Wolf’s Spoor

Especially for freshers…

There is a technology called Internet Relay Chat, which for many years was one of the few ways of interacting with your friends and colleagues around the world on the internet. Now we have lots of IM clients and protocols, but the cool kids all still use IRC.

There is a long and colourful history behind IRC at Aberystwyth, but to summarise (you can read the gory details in other places) bitternet is dead.

IRC is alive and well at irc.aberwiki.org.

Get yourself onto a Sun machine, start up a terminal window and type the following…
$irc
*** Connecting to port 6667 of server change.this.to.a.server
*** Unable to connect to port 6667 of server change.this.to.a.server: Unknown
+host
*** Use /SERVER to connect to a server
/server irc.aberwiki.org
… lots of joining stuff here…
/join #fresher
… stuff…
Hello I am a newbie

You may find yourself in a quiet empty channel, or it might have other folks around. If you feel really brave you might want to try joining #aber, but beware, here be dragons and *shudder* graduates of the department. You need to have a well developed sense of humour to survive for long on #aber, but it is worth the effort getting to know the regulars.

You may want at some point to graduate to another client with different features, but before using scripts, beware they may get you kicked or banned.

Also, get aquainted with http://www.aberwiki.org/ it is a fount of useful (and pretty useless) information.

Enjoy, and see you around

Richard

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

Everything is gone;
Your life’s work has been destroyed.
Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Seeing my great fault
Through darkening blue windows
I begin again

The code was willing,
It considered your request,
But the chips were weak.

Printer not ready.
Could be a fatal error.
Have a pen handy?

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Errors have occurred.
We won’t tell you where or why.
Lazy programmers.

Server’s poor response
Not quick enough for browser.
Timed out, plum blossom.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Login incorrect.
Only perfect spellers may
enter this system.

This site has been moved.
We’d tell you where, but then we’d
have to delete you.

Wind catches lily
Scatt’ring petals to the wind:
Segmentation fault

ABORTED effort:
Close all that you have.
You ask way too much.

First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
so beautifully.

With searching comes loss
and the presence of absence:
“My Novel” not found.

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao, until
You bring fresh toner.

The Web site you seek
cannot be located but
endless others exist

Stay the patient course
Of little worth is your ire
The network is down

A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.

There is a chasm
of carbon and silicon
the software can’t bridge

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that

To have no errors
Would be life without meaning
No struggle, no joy

You step in the stream,
but the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

No keyboard present
Hit F1 to continue
Zen engineering?

Hal, open the file
Hal, open the damn file, Hal
open the, please Hal

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.

The ten thousand things
How long do any persist?
Netscape, too, has gone.

Rather than a beep
Or a rude error message,
These words: “File not found.”

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Brilliant comic again from The Joy of Tech. Mind what you post

Just read it!

I’d not come across xkcd until someone showed me the comic today!

It’s just too good not to look at:

Model-View-Controller lyrics

I’m reposting them here – the song appears to have a habit of disappearing, and these lyrics are too good to lose:

Model, View, Controller
Lyrics and music by James Dempsey.

Model View, Model View, Model View Controller
MVC's the paradigm for factoring your code,
into functional segments so your brain does not explode.
To achieve reusability you gotta keep those boundaries clean,
Model on the one side, View on the other, the Controller's in between.

Model View � It's got three layers like Oreos do.
Model View creamy Controller

Model objects represent your applications raison d'�tre.
Custom classes that contain data logic and et cetra.
You create custom classes in your app's problem domain,
then you can choose to reuse them with all the views,
but the model objects stay the same.

You can model a throttle in a manifold,
Model level two year old.
Model a bottle of fine Chardonnay.
Model all the twaddle stuff people say.
Model the coddle in a boiling eggs.
Model the waddle in Hexley's legs.

One, two, three, four.
Model View � You can model all the models that pose for GQ.
Model View Controller

View objects tend to be controls that view and edit,
Cocoa's got a lot of those, well written to its credit.
Take an NSTextView, hand it any old Unicode string,
the user interacts with it, it can hold most anything.
But the view don't knows about the Model:
That string could be a phone number or the words of Aristotle.
Keep the coupling loose and so achieve a massive level of reuse.

Model View � All rendered very nicely in Aqua blue
Model View Controller

You're probably wondering now.
You're probably wondering how,
the data flows between Model and View.
The Controller has to mediate,
between each layer's changing state,
to synchronize the data of the two.
It pulls and pushes every changed value.
Yeah.

Model View � mad props to the smalltalk crew!
for Model View Controller

Model View � it's pronouced Oh Oh not Uh Uh
Model View Controller

There's a bit more on this story,
a few more miles upon this road,
well nobody seems to get much glory
writing controller code.
Well the model is mission critical
and gorgeous is the view,
But I'm not being lazy, but sometimes it's just crazy
how much code i write is just glue.
And it wouldn't be so tragic,
but the code ain't doing magic:
it's just moving values through.
And I wish I had a dime
for every single time
I set a TextField's stringValue.

Model View � how we're gonna deep�six all that glue
Model View Controller

Controller's know the Model and View very
uahh � intimately
They often are hardcoding
which is very verboten for reusability.
But now you can connect any value you select
to any view property.
And I think you'll start binding,
then you'll be finding less code in your source tree.
Yeah I know I was astounded,
that's not even a rhyme.

But I think it bares repeating
all the code you won't be needing,
when you hook it up in IB.

Model View � it even handles multiple selections too
Model View Controller

Model View � hope I get my G5 before you
Model View Controller

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

The Cambrian Snooze has a great article detailing all the important information that freshers need to know on arriving in “The town of the dancing sheep”

Check it out here

Thanks to Pete for pointing this out to me

I’m currently writing a “must bring these things” letter for our new intake, so that they can bring along the right stuff on the Outward bound weekend, and found myself including the phrase “Always know where your towel is!” Then I started thinking that a lot of these undergrads will not even understand where the phrase comes from, so in the hope of educating the next generation I am posting this here:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value— you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence, a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”

And I did actually use a HHGTTG quote on my data structures and algorithms exam this year too.

Reading Risks Digest this morning I came across a link to an article comparing a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual core. The question posed was how has the massive increase in computing power has changed the speed at which the most commonly performed tasks are performed.

“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry…”– Henry Petroski

Of course, some of you might already have guessed the outcome, and some might not agree with the tests as presented, but the fact is that the tests actually look pretty fair when you consider what most office workers do with their PCs.

Anyway you can read the article for yourself here on hubpages

Don’t forget that today is Global Orgasm day, as well as being the Winter Solstice.

A very merry Yule tide to you all.

Richard