Spikey Pillow

Sun Ray Connector for VDM

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:00:13 +0100

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.

Automating VMware

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 20:02:43 +0100

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.

You may be one of the lucky 25

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 12:55:06 +0100

Lick here to find out.

Best episodes of This American Life

Thu, 5 Jun 2008 13:14:30 +0100

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.

Best. Product. Association. Ever.

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:49:37 +0100

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.

If you were writing a programming language for HPC

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:41:30 +0100

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

http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/Fortress/faq.html#ten

Our initial implementation effort targets the JVM.

Oh, and yes, Fortress is very growable.*

*Growable is an actual real word, I checked.

OpenSolaris SoC => OpenSolaris Undergraduate Student Research Grant Program

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:35:44 +0100

OpenSolaris

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

Update: 19/09

The list of accepted projects has been published. The winners are:

DVD Authoring System for Open Solaris
Igor Struchkov, Vladimir Omelin
Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnical University, Saint-Petersburg, Russia
Image Storage and Retrieval in OpenSolaris
Sanjiv K. Bhatia, Antonin Brjetchka, Drew Garrett, Dante Avery
University of Missouri - Saint Louis, St. Louis, MO, U.S.A.
Application Flow Controller
Huang Liqun, Zhou Li, Zhao Jinhua, Zhou Bin, Zhang Yu
Huazhong universty of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
A study of the Zettabyte File System (ZFS)
Goutam Sanyal, Kurchi Subhra Hazra, Tania Hamid
National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, West Bengal, India
OpenxVM Research
Dinesh Naik, Ashwin Bhat K S, Balaji Rao R
National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India
Antagonistic GA applied to Dynamic Data Sets
Alex Aravind, Joseph Jeffery, Steven Mclea
University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada

You're doing it wrong

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:05:58 +0000

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.

The Danes are very strange

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:35:37 +0000

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 goes down, global IQ drops 10 points

Mon, 7 Jan 2008 19:03:02 +0000

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.