In the geek world exist funny useless things. If you are freak and football fan, you would enjoy
this.
Now you can see all the football matches LIVE in ASCII !!
telnet ascii-wm.net 2006BTW, Argentina
won 6-0 :D. Let's go for the cup!
Apparently, FIFA can't spell Munich right...
Go to
the
official german FIFA worldcup page on Munich, choose the first Video link
(which won't play, but who cares) and have a look at the city menu in the
video player... Guess what: Münich
So since FIFA doesn't know how to write
München, I guess the
opening game won't take place here, since the teams won't find it?
[Update:
Screenshot done by a friend]
I've been ill with flu the last few days, so I've been doing very little
other than sitting huddled in my recliner, with a large, warm blanket over
me, and my hot water bottle (AKA the laptop) to work on. As a result, I've
been doing a fair amount of random coding, and I've come away with a
larger-than-average amount of... weird shit. It maybe the flu, the strong
drugs I've been taking to keep the symptoms under control, or maybe just the
phase of the moon, but I haven't coded up this much madness in quite a
while. Let me take you through them.
The Proctologist
I've been writing some software which has to talk to an XML-RPC server.
Not so weird. However, because the system lacks any inherent security, the
(strongly) preferred method of communicating with this server is via a Unix
socket. That's right, I'm doing XML-RPC over HTTP over... a Unix socket.
That, you may think, is weird. Well, it is, but it isn't the curious
perversion in and of itself -- for a start, I didn't write that monster,
and I'm only blowing my own trumpet in this article.
No, the perversity is in how I wrote *my* software to deal with it. See,
I'm using Ruby for this software, and the standard Ruby XML-RPC client uses
the built-in Net::HTTP library that comes with Ruby (which is a killer
little HTTP library, BTW). Because the authors of Net::HTTP were lacking
in imagination (or crack pipes) they didn't think to include the native
ability to talk to Unix sockets. I mean, really -- isn't that the
most important feature in a HTTP library?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Anyway, despite the lack of forward planning (and crack pipes) on the part
of the Net::HTTP authors, I needed to get it to talk to a Unix socket. I
could have done the long-winded thing and spend a pile of time
putting in handling of pipe:// (crack or otherwise) URLs, but then
I would have also had to add support for it to the XML-RPC client library
(which did URL validation before passing it on -- good for it). And really,
I don't think I could have handled the guffaws of laughter when I attempted
to submit the patch upstream.
Instead, I put Ruby to it's perfectly-suited use. I simply created the
XML-RPC client object (which created the Net::HTTP object internally), then
inserted my gloved finger and replaced the default TCP socket object in the
Net::HTTP object with a specially crafted Unix socket object pointing to the
correct place.
"Dear god almighty!" I hear the practitioners of good software engineering
practice exclaim. "Doesn't Ruby have protection against such atrocities?"
Why, yes, it does. All of the objects I had to play with are private
instance variables of their parents, and I can't get access to them
normally. However, classes in Ruby are never closed, so I just reopened
them and added accessor methods (which, in Ruby, is as simple as
attr_accessor :http) so I could do my nasty little thing.
I'm quite happy to take the heat for doing what I did. It breaks
encapsulation, and makes everything that little bit more complex. But, on
the other hand, it let me get the job done -- the language gives
you full protection until you say "may I?" and then it gets out of your
way. Personally, I reckon that's a nice tradeoff between C-style full
control (where even the best programmers blow their foot off on a regular
basis) and B&D; languages where you'll never shoot yourself in the foot, but
instead you'll gnaw your leg off in frustration.
Russian Dolls
I'm doing a bunch of interesting things with the Xen hypervisor for work.
Of course, you need to have a way to test all this stuff, and despite a
number of hints, work still hasn't gotten me that fully-kitted out
dual-core Opteron that I want to test (and transcode all my video
<grin>) on that I always wanted. So, instead I've installed Linux in
a qemu image, and then put Xen on that.
Surprisingly, it's worked really well -- I've got Xen running quite happily
in the virtual machine, and I can create and run Xen domUs (the guest VMs)
in the usual fashion.
Now all I need to do is install UML in a Xen domU, and then run some
vservers inside that UML, and I'll have the full collection...
Meeting people's notes online
Despite being on Advogato for some time (but not updating my online diary as often as I would like), I didn't noticed before that my friend
faw was also keeping his activities properly documented on Advogato. I found that he recently even
linked to my
last post.
I was searching for something interesting to read and remembered that for some time I used to read Advogato entries of some people I considered interesting, went to check it out and then I found his notes online. What a surprise :-)
As I was already there reading his diary entries I took the chance to certify him as Journeyer according to Advogato's metric.
Amaya, we even watched an episode of
Fawlty Towers at school. ‘bout Germans of course, but well, British humour is somewhat... strange (the English lesson was about stereotypes... “Never mention the war!”).
Let me point you to a couple of British TV series that I have discovered this year and loved.
* The old: After watching the two seasons of
Faulty Towers, a British Comedy from the 70s with John Cleese (Monty Python), I will never be able to thank
Lars enough for discovering it to me.
* The new: I am now completely hooked to
The IT Crowd. I specially liked the first Episode. Geek humor on TV (and done right)? Yes! Absolutely drolling
