Ray Bradbury said, ""

Fire His Boss

I just went out to the store to buy nicotine and caffeine. Just as I walked in the door, a guy jumped the line, grabbed a wad of cash from the clerk's hand, and ran off. The transaction had already occurred; the till was now thirty dollars short and the clerk would have to pay out of his own pocket.

My turn in line, I offered to either tip him for speedily providing nicotinic nourishment, or buy $30 of air along with the other chemicals essential to my continued survival.

"My boss won't let me."

"Your boss doesn't want people giving the store money?"

"Yeah. I'd get fired."

"What if after I paid I threw thirty bucks at you and ran out of the store?"

"My boss would want to know where the money came from."

"Tell him you chased the bastard down and ground his teeth out on the curb and left him next to that crazy homeless guy. That'll get you a raise."

"Sorry, but I can't take your money. Thanks for the offer."

"Then I'll pay you if you tell people I chased the thief down and mauled him like a PCP-crazed bear in heat."

"Sorry."

This poor bastard's boss not only cost him $30, but denied me a reputation as a thief-mutilating vigilante. Damn it to hell. What does a guy have to do to be benevolent and simultaneously an object of terror?

Note to self: next time this happens, I will simply hand over a wad of cash and proceed to brutally maul everyone in the store. I will thereby meet both my Benevolence and Brutality quotas for the day.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 31, 2007 20:44 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Enjoy it while it lasts...

Alert: I am not a misanthrope. I don't hate all people, only stupid people.

It's a new semester, and that means the streets are crawling with bar-hopping, drunken, rohypnol-packing, neanderthallic, Halo-obsessed, beer-kegging, ditsy, illiterate, three-drinks-away-from-aggravated-assault-or-public-display-of-bisexuality, cretins. I.e. freshmen.

Woah, there, Jimmy. One day you'll woot-woot at the wrong person and get a face full of mace. Bar-hop while you can, before you know it you'll be a middle-aged janitor scrubbing the urinals in McDonalds. Who knows, maybe the ability to stumble and vomit are valuable job skills in your future career.

Tiffany, the sooner you realize that "loose, ditsy, and coyly bi-curious" is a damn good way of dropping out, getting pregnant, and spending ten years getting your ass pinched waitressing at an all-night greasy spoon while your looks gradually deteriorate leaving you with no compensatory qualities such as intelligence, the better. A hint: the kind of guys that schtick works on, are the kind of guys who buy RealDolls and dream of being on COPS.

Brad, poor soon-to-be-maced-midgrope, Brad. It would be a damned shame for you if one day Tiffany grew the balls necessary to kick you in yours.

Laugh it up, idiots. You know why you don't see any Asians or Indians or Geeks of Indeterminate Ethnicity playing beer-pong with you? They're chugging coffee and learning how to be your bosses. Think of it this way: in the time it takes you to get from shitty-drunk to I-lost-my-pants-drunk, they just added $1,000 more to their future salaries.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 30, 2007 22:03 EST | Permalink | comments |
hateblogging

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Jabberwocky spam

My comment spam has gotten so progressively goofy that it doesn't even annoy me that much anymore. Sure, I might still dream of encountering the spammer in a dark alley full of wood chippers and carboys of vinegar, but afterwards I would laugh at the thought of "hairy russian New Deal Democrats cheerio I said" and "testdrive MILF DMV bureaucracy?"

I think spam has become William Burroughs' vision: text that has become so permuted that whatever meaning it possesses is interpreted in that deep reptile part of the brain responsible for giggling at crazy homeless people.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 30, 2007 14:58 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, spam horrors

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Ever have one of those days...

where you come home from a hellish day of work to a house stocked with fresh food, fresh cigarettes, enough coffee for many 20-hour days, a couple new movies and books, with an inbox full of interesting source code, college correspondence, and a bank statement that makes you blink twice before letting loose a goofy grin?

Yeah. Life is good.

Now if only I had someone to share it with. Funny, how a nasty relationship managed to make me appreciate even more, in its absence, how precious it is to have someone with whom you can hope and laugh.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 28, 2007 18:32 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
life, introspection

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A Sign...

I've probably got carpel tunnel syndrome. My left wrist has been killing me for weeks, and can barely rotate. My right wrist is slightly better so far.

The most annoying thing? This grievous affliction has not come about through the reinvention of Quicksort or a hand-written kernel. No, not for me. I am probably the only guy with such a haphazard coding technique that for every line of final output, a hundred lines of shit sear through my wrists. Imagine a guy who blows out his eardrums through incessant practice of Stairway to Heaven and you'll get the picture.

To do:
Get ergonomic keyboard
Stop sketching code. Think a little more and maybe I won't have to rewrite a line dozens of times before it works.

Programming: more damaging than compulsive masturbation and a hundred times more addictive.

Update: It's not the typing that is ruining my wrist, it's my touchpad. I discovered this while highlighting a function in Scite using the touchpad rather than the convenient Shift-> shortcut. From now on, I'll stick with Emacs (with its infinite keyboard shortcuts) and use as little touchpad as possible. I wonder how easy it would be to make a Python touchpad-logger so I can put a number on its use each day, something concrete to aim for.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 27, 2007 16:52 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
life, geekery

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JAPH Camel

Check this out:

                                         $_='ev
                                       al("seek\040D
           ATA,0,                  0;");foreach(1..3)
       {;}my               @camel1hump;my$camel;
  my$Camel  ;while(             ){$_=sprintf("%-6
9s",$_);my@dromedary           1=split(//);if(defined($
_=)){@camel1hum        p=split(//);}while(@dromeda
 ry1){my$camel1hump=0      ;my$CAMEL=3;if(defined($_=shif
        t(@dromedary1    ))&&/\S/){$camel1hump+=1<<$CAMEL;}
       $CAMEL--;if(d   efined($_=shift(@dromedary1))&&/\S/){
      $camel1hump+=1  <<$CAMEL;}$CAMEL--;if(defined($_=shift(
     @camel1hump))&&/\S/){$camel1hump+=1<<$CAMEL;}$CAMEL--;if(
     defined($_=shift(@camel1hump))&&/\S/){$camel1hump+=1<<$CAME
     L;;}$camel.=(split(//,"\040..m`{/J\047\134}L^7FX"))[$camel1h
      ump];}$camel.="\n";}@camel1hump=split(/\n/,$camel);foreach(@
      camel1hump){chomp;$Camel=$_;y/LJF7\173\175`\047/\061\062\063\
      064\065\066\067\070/;y/12345678/JL7F\175\173\047`/;$_=reverse;
       print"$_\040$Camel\n";}foreach(@camel1hump){chomp;$Camel=$_;y
        /LJF7\173\175`\047/12345678/;y/12345678/JL7F\175\173\0 47`/;
         $_=reverse;print"\040$_$Camel\n";}';;s/\s*//g;;eval;   eval
           ("seek\040DATA,0,0;");undef$/;$_=;s/\s*//g;(   );;s
             ;^.*_;;;map{eval"print\"$_\"";}/.{4}/g; __DATA__   \124
               \1   50\145\040\165\163\145\040\157\1 46\040\1  41\0
                    40\143\141  \155\145\1 54\040\1   51\155\  141
                    \147\145\0  40\151\156 \040\141    \163\16 3\
                     157\143\   151\141\16  4\151\1     57\156
                     \040\167  \151\164\1   50\040\      120\1
                     45\162\   154\040\15    1\163\      040\14
                     1\040\1   64\162\1      41\144       \145\
                     155\14    1\162\       153\04        0\157
                      \146\     040\11     7\047\         122\1
                      45\15      1\154\1  54\171          \040
                      \046\         012\101\16            3\16
                      3\15           7\143\15             1\14
                      1\16            4\145\163           \054
                     \040            \111\156\14         3\056
                    \040\         125\163\145\14         4\040\
                    167\1        51\164\1  50\0         40\160\
                  145\162                              \155\151
                \163\163                                \151\1
              57\156\056

More at CPAN's JAPH archives.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 27, 2007 01:18 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries, blog nocturne, geekery, hackery

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Brief Reviews

I'm learning C, C++, Java, Perl, Shell, Common Lisp, and Python. Each language has its own personality:

C: The burly mafioso of computing. He may not smell like a bag of roses, but he'll break a knee cap for you without roo much haggling. Piss him off once, though, and he'll gouge out your eyes, swipe your credit cards with a magnet, and sell your sister into white slavery.

C++: That same mafioso after hours, discussing Thomist philosophy over a pint. Instead of gouging out your eyes, he'll just knock you out for a while and take a snapshot of you nude in a public place.

Java: That guy who always speaks in elaborate metaphors. He doesn't say anything so base as, "hello." Instead, he waxes on for hours in an extended conceit involving unicorns, the works of Jacques Derrida, and String Theory. By the time he's finished your wallet's empty and you missed the last bus. You don't dare to interrupt him, though, because he's your boss's brother-in-law.

Perl: The capable drunken Cockney sailor. You may not understand what the hell he's cursing about, but somehow he always manages to seduce the most beautiful women around and procure tickets to the best concerts. Oddly, whenever you mimic him by a hearty yell of "$@x#Ox47$!" someone breaks a bottle over your head.

Shell: We all know that somewhat creepy handyman. The one who is one step away from being homeless, who makes a living building bird-cages and painting houses while leering through the windows. Shell is this guy. He'll get the job done, but you feel slightly dirty having let him on your property.

CLisp: The most feline of languages. If men are programmed in C, women are programmed in Lisp.

Python: The idiot savant of programming languages. He might look like a drooling idiot, but he can hack a Beetle into a Hummer and still have time left to chase butterflies.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 26, 2007 21:44 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery

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Literature Meme

In my Amazon cart, waiting:

Lion's Commentary on the Unix Kernel
O'Reilly's "Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think"
Geoffrey James' "The Zen of Programming"
Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Revolution"
Eric S. Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming"
Brian Kernighan's "The C Programming Languagge" 2nd ed.
Brian Kernighan's "The Elements of Programming Style"
Richard Feynman's "Lectures on Computation"
Ellie Quigley's "Perl by Example"
Ellie Quigley's "Unix Shells by Example"
Steven Kochan's "Unix Shell Programming"
David Bovet's "Understanding the Linux Kernel"
Andrew Koenig's "Accelerated C++"
Douglas Hofstadtler's "Godel Escher Bach"
Raymond Chandler's "Stories and Early Novels"
Malacalypse the Younger's "Principia Discordia: or How I Found the Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her"
Scott Adams' "God's Debris"
Terry Pratchett's "Reaper Man"
Terry Pratchett's "Night Watch"
Terry Pratchett's "Thief of Time"
A scattering of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack novels

I'm going to spread this meme very gently. You simply have 4 hours to tell me what books you are lusting for, before I sic a were-Dachschund on you.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 26, 2007 18:33 EST | Permalink | comments |
books, memery, geekery

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Spam Assassin

I came into the possession of a nice old computer. I decided to turn it into a spam assassin.

The idea is simple. Using the Laundry IP anonymizer, I'm going to set up a Perl/shell script that spiders through, pings, and wgets (into /dev/null) the IP of the spammer and every single (non Lycos/Google/Yahoo) link in a comment spam on my blog, and then deletes the comment. Sort of like a reverse external firewall. Instead of protecting my computer, it will simple beat the living crap out of spammers. If I wanted to be very efficient, I could set up a counter and increment factorially the ping rates for each duplicate spam.

Simple, neat, and righteous. I wonder if I could make money off it. How much would you pay for Hassan i Sabbah 011010 to bitchslap spammers for you?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 26, 2007 10:43 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery, hackery

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You' ll like this

Paul Graham

Chock full of programming wisdom and hackish opinions.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 26, 2007 07:48 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries, geekery

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Lithium-p?

I've been playing around with the Ubuntu distro of Common Lisp. I now know why A.I. researchers are so hyped about their achievements: Lisp has driven them insane.

"((Do-you-behold-p) (my ((luminous) lunar) (porpoises ((as they) ((graze the (neutrino-rich) subfabric)) of ((quan)tum jellybeans)))))?! I have disco-"

"Sorry, Bob, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave the lab. And put on your pants. Guards?"

"why-p?!!"

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 25, 2007 10:08 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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In Which I Threaten Millions Through Semiotic Confusion

Behold! I have taken over the interwebs! Give me all your money!

Or else!

 +-'~`---------------------------------/\--               
||"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" \\\\\\  \/~)           
||                                  \\\\\\  \/_           
 |~~~~~~~~-________________-_________________\ ~--_       
 !---------|_________       ------~~~~~(--   )--~~        
                     \ /~~~~\~~\   )--- \_ /(             
                      ||     |  | \   ()   \\             
                      \\____/_ / ()\        \\            
                       `~~~~~~~~~-. \        \\           
                                   \ \  <($)> \\          
                                    \ \        \\         
                                     \ \        \\        
                                      \ \        \\       
                                       \ \  ()    \|      
                                       _\_\__====~~~      
                                                       

(Hat tip: Jeff Goldstein)

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 25, 2007 03:34 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, news

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Hail Discordia!

Grau doesn't have a monopoly on expletive-laden work posts. He shouldn't.

One of the temps, we will call him Abu Horsetassle, has, over the past two weeks, been noting ominously that another temp would be reassigned shortly. You know that schaedenfreude tone: "Looks like he'll be leaving us soon..."

(A note about Sir Abu Horsetassle: he's a little guy. Not a midget, but a Curly sort of fellow.)

Today, Sir Abu Horsetassle the Magnificent goes off on a half-hour violent rant against a sub-boss. Threats, hysterics, drama-queen intonations, all safely conducted while the sub-boss is on the other side of the building. I stepped in:

Me: The bonobos are a race of chimpanzee with very interesting social patterns. You know, Sir Abu Horsetassle the Magnificent and Infinitely Benevolent, the bonobo social structure is based upon a dominance-submission heirarchy settled by sex, not violence. Fights are rare, every dispute is settled by one bonobo bending over, or by penis-jousting. Among the monkeys, they are the hippies.

SAHMIB: So? I'm going to rip his head right off and tell him who's boss!

Me: You see, humans disguise this dominance-submission heirarchy in conflicts using language. We no longer climb onto branches, dangle from our feet, and jab our penises at each other. No, we instead yell "up yours!" "you're a big asshole" and "fuck me? No, my friend, fuck you!" and "give it to me!" and "I'll fuck you up!" and a host of other thinly disguised homoerotic signals expressing our desire to dominate or submit physically to our adversaries.

SAHMIB: You're saying I'm gay?!

Me: No, your subconscious is. Your whole rant has been an expression of your contradictory sublimated subconscious desires to both physically dominate the sub-boss, as well as to be a good little monkey and submit to his power. All this bluster could have been avoided if you had just been a proper primate and laid it out in the open. Literally.

He almost lunged. But being neither a bonobo nor a man capable of more than bluster, he went back to an idle seething.

Until some hours later when I told the other temp about Sir Abu Horsetassle the Magnificent and Infinitely Benevolent Toward Small Children and Fluffy Kittens' view of his employment future:

SAHMIBTSCFK: What? Who told you that?

Temp: You have been plotting my downfall for weeks now. I will not go gently into that good night. I will NOT.

SAHMIBTSCFK: I never said that you would!

Temp: Not gently at all. It will involve copious bleeding and pain.

SAHMIBTSCFK: Why would I say that?

Temp: I will find out. And you will feel my wraith.

Sowing discord and confusion is always a perk.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 22, 2007 18:06 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
scruffy work

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In Which I Mock Buckminster Fuller

I seem to be a loose assembly of verbs, nouns, and photo-realistic portraits of squirrels.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 22, 2007 03:28 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor

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Heh

Old but still good: the Bastard Operator from Hell.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 21, 2007 03:42 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery

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Monogamy for Dummies

Trying to understand a woman is an NP-Complete problem. For each additional woman, the computational time required increases exponentially. Considering that after decades of marriage a man is still guaranteed to be confused, this means that most men will barely avoid enraging one woman, let alone two. This is also the reason why polygamous cultures are known for their state-of-the-art stone age technology and impressive 7th century political systems: every minute trying to understand a woman is one minute not spend creating useful things like medicine and civil rights.

Every man who believes himself capable of cheating, should sit down and attempt to solve an NP-Complete problem. If you cannot solve the Travelling Salesman Problem, believe me, you will not be able to keep two women from wishing you dead and/or castrated.

Notice I am appealing to self-interest, not morality. We all know how effective religion has been to keep men from fooling around. But tell a man that it is easier to solve a Boolean satisfiability problem for N variables, and he might just reconsider.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 20, 2007 17:50 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
philosophy, geekery, best posts

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How to Debug A Program

You will need:

A pineal gland
A buggy program
A sturdy two-by-four AND a copy of Gorillaz' Gorillaz
A sturdy conviction that you are infallible NAND fallibility
Three pots of strong coffee, black, and lots of sugar
Abundant cigarettes
A direct line of (communication with Eris XOR God) AND a pulse

If the bug is simple idiocy 
	for each instance of the bug
		smoke a cigarette and have some coffee
		if the bug persists
			smoke a cigarette and have some more coffee
		else if the bug remains
			crack your knuckles and pray to
				switch 
					case 1: pray to Eris
						if you believe in Eris or don't
					case 2: pray to God
						if God exists and you don't believe or disbelieve in Eris
                                     
					esac
				twitch
		else if you know how to fix the bug
			crack your knuckles and 
				switch
					case 1: make another bug while trying to fix the first
					case 2: masturbate
					case 3: attain Samedhi and fix the bug
					case 4: lick Bill Gates
					esac
				twitch
		else if you don't know how to fix the bug and you cannot perform case 2
			while you do not know
				cry like a little girl and hit the keyboard with your head
		else if you are a wimp and bothered to look up the solution
			do gloat triumphantly
				while you burn in hell. Wimp
else if the bug is a sign from a higher power
	for each higher power
		mumble something that sounds important
		do continue
			while higher power does not throw lightning at you
		curse Bill Gates
else if the bug is a sign of too little sleep
	if hours of sleep < 3
		do drink some coffee and smoke another cigarette
			while you have coffee and cigarettes
	else if hours of sleep < 3 and you have no coffee and cigarettes
		do buy some and give yourself some time to see the world outside
			while there is a world outside and you have money
	else if hours of sleep ==4
		do wonder at the curiously round number
			while 4 is not an unusually fractional value of 4
	else if hours of sleep > 5
		if you are a wimp
			just admit it
		else you are a wimp and don't know it
			do mumble a bit and try not to get in my way
else if
	switch
		case 1: the bug is a Heisenbug
			find Schroedinger's cat and hit it with two-by-four
				do keep hitting it
					while it refuses to tell you the Plan
		case 2: the bug is not a Heisenbug
			if you played dice with the universe
				stop, return to masturbation
			else 
				beseech Eris or God but not both
		case 4: 
			if there is no case 3
				shrug and drink another cup of coffee
		esac
	twitch
else if the bug is not simple idiocy and 
	the bug is not a sign of a higher power and you got plenty of sleep and the last 
	switch statement made no sense
	for each finger on your hands
		do drink a cup of coffee
			while there are fingers on your hands

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 19, 2007 17:56 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery, best posts

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Bwahaha!

Heh.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 19, 2007 01:55 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery, hackery

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Another programming goal of mine: every day, make a completely useless, utterly absurd program. Doesn't matter what. As long as I produce something that will later make me wonder what the holy hell I was thinking to make such a program, I'm happy.

I have to make a note of it. Look at the birth of Unix: Thompson made the world's most powerful operating system so he could play a video game, Ritchie made C so that video game will run faster. How many fields of mathematics were created by curious guys watching rabbits mating, whiskey barrels being stowed, or toilets flushing? Every single innovation Man has produced has come from some distraction, usually scatological in nature.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 18, 2007 12:26 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Alternative Facts

Podium. N. A device used by a public speaker to hide his physical arousal from an audience. cf. Henry Kissinger's "Power is the Ultimate Aphrodesiac."

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 18, 2007 11:24 EST | Permalink | comments |
alternative facts

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This is not a fnord

I spent most of yesterday reading Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus and Schroedinger's Cat trilogies. The latter is now at the top of the list of books that made me laugh like a madman in public.

Imagine if Philip K Dick, Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Carlin all broke into a genetic research facility, got marvellously wasted, and while goofing off with the machines accidentally combined their DNA. The result would be Wilson.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 18, 2007 03:22 EST | Permalink | comments |
books

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A Typical Pooklekufr Friday Night

I've got three old Bollywood movies, a pot of coffee, an ungodly large number of peaches, a fresh pack of cigarettes, and 300 lines of buggy code.

Bollywood or code? Hema Malini versus null pointers?

Such is the life of a single man.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 17, 2007 16:48 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Heaven...

Write 120 lines of code.
Debug it in less than four saves.
Create more bugs.
Rinse and repeat.

I have a theory that all programmers are masochists. The joy you feel when the code actually works, must be similar to how Sully feels when he survives another Gimpapalooza festival.

"You'll fight the bugs at first, but you will get to know and love bugs. You will be one with the bugs. You will make sweet love to the bugs."

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 16, 2007 21:44 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Who Buys this Crap?

I got an oddly frank spam today:

My name is Araujo Domingos Sakaita Savimbi, son of late Jonas Malheiro Savimbi, a former war lord and rebel leader of Unita movement in Angola. Lately, I decided to relocate from Abidjan to Spain. I have $23Million under my custody. This money was gotten from sales of diamonds which I smuggled out of Angola with the help of TAG Airways pilot. I control my father’s diamond business with arms and munitions business from South Africa. I need to put this money into your account. I will offer you $3Million for your help. You can call me on +34 671 744 036 or email me at araujosavimbi@hotmail.com

What demographic is this spammer aiming for? Those who are mentally defecient enough to fall for scams like this, don't strike me as the type who would willfully aid and abett a self-proclaimed Angolan arms-dealing, blood-diamond-smuggling, Angolan warlord. This spammer has set out to target people who are both severely in need of prefrontal lobotomies and evil. That's a tough catch whatever line of business you're in.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 16, 2007 17:49 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
spam horrors

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I Will Tell You About the Peanut...

I am in full on hack mode. A pack of fresh Camels on one side, a pot of coffee on the other, and ready to supplement my 12-hour day job with eight (unpaid) hours of ramming my head against the wall that is programming.

You see, I had a eureka moment this morning wherein, like both George Washington Carver and Zaphod Beeblebrox searching for the ultimate answer, I received, neither a peanut nor cryptic integer, but the Answer to Array Manipulation and Resizing.

More later.

Update 1:13 a.m.: My mind has, to a large degree, become a baboon. After about 10:00 I might as well have smacked my face repeatedly against the keyboard. The Eureka concept is still there, but it somewhere between my sleep-deprived brain and my fingers it is getting shit-faced and singing Jimmy Buffet songs. Tomorrow I'll have to rewrite almost everything I did today.

Update 4:26 a.m.: I have used up my ration of hack and coding will have to wait until I can steal more from the REM fairy. I'll be a zombie alright, but a zombie who wrote almost 700 lines of buggy code in one day. At this rate I will be writing Windows in a matter of months. Here is a video of what I suspect my neurons are doing at the moment.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 14, 2007 18:12 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Put it to the Test

Uncyclopedia. Heh.

Aspergerians have Wikipedia, geeks burned out by hours of programming have their own outlet. I am willing to bet not a single contributer to either has what we would call a normal sleep-wake cycle.

Finally, a website slightly more accurate than the NY Times!

(Hat tip: the Isiah)

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 14, 2007 02:54 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, discoveries

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A Day in the Life of Scott Beauchamp

"I saw the funniest thing today. An old lady with Parkinsons was trying to walk her Sharpei along the sidewalk, but the leash kept shaking out of her hand. I stood and watched as she struggled to bend her arthritic knees to pick up the leash again. What delightful fun!

"After the fifth time I lit a cigarette and trailed them for another half a block. At the intersection, the leash fell down again. Deep in my mindthoughts I prayed for a hilarious conclusion to this farce, but the dog sat obediently while the old lady meticulously bent to pick up the leash. That wasn't funny at all, so I picked up the dog and threw it into traffic."

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 13, 2007 18:05 EST | Permalink | comments |
moonbats

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NP-Interesting, 2

Until the Isiah and I start up the open wiki (complete with his mission statement), you can find my code at my Unix Kufr blog.

What I'm working on now: subjecting 2-D arrays to rotations, dynamic resizing via pointer arithmetic, and other transformations. In the process I'm also experimenting with array-to-string conversions and string manipulations.

Blogging will be light as I take up a squatter's residence in the code.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 12, 2007 18:34 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Curious Spam

I've been getting some mighty peculiar comment spam lately. It consists of Lycos search links, links that have nothing to do with pron, viagra, or mortgages. It is, in a word, geeky.

Stuff like:

William Blake Tiger Tiger structure of benzene what is the world's largest fission reactor mars orbital Who wrote Dr. Faustus Capillary action at a distance quasar genus planck level world's highest mountain

It is almost as if the spambot knows I can't help clicking such intriguing links. Damn you, curiously nerdy spambots! Damn you to hell!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 11, 2007 19:01 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging, spam horrors

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Woo Hoo! Flash Drives!

I found two 256 meg USB key drives. Not much, but I can still use one to run PuppyLinux on any computer I can get my hands on (supressing evil giggle), and the other for project backups. They also appear small enough that, were I to have to smuggle information out of a secure installation, I could do so with little rectal discomfort.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 11, 2007 12:45 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Some Gratuitous Linkage

Scott Meyers' Basic Instructions (Scott Adams, your memetic influence has worked its way on me.)

Warmlist, an exhaustive list of Bad Things attributed to global warming, from a wobbling of the earth's orbit to the Next Ice Age (not kidding, via a comment at AoS).

Requiem for a Dream Theme on guitar

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 10, 2007 02:40 EST | Permalink | comments |
blog nocturne

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In Which I Steal Jeff Goldstein's Thunder In A Mock Late Night Conversation with My Goldfish Houseguest

Me: So we meet again, Mr. Fish. I'm onto your game.

Goldfish:

Me: Thought you could fool me, huh? Thought I wouldn't notice that you've been buying an awful lot of arsenic for a fish.

Goldfish:

Me: I feel like artfully arranging the raw flesh of a highly poisonous fish with a delicate garnish of bamboo shoots and ginger slices. Where oh where can I find a pufferfish at this time of night?

Goldfish: *gulp*

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 08, 2007 22:51 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, blog nocturne

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NP-Interesting

The Isiah claims to have discovered a solution for integer-interval Travelling Salesman problems, relying on an algorithm which maps the points onto a Cartesian plane and divides the (n-1)!/2 solution space into an arbitrarily smaller number of "clusters" an incremental addition of which does not superpolynomaniacally increase the computational run-time. Considering that for 20 points, the solution space consists of exactly 60,822,550,204,416,000 possible arrangements, every reduction of N number of points into N/k number of clusters can reduce that load enormously. Each cluster can be considered a scaleable subgraph of the total constellation, capable of being permuted into vastly differing shapes retaining the same topological properties; as such there may be only a finite number of "archetypal" clusters which combine to produce all such constellations of arbitrary complexity (think of Penrose tiling).**

I personally think he has only pushed back the NP-erectness one step, and you may see why already, but I will help him batter his head against the NP complex. If he is wrong, I'll get some programming/algorithmics experience. If he is right, I will share the Fields Medal and half the geekette groupies.

His idea: create an open Wiki project wherein people submit constellations and proposed algorithms, compile and compare proposed algorithms, and drip big-O everywhere. 10,000 scattered minds and their PC's can outrun any Cray. Every time some cluster, say, of 20 points, gets attacked, the best algorithm can be determined. All we need is some server space, open source Wiki, and the help of others after the Holy Grail. More soon.

**My own lopsided take.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 08, 2007 19:06 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Core Dump

Ugh. I was working on a shell script frontend interface* for my blogroll-grabbing Java program, when my brain shut down on me. Literally, little bugger walked off and took a swim in the fishbowl before I knew it.

Time to make a huge pot of coffee and chug away until the neurons start screaming.

*What's that, you ask? My supremely kludgy attempt to clear my blogroll of dead blogs. I open shell. Java grabs my blog template, hands it over to Shell for parsing into blog-links, and those links are plugged back into Java in the appropriate URLConnection function to be searched for recent content. Java outputs those links with recent content into dump log. I take dump-log of living blogs and cut-n-paste it into my blogroll (or write a script to do it for me). In the time I have spent playing with this, I could have manually read the entire archives of each blog. That, my friends, is hackery. Of the most incompetent sort.

Update: 9 cups of coffee and a cigar later, my caffeine:nicotine:blood ratio was renewed to its superhuman levels and I merrily continued.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 07, 2007 20:31 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery, hackery

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Pastorius Goes Rushdie

Pastorius has embarked on a poetic memoir, touching and brutally honest. Every man at some point has to ask himself how much of his soul belongs to the past; Pastorius is in search of that answer.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 07, 2007 15:57 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging

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Another Step Into the Land of the Neckbeard

I've begun grovelling through ancient Usenet threads. Alt.folklore.computers, comp.lang.c, comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.java, etc.

As Professor Goldthwaite said, "for me, the so-called 'dead tongues' hold more import than today's newspapers." Or something like that.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 05, 2007 21:17 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Is Your Father Retarded?

Check this out.

I have never seen so much computer stupidity crammed into one place. Good lord, this poor man thinks his son is a hacker because, while looking at deviant bestial midget pron, he picked up a spyware toolbar.

My favourite quote:

8. Is your son obsessed with "Lunix"?

BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War. It is based on a program called "xenix", which was written by Microsoft for the US government. These programs are used by hackers to break into other people's computer systems to steal credit card numbers. They may also be used to break into people's stereos to steal their music, using the "mp3" program. Torovoltos is a notorious hacker, responsible for writing many hacker programs, such as "telnet", which is used by hackers to connect to machines on the internet without using a telephone.

Your son may try to install "lunix" on your hard drive. If he is careful, you may not notice its presence, however, lunix is a capricious beast, and if handled incorrectly, your son may damage your computer, and even break it completely by deleting Windows, at which point you will have to have your computer repaired by a professional.

If you see the word "LILO" during your windows startup (just after you turn the machine on), your son has installed lunix. In order to get rid of it, you will have to send your computer back to the manufacturer, and have them fit a new hard drive. Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface.

Someone please tell me this is satire. For the love of God.

Update: It is satire. I should have followed through one of the links to Judas Priest.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 04, 2007 12:21 EST | Permalink | comments |

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Holy. Crap.

(hat tip: Something Awful)

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 04, 2007 11:01 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, discoveries

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Too frickin' hot

It feels like I've had Fremen chasing me around all day trying to reclaim my bodily fluid. And believe me, that's not very pleasant.

The only person who feels cool today? The Secret Service guard standing by Hillary.

I'm going to watch me some MST3K, write me some code, and eat me some ice cream. Then I'm going to take a nice long bath in a pool of Freon.

Update: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is worse than I remember it to be. Watching that movie is like getting lobotomized by a palsied baboon using a jigsaw.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 02, 2007 15:32 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Literature

I have been spending way, way, too much time at Planet Source Code. It is full to the brim of interesting code, and has little mercenary ads for rogue programmers. The only negative to the site is that for some reason it treats Basic as a programming language.

Calling all C/C++, Java, and Perl hackers: what source code would you consider the most beautiful and enlightening to study? Besides eMacs and Gimp?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at August 02, 2007 03:47 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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