I have a confession to make. I did something unspeakable today. No, I didn't eat meat, I'm afraid it's much worse than that. I killed a plant. Actually I didn't kill it, that would at least be the humane plantane thing to do under the Geneva Convention. Instead, I... tortured it. Not because I needed information, just to... make it look better. You see, there is this rosebush in the garden that has branched out far beyond its designated area, it's been attempting to annex part of the terrace. So in a mad rage, I grabbed the first weapon I could find, a pair of garden clippers, and went to work on it in a way that would make a serial killer proud. Once I was done, the magnitude of it all overwhelmed me. I broke down on the terrace and wept like a child at all the plant cells that had lost their lives.

I'm expecting SWAT at any moment and I'm sure PETA will hold a nude protest outside my house as well. Meanwhile I'll be in my room playing Counter Strike while I think about what I did.

One of the most beloved characters of the blog is back: the king! While he got some stick from me for serenading English football, he's back with a vengeance. This time he accepted an invitation to celebrate the Pakistani national holiday from the Norwegian Pakistani community. :cool::party: Pakistani politician for Høyre, Aamir J. Sheik, said his eyes teared up at the news. :D

Pakistanis are the biggest minority group in the Oslo region and possibly in the country as a whole. When I was growing up in Holmlia, it was known as an immigrant suburb (nowadays it's a bit more prosperous place) and I knew tons of Pakistanis. One of which was Omar, the best player on my football team, Holmlia SK, who tried to teach me that trick where you loop the ball over your head, but to this day I haven't mastered that. :D

I caught about 5 minutes of this fascinating cheapo aircraft reality series program on tv as I was waiting for my noodles to get ready. You've probably seen one of these shows, called "Heathrow <something>" and they try to make it very dramatic and exciting. "Will Jill get on a flight at all today?" "How will Mark resolve the tense situation with the pissed off customers?" Not exactly award winning stuff.

Anyway, they mentioned in passing that Easyjet has just merged with Go Ahead and so they had to turf all the Go Ahead planes to repaint them in Easyjet colors. This job, consuming 12 people around the clock for six days is worth £26,000. Which is interesting. Easyjet, unlike Ryanair, is a dotcom company, every advertisement where you'll see their name it says "Easyjet.com". I guess they were banking that the dotcom suffix would get them more business, because they're so state of the art.

That got me thinking.. putting aside for a moment the advertising costs, if it takes £26,000 to repaint a plane, and Easyjet has... what... probably 100 planes, that's a lot pressure on the shoulders of the guy in Easyjet's IT department who's responsible for renewing the domain name. If he let it expire and the domain sharks got it, he would forever be known as the guy who lost in excess of £2,600,000 on four letters.

Now Ryanair, they're smarter. If they should one day, god forbid, lose their domain name, they can come back with ryanair.net or ryanair.com.nc or whatever. But Easyjet can't, they're committed. Better not let it expire, domain guy.

As public opinion will have it, geeks are generally harmless. But they are also pranksters. And when you let that personality trait mix with skill and creativity, you have a huge potential for great pranks.

Like this one

If you're one of those people thinking "there isn't enough computer science in this blog", today's entry is for you. We deal in applied computer science.

As I was on my way to the supermarket, I was thinking about an algorithm for a coding project I'm working on. Just as I arrived, it struck me: shopping is an M:N problem. It is isn't it? When you're at home thinking "I need to get some food in here", you make a list of things to buy in your mind. Then you arrive at the store and you have your list, but you're confronted with a longer list - the list of things in the store. So as you go from to display to display, you have an option of two fundamental algorithms:

• for each item in the display, compare to everything on shopping list
• for each item on shopping list, compare to all items in the store

And whichever you choose, you have to loop that around the other list, so it's a heavy computation. In reality, our methods are somewhat more refined, we associate milk in the diary section with milk on the shopping list without having to compare it with all the other items. But memory remains a problem. How many items can you remember when you go shopping? For me it's about 5-6, anymore and I get very error prone.

Another way to shop is just not make a list at all, just go in the store and for every item, run a heuristic to estimate the need for this particular item at home. The heuristic will accept as arguments many different things, like:

• current price vs average price for this item
• the existing supply of this at home
• the need for this in the first place
• the craving for this item, if any

So you see, fundamentally, it's a complex system. No wonder amateurs can find it daunting.