WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?

Poodle Hats

My colleagues at work returned from lunch today to taunt me with their copies of Poodle Hat. I have been somewhat paralysed the last couple of days and haven't had the opportunity to go out and purchase my own copy. Grrr! Oops, time for my meds.

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Hackers, Old Style

Web site of the Day is the MIT Hack Gallery. As they say:

The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!). Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call "cracking").

Some favourites:

The Great Droid
Trogdor the Burninator in Post-It Notes
The Elevator in the Basement
The Gnome Infestation

There are many more, with pictures. There's a Best Of page too, which might be a good place to start.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Nor Any Drop To Drink

This week's New Scientist also has an article on the latest in mega-engineering trends, the same trend that Mapchic wrote about recently on Geographica: dirty great big dams. New Scientist refers to them as "megawater" projects. And the Three Gorges Dam that Mapchic spoke of is only the beginning. Try this for size:

The third, western, arm is the biggest and most complex. It will capture the headwaters of the Yangtze in a 300-metre-high dam [That's as tall as an 80-storey building. — Pixy] downstream from the melting glaciers of Tibet. Every year, it will lift a volume of water equivalent to a quaerter of the annual flow of the river Nile through a 100-kilometre tunnel into the upper reaches of the Yellow river.

The article gives some grim statistics on just why China feels forced to undertake such huge projects:

Five times in the last decade, the Yellow river has failed to reach the sea for part of the year because every drop of water has been diverted.
The aquifers [underground water] of northern China are being depleted by a staggering 30 cubic kilometres a year.
The water table beneath Beijing has fallen 59 metres in the past 40 years.

The north of China, the article tells us, has two thirds of the nation's farmland and only one fifth the water; in the south the figures are reversed. So there are sound reasons for these projects, but the history of similar works - the Aswan Dam beaing a prime example - raise doubts about their long-term prospects.

The article also refers to an (admittedly speculative) Australian plan to "drought-proof" the country by diverting northern rivers such as the Clarence (which is actually in the southern half of Australia) and the Ord, inland in the general direction of Adelaide. Now, I'll grant that Adelaide needs all the water it can get, but the problem with trying to drought-proof Australia is that it's a frigging desert.

Ahem. Sorry. It's not a question of there being more water than needed in some places and a shortage in others, as in China; even in principle there's not enough water to go around. The recent drought affected pretty much the entire country; in Sydney, which is where it is because of the high local rainfall (and the harbour, of course), it didn't rain at all for months. If you want to drought-proof Australia, you have two choices: either fix the world in a permanent La Niña cycle (perhaps by dropping enormous ice cubes in the Pacific) - which really doesn't do that much and will probably piss off every country in the world except Australia - or increase the water supply in the interior of the continent, perhaps by building a mountain range stretching from Ayers Rock to Adelaide. This idea (which was actually floated about twenty years ago) would give real meaning to the term mega-engineering.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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ROT F, L

This week's New Scientist notes that the Alpha Five database package (I've heard of Meta 4, but not of Alpha Five) uses the extension .sex for its files:

As a result, the template directory of this program included filenames such as: "Gift entry.sex, Invited guests.sex, Party budget.sex, Classes to instructors.sex, Classes to students.sex, Recipes.sex, People - Activities.sex, Employees.sex" and much more.

The Motorola 6809 microprocessor, as used in the Tandy Color Computer (my first computer!), had a sign extend instruction; the assembly language mnemonic for which was, reasonably enough, SEX. Sign extend extended a signed 8-bit number to a signed 16-bit number. Due to the way twos-complement arithmetic works, this involves filling the leading byte with either zeroes or ones depending on whether the number was positive or negative. Which is probably more than you wanted to know about the subject, so lets get on with story:

DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the SEX mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the last time this happened, either. The author of "The Intel 8086 Primer", who was one of the original designers of the 8086, noted that there was originally a SEX instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the instruction was renamed CBW and CWD (depending on what was being extended). Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC keyboards) is also missing straight SEX but has logical-or and logical-and instructions ORL and ANL.

That's just one of about a squillion little bits of geek humour to be found in the Jargon File, including the wonderful tales Robin Hood and Friar Tuck and The Story of Mel:

A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:

        Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly'' software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software'' sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

If you are a geek, or love a geek, or just want to understand geeks better, you really need to read The Story of Mel. The jargon file describes it thus:

This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together.

And also notes that:

The original submission to the net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it -- it was straight prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it apparently got modified into the "free verse" form now popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net. That seems appropriate, somehow.

Go forth and read, while I scour the net for new irony.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:37 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Tribes 2

Have you ever wondered how the different European nations view one another? Well, you need wonder no more, now that you have this handy chart!

(Thanks to headscratcher4 on the JREF Forums for this gem.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:20 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Rocking the Casbah

Reason Online has a fascinating article up titled Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah:

Eroticism like this, which seems to emerge from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, isn’t usually very noteworthy. Indeed, the video’s assumption that there’s something "forbidden" about its subject matter that must be approached in an "artistic" fashion may seem outdated. But in this case it is exactly such elements that make the production compelling. The reason is the video’s cultural context: This is not an American or European or Japanese video; it is an Arab artifact. The woman is a singer named Elissa; her song, which has made her a leading celebrity in the Mideast, is entitled "Aychaylak" ("I Live for You"); and both her song and her video were among last year’s biggest music hits in the Arabic-speaking world.

Exactly what the broader implications of this trend are is beyond me, but it's bound to have an impact on the Arab world.

(via Motley Cow, who comments Peace on Earth through Arab pop sex kittens?)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:15 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Geographica

Blog of the Day is Geographica, hosted by Mapchic:

Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
I’m still unemployed
And I have no money.

Oops, that was five days ago. Sorry, Mapchic!

I have to admit that I am a bit sad that I did not get a chance to go to China and see the Yangtze before the gorges were flooded. I understand that it was a lovely region.

What I do know for certain is that this dam will render all previous physical maps of China obsolete.

The changes wrought by this dam go way beyond those of a simple new roadway – instead there will be a new physical map of China. A new lake (no name has been released) will be created it is expected to stretch for almost 400 miles upstream along the Yangtze. The flooded area will cover 2 cities, 11 counties and 116 towns.

Yes, and I wish they'd stop moving borders around and changing names and stuff like that! I just bought a new atlas and I'd like it to last at least a little while, thank you!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Useless Motherboard Features

The Useless Motherboard Feature of the Day Award goes to Gigabyte for their GA-7NNXP, GA-8PENXP, and GA-8KNXP. Why's that?, you ask. I'll tell you. The GA-7NNXP has four memory sockets. How many memory modules do you think you can use with it?

Wrong. Guess again. That's right, three.

Similarly, the GA-8KNXP has six memory sockets. How many can you use? Yes, that's right. Four.

The 8KNXP's problem is actually understandable: The chipset supports two channels, and each channel supports four banks of memory. A double sided module - and almost all modules are double-sided - has two banks. Which means you can only use two modules. Unless you happen to have single-sided modules lying around. There's no point in buying single-sided modules, because they have half the capacity of the double-sided ones but cost rather more than half as much.

The 7NNXP also has two channels. One channel can apparently support four banks of memory, and the other... Well, the 7NNXP (and the five other boards in the same family) is the only Nforce motherboard I've seen with four memory sockets; all the others have three. It would seem that the second channel can only support two banks. If you plug three 512MB double-sided modules into a 7NNXP, you get the expected 1.5GB, but because the memory isn't balanced across the channels, it doesn't work in dual channel mode. If you add a fourth module, you still have 1.5GB of memory - it disables one side on each of the third and fourth modules - and it still doesn't work in dual-channel mode.

Gah. What's the point? Apart from the four people in the world who happen to already have DDR400 single-sided modules that they aren't using, who needs this? And why isn't there a big notice on Gigabyte's site saying "extra memory sockets will not work for most users"?

Grumble. I'm upset mostly because these looked like really nice boards. As it stands, there's nothing really to set them apart from boards from the other manufactures like AOpen, Asus, Abit, Albatron, Asrock... Except that Gigabyte starts with a 'G'.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Peripatetic

Word of the day is peripatetic. (Yes, and I assume it will be gone by tomorrow? — Ed.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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We're the Phone Company

I've always loved this Lily Tomlin sketch from Saturday Night Live, perhaps because I've worked in the industry for (mumble) years. Every so often I'll trot it out when the opportunity arises - or indeed for no reason at all.

Here at the Phone Company we handle eighty-four billion calls a year, serving everyone from presidents and kings to scum of the earth. We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care. Watch this -- just lost Peoria. You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space-age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it? Next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string. We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:53 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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