the corner office

Years ago an urban legend email was doing the rounds about KFC no longer using real chickens, and instead using genetically modified, boneless quasi-chicken organisms to up their profits. That might have been a hoax, but this Slate article (via Andrew Sullivan) makes the case for a humane way to generate the dead animals we demand as part of our diet:

How? By growing meat in labs, the way we grow tissue from stem cells. That's the great thing about cells: They're programmed to multiply. You just have to figure out what chemical and structural environment they need to do their thing. Researchers in Holland and the United States are working on the problem. They've grown and sautéed fish that smelled like dinner, though FDA rules didn't allow them to taste it. Now they're working on pork. The short-term goal is sausage, ground beef, and chicken nuggets. Steaks will be more difficult.

I predict some market resistance.

Russ Olsen has a post Seven Skeleton Keys For the New Unix User. I quite enjoy his comment about Unix's de facto text editor, vi:

The problem with vi is not, as many people think, that it is hard to use. No, vi is easy to use. What it is is hard to learn.

I've always been a bit of a ham-fisted vi user, knowing enough to not hurt myself when tweaking config files and the like, but not much more. A little while ago I started a bit of a 'skool me unix' thing as a sub-hobby, and decided to use vi as my 'IDE' for any C system-level programming I did. Living the Unix dream and all that.

It's quite a change from a normal GUI-based IDE, but the truth is that vi (or more correctly, vim) can do just about everything you'd normally do with a GUI. The one thing I learned is that you really have to take the time, and keep making the time, to learn new features. If you do that, you find that you can do certain things incredibly efficiently, but at the same time, it's all too easy to flub around, getting frustrated while battling to accomplish simple editing tasks, and end up believing that the program is backwards.

Having said that, I still spend a lot of time using Eclipse's CDT plug-in as well, and I think that on balance, my brain still prefers the GUI way. Being able to use vi properly is not a bad skill to have, though.

On a brighter note, my favourite right-wing loon, the PT Barnum of modern-day Christendom, puttin' the fun back into fundamentalism, is at it again: the inimitable Pat Robertson flogs an Age-Defying Shake (what, no ™?), and it sounds like potent stuff:

Did you know that Pat Robertson, through rigorous training, leg-pressed 2,000 pounds! How did he do it?

Where does Pat find the time and energy to host a daily, national TV show, head a world-wide ministry, develop visionary scholars, while traveling the globe as a statesman?

One of Pat's secrets to keeping his energy high and his vitality soaring is his age-defying protein shake. Pat developed a delicious, refreshing shake, filled with energy-producing nutrients.

As this article points out, though, the Florida State University record is only 1335 pounds, and the record-holder had to have the leg press machine specially kitted to hold the weight, and the record-holder got burst capillaries in his eyes from the effort.

Although that would explain Pat's handsome squint.

(via The Agitator)

The dearest and I are bookish kinds of people, and the one precious commodity in our home is real estate for all our bookshelves, and I'm the proud owner of heaps of old and shabby books, some of which I've owned for 15+ years or more, but still not gotten around to reading.

(Though I mean to, eventually, promise.)

All of this didn't keep my first ever visit to UNISA's library today from turning into something of a depressing affair. (And no, I don't mean depressing because it's only as a final year Honours student that I finally set foot in the library, having relied on my own purchased textbooks for all these years, although that is tangentially part of the depressing bit).

Libraries are meant to be a celebration of books, a huge store of amassed knowledge, waiting for people to partake, to learn. Problem is, what are they if they're just lifeless warehouses of books, sitting on shelves, that nobody really cares about?

I'm doing a project this year on Linear Programming, and I was blown away by how many books UNISA had on the subject. I checked out a small mountain of books, but my books were a fraction of the number of LP books sitting on the shelves. Many of those books, though, have been sitting there for decades, and I was blown away to see that some of them haven't been checked out for 20 years or more.

It's just the nature of things, I guess, but it strikes me as kind of sad. You pour years of your life and experience into a book, and perhaps a few academics soak it up, and then copies of your book just sit and gather dust in libraries for decades, until long after you're dead. It just seems a little pointless.

'I hope what we have done here will prove that we don't eat babies,' the fire-spewing group's gargantuan-sized frontman, 'Mr Lordi', told The Observer. 'We've always been 110 per cent serious about our act even though in my country so many people have said such terrible things about us because we've got horns protruding from our heads.'

A Finnish heavy metal band named Lordi have won the Eurovision Song Contest, which seems to have come a loooong, very freakin' loooooong way since Abba.

I've spent this week laid low with the dreaded lurgy. The sounds emanating from my chest at night could be used as the soundtrack for a horror movie, and images of me coughing and sniffing would work quite well as the promo poster.

In between sleeping and trying to sleep (koffity koff), I've finally had some time to sit down and play with VMware. Part of my plans for world domination involve me needing a fairly bare-bones Linux installation, and of course VMware is an absolutely brilliant way to set up a working system, and after backing up the base image, fiddle, break and restore and repeat to your heart's content.

Along the way, I got to answer a question I've been wondering for a while: what's the difference between VMware workstation (which is still a commercial, pay-for product) and VMware server (which is free as in with every box of Rice Krispies)? The answer is that there doesn't seem to be much difference at all, at least not for straightforward, normal use. I'm sure there are features that differ, but the server product has allowed me to create and run VMs, and that's all I really need.

One warning I stumbled across though, is that VMware server (which is still in beta), is apparently compiled in 'DEBUG' mode and is therefore a little slower. I haven't noticed it, but I'd infer that if you went with something like VMware player (which is also free), you might get better performance.

The Linus Torvalds - Andrew Tanenbaum dust-up from 1992 about how stupid an idea a monolithic kernel was for a 'modern' operation system is legend in Linux circles. It's 14 years later and the back-and-forth still flares up every now and again. This page discusses Linus Torvalds' latest response to a pro-microkernel article by Tanenbaum in the IEEE Computer magazine.

I've used a number of Tanenbaum's textbooks for university subjects over the past few years, and the 'microkernels are where it's at' sections always provoke a bit of a 'yeah right, that's not what kernel hackers say' reaction from me.

The debate interests me, not because I'm qualified to have opinions about how best to build kernels, but because the debate highlights a tension between theory and practice. Support for microkernels seems quite logical if you consider all the stuff you've learned about software development - modularity, simplicity, defensive design, etc etc. The only problem is that mainstream kernels like Linux are monolithic, and there seems to be no significant impetus for smaller-and-better microkernels to replace them.

Perhaps it's just an issue of barriers to entry, because a large part of the success of a kernel is dependent on driver support, which isn't easy to come by without a huge developer community willing to write the drivers needed, but still: if monolithic kernels were so bad, surely the people who spend the most time writing production-use kernels would come to the same conclusion academics do?

A colleague was telling me about a school friend who used to irritate his teachers by repeating the last few words of each sentence a few times, a few times, a few times.

The next time you're speaking to someone, and want to drive them dilly, give it a try, a try, a try.

... is it proper to say 'rhetoric and scaremongering is back' or 'rhetoric and scaremongering are back'? The latter seems grammatically correct being a plural but it sounds just as wrong and I've spent too much time joking in a fake Afrikaans accent today to trust my judgement, and my copy of Strunk & White are at the cleaners.

(Update: 'are' were correk. What it is! Thanks guys! (and lest posterity condemn me, the S&W thing was tongue in cheek ;-)

I am inclined to believe that the US will not go to war with Iran simply because the bad guy's surname is too hard to pronounce and the news networks will revolt.

In a nutshell though, Ahmadinejad sent a letter to Dubya, saying something between 'yo momma' and 'can't we all jus' get along?' and 'what's in it for me, cowboy?'. Unsurprisingly, the US administration told the handsomely bearded Mr A to get stuffed.

I make a note of this because about 2 years ago I'm sure I commented somewhere that Iran or Syria were sure to follow in Iraq's footsteps, and then a year later it seemed like Iraq was a such an unholy mess that the US wouldn't be able to look at another tin-pot dictatorship without developing that queasy feeling you get when you've puked your guts out on a bottle of Cinzano White and get a whiff of the stuff again.

Now, over the past few weeks, the rhetoric and scare-mongering are back, and the letter seems to be another punctuation mark in what is increasingly looking like a really bad story. Where will the story be in another year's time?

Jim Henley has an analysis (part 1, part 2)of what all the letter stuff means, and the comments are delightfully cynical too.