskell, etc.

When the rest of people from my group arrive I'm going to be working on some of source code repository thing, more will be explained later.

I had a pretty cool party before I left. I think it was the nerdiest I have ever attended.
I got some really cool presents, like PlayDoh (it smells like innocence) and ethernet cross-overers.

This is the fridge before the party, there were even more beers but they didn't fit. And no, the photo isn't all blurry because I was drunk, it's because it needed a really long exposure.