Funny

Few things Wall Streeters love more than a bit of gallows humor.  In that vein:

Christer Ericson in Design patterns are from hell says:

The “Design Patterns” book is one of the worst programming books ever. Yes, really. I’m 100% dead serious when I say that I think it has set (and will continue to set) the progress of software development back by decades. Why?! Let me offer up a parable; I will call it “The Plank.”

Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.

to read more about Johnny Lee, visit his website

From this piece. In addition to their customary symbolic $1 salary:

Each founder received a bonus of $1,723, for a total of $1,724.

Weird.

Check out the reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk and Bic Pens on Amazon.

(via Andrew)

A bit of light relief for my friends in the industry who might be feeling a bit down these days.

Sub prime crisis explained

From Yahoo! Finance article here (bolding mine):

Rieva Lesonsky, co-author of "Start Your Own Business," and senior vice president and editorial director at Entrepreneur magazine:
Lesonsky’s best advice "was from the owner of our magazine, Peter Shea," she recalls. "He said, ‘Housing prices have gone up — get a second mortgage and pay off your debt.’ I did, and I’m debt-free."

Remind me never to read Entrepreneur Magazine.

I just got back from Iceland, which is an amazing country. While there, I discovered an interesting culinary habit, which I thought also has some metaphorical relevance to corporate software development. One of the traditional dishes in Iceland is hakarl, or ‘Putrid Shark’. It is exactly what it sounds like. One of the traditional drinks is brennivin, also known as ‘Black Death’. While brennivin is quite foul tasting, it does have one judicious use. It can be used to wash down the awful taste of putrid shark. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider what Black Death they are using as a chaser for what Putrid Shark

Loyal readers may recall that Lab49 sponsored Wiimbledon this past weekend.

The place was flooded with media attention and the event itself was quite fun and lighthearted. Here are a few stories from around the ‘net covering the event (and featuring yours truly):

MTV Overdrive
ABC World News Tonight
NYTimes BITS Blog entry

Here are my Flickr photos from the event.

Optimization tips

[via donncha]

Disclaimer: What follows is pure unadulterated frivolity. If you have serious work to do then ignore this post!

Suppose God awoke you one night as you slumbered on your keyboard (having collapsed in exhaustion from another all night coding session). God spoketh, “I am angry with you programmers for daring to out do my stunt at the tower of Babel! How dare you invent 10 times more (programming) languages than I did on that day! As your punishment for your great hubris I am imposing an inverse-Babel on your unholy profession. From this day onward for the next 40 years there shalt be only ONE programming language. I commandeth you to picketh which one that language shall be!”

Now, from a practical point of view, this scenario is ridiculous because even if there was a God I am sure he could not give a rat’s tuckus about programmers. Try to run with it anyway! If God asked you, which language would you pick? Be careful! You may be tempted to pick C. The thinking might be that with C you could simply start over and recreate the other missing languages! Sorry, God said no. Pick the language and that’s it for 40 years. Are you really willing to write all your shell scripts, database queries and XML transforms in C for the next 40 years?

Maybe you’d pick LISP? Certainly an improvement in many respects over C but what would happen to all those real-real time systems and 3D first person shooter games if everything became LISP? Could you live with yourself after the 100th multi-car pile up on the freeway after the GC kicked in on that embedded controller in charge of the ABS brakes!?!

Yes, this is a stupid question but trying to answer might teach you a thing or two about what you value as language user/connoisseur.

I was sat with my colleague Alex Vandenberg today, and I spotted a “book” to his side.  I call it a book, but it wasnt really.  Reality is, when I went to lift the book off the table, I actually slipped a disc.  In fact, on my second attempt, sweat pouring, blood vessels almost ready to burst, I did manage to lift the book using the classic clean and jerk, and what a jerk a felt when I slipped my other disc.

On my knees, in pain, a broken man with nothing left in me than the last breaths of a dieing geek, I reached over and, with my last utterance, said, “Bloody Microsoft Press” and I fell unconscious on the floor.

Well I lived to tell the tale, and the nurses are pretty nice here in A&E too. I’ve just seen the doctor, and it has been explained to me that I had attempted to lift this : dead-weight. Apparently, this is not a book, but is in fact nothing other than a heavy weight one would benchpress in the gym. Furthermore, I’m the third person in the hospital this week! Some other happless techy attempted to pick up this Its gotta hurt, at 2704 pages! The doctor said it was like the guy had attempted to lift a small goat, without the appropriate warm-up.

So, it seems Microsoft has realized the health implications of us geeks spending all of these hours sat in front of our computers “burning the midnight oil”, and has gone into producing books the size of small farm animals, with which we can actually use to keep ourselves fit. If, when the cold chill disturbs you from the screen in the dark of night, when everyone else is in bed and you’re still on your computer, dont think its time to go to bed yet. No. Pick up your latest Microsoft Press “book”, get down on the deck, and start to benchpress! In fact I’m sure you could manage a whole workout from just two Microsoft books, but do make sure you work your way up with the lighter weights, first, and dont end up in A&E like me!

Nurse??!!

If you received the following request from an anonymous web visitor, how would you respond?

Please compose and record a song extolling the virtues of your Web site in which the lengths of the words can also be used as a mnemonic for at least the first 50 digits of pi. In other words, the first word has three letters, the second word one letter, the third word four letters, and so on.

Well Andrew, from Songs to Wear Pants To received just such a request. His response, entitled “I Am The First Fifty Digits of Pi“, is a tour-de-force of clever, silly and creative songwriting.

Bucketing, buckety, bucketed - they’re all the rage:

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/03/wsj_teaches_kids_new_slang.html

“Bucketing - it’s not just for vega anymore!”

Loyal readers may have noticed that we recently incorporated a ClustrMap into the blog, over there on the upper right corner. I was looking it over this morning and for the most part I understand it: lots of views in New York where the company was founded; Texas, home to Corpus (our parent company); London, our newest office location; etc.

However one spot in particular struck me as fairly anomalous. Let me zoom in on it for a closer look:

What’s that dot sitting there off the east coast of Africa? Who are you, o reader, out there in the middle of the Indian ocean?

Darren alerted me to what has to be one of the more whimsical programming guides around… Check out The Poignant Guide To Ruby. Apparently the recommended consumption methodology is to “read it leisurely in your housecoat”, but given its generally psychoactive tone, I would imagine it is quite amenable to variations…

Visual Studio was particularly moody today while I was trying to debug an MS Excel add-in project. After it ran out of ways to get in my way, it gave me this:

Visual Studio cannot debug because debug target “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE” is not an EXE file.

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Clever play on the new Linq syntax.

I was reminiscing with my good friend David Bergman about how we used to load games into our early 80s computers from cassette tape. In the case of my ZX Spectrum, you could actually pause the tape player for some games at the appropriate moment, then POKE a value into a memory address, un-pause the tape player, and enjoy unlimited lives… Anyway, David mentioned to me that in Sweden there were pirate radio stations which would play this same audio-encoded format over the radio, so that you could tune in, record it to tape, and then be able to load the game. That just seems insanely cool to me for some reason…