The Lair

Lots of year end parties and the like floating around. Quite a few of the crowd who started with me aren’t travelling around this year’s end - they’re staying on campus (or around it, as the case is) and there are planned activities like parties and pub crawls and so on.

Which brings me to one of the most horrific social intercourse moments of my entire life.

I accepted an invite to hang out and attend a New Year’s party with one of the new arrivals and his girlfriend. In his kindness, and not wanting me to play gooseberry or anything, Poland sets me up with a date. And then casually drops that fact while we’re arranging meetup times and places and so on. *starts hyperventilating*.

First…. ewww.. girl cooties. No, I probably didn’t mean that, but my instinctive cringing could have been mistaken for that response easily.

Second, omg omg omg this female is from the feminazi department. Ok, so that sounded vaguely sexist. It’s called Women’s Studies. Any academic department with such a gender specific name (and not associated with the medical profession) is bound to get that reaction from me. She’s from that department. The place where gender ratios are like Comp Sci, only in inverse.

And I’ve been set up on a blind date with some random female from this department ? Double you tee eff ?!

Quite apart from the sig other finding this completely and rib-ticklingly heel-drummingly hilarious (I live to provide amusement, dontcha know ?), I’m now left in the horns of a dilemma. I don’t want no frickin’ date. Jeebus! I’m too old for this shit.

Updates to follow soon (possibly in January). Merry Christmas and HNY, everyone.

By the way, why has everyone shifted from saying Merry Christmas to Happy Christmas ? Was there some sea change in politically correct greetings for the season while I had my head buried in a book or something ?.

Had an interesting problem to solve over the weekend - how to get RMI to work across a restrictive firewall.

Not an uncommon occurence, you might think - there is a FAQ on the topic. In the FAQ item, there is talk of HTTP encapsulation and all manner of weird and wonderful things. Ah, but you see, I don’t really want to run a webserver to get two RMI aware processes to talk to one another, do I ? If I wanted to use HTTP, I would have done that in the first place. WebDav anyone ?

So, no… the FAQ doesn’t really seem to address the problem in the way I wanted it solved.

Now what ?

A quick examination of the endpoint connections made by RMI revealed some more information - RMI always connects to port 1099, the rmiregistry… Thereafter, it uses a variable (negotiated) port number, much like FTP. Has anyone tried to tunnel FTP through a firewall ? No, it’s not fun. There’s a reason for weird things like PASV FTP. Clearly, the RMI people hadn’t figured out that explicitly specified connection endpoints were a good idea, at least when it comes to negotiating opening ports with a suspicious and paranoid firewall admin.

First step: I had to write a RMISocketFactory and setup the connections to always use one or more of ports 3801, 3802, 3803. That takes care of incoming calls. Now, one quick SSH forwarding later, I could get incoming messages through the firewall.

Outgoing ? This is where it got interesting. OpenSSH (and indeed, other ssh clients for all I know) has an interesting command line switch, -D.

This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local side, and whenever a connection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over the secure channel, and the application protocol is then used to determine where to connect to from the remote machine. Currently the SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 protocols are supported, and ssh will act as a SOCKS server.

Ye gods. SSH can act as a socks server. Well, RMI can use a socks server to send outgoing calls through a firewall. Anything in Java that uses ServerSockets can use Socks to communicate.

Yeah. That seemed like it would work. And so it did. Two ssh invocations and one RMISocketFactory subclassing later, RMI packets were humming through the firewall.

I’ve been astonishingly busy the past week or so - hence the usual fluffy content is going to be replaced by something even less calorific - or more so, depending.

From various quarters, we heard that firefighters at the Buncefield oil depot blaze were woefully prepared to tackle the blaze. Quite apart from commentary on the veracity of this claim, the wannabe linguist in me is immediately drawn to the use of woefully in that phrase. See, the more common usage that I’ve seen is something like woefully inadequate where woefully serves to emphasize the inadequacy. In this particular case, though, the word woefully does something entirely different.

All very uninteresting, unless a major part of the previous year was spent in trying to parse, or make sense of, English language constructs in news stories. Woefully prepared and woefully unprepared. Are they the same thing ? Sorta kinda, but not quite. Now figure that stripping adjectives from a phrase is quite common in some shallow parsing techniques and you’ll see the problem… stripping out woefully in one of those cases is going to produce a really bad result.

In other news, it’s that time of year again. Where mandatory socializing and stilted conversation with people whom you can find very little in common is the rule rather than the exception. I’m speaking, of course, of the dinner parties and pre-Christmas get-togethers that have been heading my way like so many headlights on a motorway. No way to duck them in particular, but oh, the crushing boredom.

The alternative (unfortunate though it may sound) is anesthetizing one’s senses with excessive quantities of alcohol… not the healthiest of exercises, but at least it makes prolonged social contact with a crowd of people a bit more tolerable. Also, I’ve discovered in the last week that Taiwanese drinking games are pretty much like the pub games here. The objective in each case is to pour as much alcohol down your neck as humanly possible. Kudo points for the winner.

Christmas do at the department today and I had the best tasting mince pie to date. And since I’m trying to cram in as many sundry factoids about my existence as possible, let me also say that I’ve “discovered” that the local student supermarket (misleadingly named Costcutter) stocks sauces and various interesting odds and ends that are brought in from China. Of course, these are for the quite large populace of Chinese students, but there’s nothing wrong with someone else trying out a few of the intriguingly named items, is there ? Duck’s feet ? Hmmm. Incidentally, the recipe linked calls for one petal of star anise - the major constituent of Tamiflu.

Dear friends and citizens of GB:
As you are already aware, this has been a tragic weekend for our country - not only have we lost an estimated 20 tanks of a gigantic fuel depot, but it seems like someone has been ignoring the “no smoking” signs hung up in prominent places around the workplace again. The stereotype of Homer Simpson in a nuclear power plant isn’t necessarily an American phenomenon, huh ?

Unfortunately, dear friends, it seems like the huge pall of smoke over most of the South East is going to cause a variety of problems for the inhabitants of the region. Perhaps the most serious among those is the following: we recently agreed on reducing carbon emissions after 2012. It is with deep regret and sadness that I inform you that the equivalent of a Guy Fawkes night bonfire organized by hooligans has exhausted our carbon emission quota for the next decade. Therefore, we are reluctantly compelled to put in place the following emergency measures to bring our carbon emission back on track.

Please refrain from driving, turning on heaters and cooking. Wherever possible, please also refrain from breathing. Remember, reducing your CO₂ emissions by 20% each week means you need to exhale less as well. If you must exhale, please consider diving deep down off the North sea and exhaling near the seabed.

On the bright side (yes, there is one), exhaling less might mean that you’re less likely to get all those nasty respiratory diseases from the soot and carbon particles pumped out by the fire (or not)… and even better, it looks like we’ve actually been drawn into a group with at least one team we can beat. Now if only those pesky Trinidadians don’t take football lessons from the Northern Irish, we’ll be doing swimmingly well.

It’s pretty much a feature of life that people are driven to compete… sometimes in the most obscure pursuits imaginable. The stereotypes in this vein are many, but at least they are predictable. We have the “I drive a Ferrari, what do you drive” type competition and so many other comparisons of that nature, even between casual acquaintances, it’s not even funny.

Actually, it is funny if you can step outside yourself and laugh … especially at yourself. Not quite so funny when you get sucked into competing, no matter how arcane the competition might be. And if you’re ultra competitive, it’s quite hard not to get sucked in.

But in a seeming non-sequitor, I’m actually not going to talk about competing at all. I finally plucked up the courage (and perhaps the blind confidence that comes from not having pressing appointments for the next month or so) to try a vindaloo from the local takeout. In itself, not much of a deal, takeout food is the staple of student life. The difference here is that this particular takeaway has the reputation of serving the hottest vindaloo around and I was keen to match my chillie eating abilities against the fiery curry.

Now, the deal here is that I don’t usually eat takeout food. There are many reasons for this, only one of them being the expense… Takeout places around here are quite well optimized towards a large chunk of student orders during term time and there are a number of discounts and special offers and free stuff enticements to keep people who can’t be bothered cooking well fed. It’s possible to get a reasonable deal, so even starving students can afford to eat takeout.

What drives me away from takeout food is the grease.

It’s an odd thing to some of you to hear me say this, I’m sure. It’s never been part of my dietary habits to skimp on fatty foods and excess calories. I still haven’t modified my eating habits, not since my teens.. I was a skinny tyke then, making a great case for someone who wasn’t fed much. Even if any genetic predisposition to not gaining weight has long since vanished, I still haven’t modified my eating habits to change things and thus, I still eat whatever I feel like eating, with perhaps reckless abandon.

But the Indian food around here is in a league of its own when it comes to oil. Consider that the cardboard covering the top of the aluminium tub and the paper bag enclosing the entire order is transparent with oil after 15 minutes in the delivery vehicle. That should give you an idea of how much oil there is. Dip something into the curry and it’s viscous, dripping slowly away from the fragment of naan. Rub a drop between your fingers and it’s of the same consistency as machine oil.

If all of this doesn’t paint the most appetizing of pictures, well, that’s far from the truth… the curry tastes quite nice. There are disturbing reports about the origin of the funny colours, but surely fiery orangish red is natural, right ? Right ?

Placing the order is also amusing, and this is where my lead-in about competition kicked in. People who order the vindaloo variant as opposed to the slightly less hot madras get more respect. And if you believe that, then you’re also the subtype who believes that all those telephone numbers advertised on late night TV have hot chicks waiting at the other end of the line till you (yes, you) call them. Or not. You can almost detect the concern on the part of the person taking the order (are you sure you said vindaloo, sir ? That’s our hottest dish… with the unsaid subtext being “We wouldn’t want a lawsuit because you burnt your stupid piehole with our classic asbestos-mouth rated liquid fire“). Yes, I was very sure I wanted the vindaloo. Side orders ? A glance at the Chilean (who opted for sanity and a normally spiced curry) and a moment of mad machismo seized me. Chilli naan ? Hmm, that sounds interesting. Why not ?

As you doubtless realized by now, I wasn’t sent to the hospital to get my stomach pumped. Yes, there was a metric shitload of what smelt like roasted chilli powder in that curry … and it was hot, extremely so… but not enough to cause a thermo-nuclear alert from my digestive system.

The clock speed of your gaming rig, the amount of memory on your VGA card, the amount of alcohol you can drink in one sitting. Have you heard of stranger things that form a basis for competition ? I’ve heard of all of those. Perhaps I now need to get myself a tshirt that says “I survived the vindaloo from Zafs“. Top that, chillie eaters.

The Chilean who sat next to me for the best part of two years returned for the penultimate time. Due to space constraints, JV had already been booted from his place … but the desk opposite fell vacant at the right time and he eased there, preparing for his viva.

The four hour examination actually represented the culmination of half a decade’s work. If there were nervous jitters and stress, I really couldn’t blame him for it; he had his first born in the UK while he was working towards the degree, and the entire whirlwind of the dot com boom and bust passed him by while he was in the university. I also gathered that it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify the biannual trips halfway across the planet to add the finishing touches to this thesis.

To no one’s surprise, he passed.

Perhaps to the deteriment of whatever liver function survived my wild undergraduate days, we actually picked The Vic, one of the last bastions in York that serve scrumpy, as the pub to celebrate the award. Also somewhat unfortunately, the Vic had stopped serving food, so we had to nip out in the freezing cold and smuggle in fried chicken under our coats. As can be imagined, this exercise was not the most effective, so we abandoned it after the first run.

In retrospect, drinking a pint of scrumpy (a pint of the local ale in the case of my companion on this hunting expedition) inside 5 minutes probably explained the fiasco with the grease… Anyway, those are mere details, best skated over swiftly.

Quaffing that many pints in one sitting isn’t really the best of habits to get into - but at least I can say I had a great excuse this time around.