Greetings,
welcome to another edition of TWIG. When code misbehaves, sometimes it’s better to let it do whatever it wants. The output might be magic. I have tried that approach this week, no magic yet. Just a very unhappy computer. There is more to life than computing it is very true, but then everything comes back to computing, or rather that interesting logic that it has that I find appealing. I intend to compute to am minimum this weekend and to get out in the waves as much as I can despite it being cold! I hope that your weekends involve sulking at your machines too.
Without further ado…
Cult stuff:
phase of the moon /n./
Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. “This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon.” See also heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon’s true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected’ it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug. (The Hackers dictionary)
please send:
illumi-knob
– Helps you open doors in the dark
Bionamic concept car – it has joysticks!
Void LP record player – the records just spin in mid air – weird!
An Oculas – It’s like a big egg and has a comfy seat in it so you can shut out the world and get on with gaming
A Nooka watch – wow, it’s soooooo cool.
Lexeme of the week:
bandwidth = The ability to juggle or handle an excessive amount of stuff. “I’m really busy and don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate to your issue right now.” (Geekspeak dictionary)
Code of the week:
my $search_key = $something_else;
foreach (keys %some_hash) {
if ($_ eq $search_key) {
do_something($_);
}
}
Geek Tweet of the week:
“My dream is that one day soon I shall have a Hadoop cluster in my garage. Need to get a garage first.” @andymurd
Time-sink of the week:
I am addicted to this one…I warn you, you may be too.
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@missmcj My dream is that one day soon I shall have a Hadoop cluster in my garage. Need to get a garage first.
I knew that tweet would come back to haunt me! I guess I should just embrace my geekdom. BTW I’m on the way to getting a garage so if you know of any (very) cheap servers…