Text — Vacay

First vacation in a damn, damn long time. Had to recover from serious burnout. Originally planned on Bella Coola but the lack of a car + distance between attractions wasn’t going to work out this time around. So, Vancouver it was.

Vancouver is f✘✘king awesome.

Photos? Click here!

Text — Why "Cloud computing" is like teenage sex

1. It’s on everybody’s mind all the time.

2. Everyone is talking about it all the time.

3. Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it.

4. Almost no one is really doing it.

5. The few who are doing it are

a. doing it poorly,

b. sure it will be better next time,

c. not practicing it safely.

Text — Oct 31 == Dec 25

Geeky jokes that I haven’t heard before…

~

A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt.

The physicist said “We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed”.

The engineer said “I think I’ve got a few spanners in the back. I’ll take a look and see if I can work out what’s wrong”.

The programmer said “Why don’t we get going again and see if it’s reproducable?”

~

A SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and says, “Can I join you?”

~

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None, that’s a hardware problem.

~

I called the janitor the other day to see what he could do about my dingy linoleum floor. He said he would have been happy to loan me a polisher, but that he hadn’t the slightest idea what he had done with it. I told him not to worry about it - that as a programmer it wasn’t the first time I had experienced a buffer allocation failure due to a memory error.

~

I run across these lists everywhere. Unfortunately, they all seem to have been done by some brain-damaged soul who thinks C is a “normal” language. So I have made an attempt to come up with a new list that is a little more accurate, at least where I sit.

Ada : You aim at your foot and pull the trigger, but the safety stops the gun from firing. The safety won’t budge until you tag your foot with a sign reading “Bullet Hole in this foot”, and call the paramedics. You do so, then shoot yourself in the foot.

C : The gun comes in 38 pieces, with a set of assembly instructions. After painstakingly assembling the pieces, you pull the trigger and the gun promptly backfires and blows your head off.

Assembly : The same as C, except you have to hand-machine all the pieces as well. When you pull the trigger, your whole house explodes.

Java: You break into someone else’s home and steal their water pistol. You then make a child gun that uses .38 rounds instead of water. When you pull the trigger on the child gun, nothing happens to you, but everyone who visits your house gets shot in the foot.

Basic : You aim the gun at a straight horizontal and pull the trigger, which causes a stream of water to be squirted straight down onto your foot.

Pearl : You aim the gun at your foot and pull the trigger. There is no explosion, but gravity causes the bullet to slide out of the barrel and bounce off your foot.

Lisp : You do a small part of the remaining work involved in shooting yourself in the foot. You then call yourself, and tell yourself to shoot yourself in the foot.

Pascal : The same as Ada, except when you pull the trigger a little sign pops out reading “BANG!”.

C++ : The same as Java, except you try to build the parent water pistol using the gun tools from the C gun. When you pull the trigger on the child gun, the parent C gun explodes, spraying water everywhere, including the chamber of the child gun. This causes the child gun to backfire, blowing your head off.

Visual C++ : The same as C++, except that the bullets, the gun parts, the tools you use to put it together, the hospital you get taken to afterwards, and the ambulance that takes you there are all owned by the same company.

APL : Whenever you pull the trigger, no matter where you aim the gun, the bullet ricochets off of 13 objects and lodges in your foot. The gun has been examined by ballistics experts, mechanical engineers, and even the person who made it, and none of them can figure out how it works.

FORTRAN : When you aim the gun at your foot and pull the trigger, a table indexing error causes the gun to shoot its firing pin into your foot instead of the bullet.

~

Saying that Java is nice because it works on every OS is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on every gender.

~

Q: How many C++ programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: You’re still thinking procedurally. A properly designed light bulb object would inherit a change method from a generic light bulb class, so all you would have to do is send a light-bulb-change message.

~

This code is about as stable as a one-legged drunk with hypothermia in a hurricane, balancing on a banana peel… when someone throws him an elephant with bad breath and a worse temper.

~

So this programmer goes out on a date with a hot chick…

Text — Google stock glitch

Wonder if it was a similar situation (though much more under the radar) to the whole United Airlines stock dip a bit ago. Which Google had an unintended hand in. From Peter Neumann, via IP:

[On Tuesday, Sept. 30th] …the last few minutes of NASDAQ had an amazing event relating to Google stock that is not reported in today’s NYT and mentioned only in passing in a very brief detail-free summary in the San Fran Chron.

GOOG: Stock Quote & Summary Data

Last Sale  $320.50

Change Net $60.50  -15.89%

Today’s High/Low $483.63 / $39   [NOT A TYPO]

In a glitch that apparently remains to be explained, the stock price took a horrendous dive in the last few minutes and then recovered. Although some people tried to profit from it, NASDAQ apparently revoked all transactions that occurred during the downward “surge”.

TheAustralian.news.com.au [and the San Francisco Chronicle] blames “erroneous trades” routed to Nasdaq sent Google shares tumbling. Shares rebounded in after-hours trading to $413.06.

I look forward to some detailed explanations for risks.

Text — Android on the Desktop

Via IP, anonymized:

For IP if you like.

Google’s new Chrome web browser caused all kinds of claims it was a new kind of operating system — something designed to (in the future) rival Windows.

Many analysts shot this down. It doesn’t have hardware support, it doesn’t contain drivers — and rightly so. Chrome depends on Windows to access the disk or obtain network access. Android (will) not.

Think of Windows as “top-down” and Android as “bottom-up.” Windows created a platform and as since moved it (and the hardware, disk drivers) to other chips — you see this as Windows Mobile. It runs Windows on phones, tablets and other small devices.

As we all know, Google likes the “Beta” model — release something before it’s well baked as a beta and refine from wide-spread testing.

Android could be the OS those analysts have been looking for. It supports various “small device” chips right now, but could easily be cross-compiled to run on x86 chips found in many PCs. Since it’s based on Linux, Google could easily include the existing Linux drivers to run the hardware, kernel, etc. and let Android run the apps.

I figure Google plans to release the phone and refine the platform until it’s ready (and has the apps to support) it’s release to the desktop. Android will be optimized to run Google’s apps on the web (via Chrome and it’s speedy Javascript).

This is the bottom-up approach to overtaking the desktop that could rival MS. A free OS, running Google Apps (Office, email, etc.) all running off the minimal (and therefore faster and more secure) Android OS.

This theory is even hinted at by the quotes from the Andoid release:

“This is as good a computer as you had a few years ago in this phone,” Google founder Larry Page said.

[with a PC chip, it would be just as fast — or much faster]

“Google is looking to create the same open environment that it enjoys on the desktop,” [Avi Greengart] said.

And via IP as well, a followup from Sashikumar N:

I had a look at Android road map page. As per this page, source code will be released in Q4 2008 and a key announcement on Android Developer Challenge is to be made, could this be about the OS?