Via Joel on Software, one good reason not to steal your neighbor’s wifi.
… Dr. Myers ain’t got no soul.
Dorky Mr. Rodgers Type: Well, the sun is shining, it’s a beautiful day outside. And God had nothing to do with it, beacuse God doesn’t exist.
Kids: Yaaayyyy!!!!
And then, less than 24 hours after my flight, Beirut International Airport is bombed. I wish there were actually something funny to say about this.
The Daily WTF is one the favorite websites among the software engineers where I work. I thought about posting it a while ago, but I figured no one would get the humor. “What’s funny about referential integrity,” you might ask, and it would be a good question.
Today’s wtf, however, is wonderful. Basically, a programmer does something stupid (uses a system resource to save a value) which works fine for a while (as all great progamming blunders do), and then breaks catastropically when the code is shipped to Europe. Affected users have their system dates set to confusing values and after the 13th of the month printing only works on every second attempt.
What I like best about this is that it gives non-programmers a sense for how completely absurd behavior arises. I think programmers conceive of software and bugs differently from normal people. This is sort of a window into our mindset, in fairly understandable language.
Good news: [t]wo studies [...] demonstrated that coffee drinking might protect against liver cirrhosis.
It’s always nice when two health-wrongs make one health-not-as-wrong.
(Via The Register and Keats’ Telescope.)
[Meanwhile, I apologize for the speed with which this has turned into a booze-blog. I'll work on finding more non-alcoholic material in the near future.]
Do me a favor and take a minute to play with this. It’s a demo application for a framework called Echo2. This framework “removes the developer from having to think in terms of ‘page-based’ applications and enables him/her to develop applications using the conventional object-oriented and event-driven paradigm for user interface development.”
Basically, it allows a person to create very nice website/applications without having to deal with the usual technologies of the internet. Which is nice, because the sort of people who are capable of designing and implementing complex, elegant applications are all snobs who believe HTML is a pain and javascript is ugly.
When you’re done playing with that, tinker with google spreadsheets.
I’m sort of curious as to whether or not people think that these sorts of “internet applications” are good things. There’s already a lot being written about this sort of thing, so I doubt we’ll have anything new to add, but I’m curious nonetheless.
For my part, I remain curmudgeonly and unconvinced. I like for my applications, my configurations, and my data to live on my hardware. My life would be easier if I could change my mind; I use about five different computers in three different operating systems every week, which means learning a ton of different applications to do the same jobs. Each application on each computer requires its own configurations, and my data becomes spread out, which is a hassle. It seems like I am exactly the sort of person who should jump at these ideas. Nonetheless, I continue to configure Thunderbird to check my GMail account on every operating system on every computer, because the GMail interface simple doesn’t do it for me.
A lot of blog systems have a way for you to write an email to the system, which it will then translate into a post. I was not aware that TBND had such a feature. Turns out we do, and it’s me.
Says Tony:
Todd pointed out that the English can drink. Unfortunately, they have poor taste in beer. I entered the bar in Heathrow with a few aims:
- Order an English beer
- Get the (English) beer with the highest ABV
- Get something on draught.
- Don’t spend more than £3.50
Ultimately, that landed me with Fuller’s, which was not a total disappointment, but not as good as one would expect beer abroad to be.
I’ll (hopefully) post soon with more info on my travels, which are (for once) taking me to some interesting shores.
The email-post system — with its sophisticated language comprehension system — responds, “What, Vienna wasn’t sufficiently interesting? Prick.”