October 2004 Archives

#define please
#define also
#define thanks
#define let

then you can write code like:

also please let a = 1 thanks

Ironic as it sounds, Sun is the inexpensive leader in Opteron workstation design.

The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.

The longer and more complete answer is that after a very long argument about whether sleep(1) should take fractional second arguments, Poul-Henning Kamp < phk@FreeBSD.org> posted a long message entitled "A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass...''. The appropriate portions of that message are quoted below.

"What is it about this bike shed?'' Some of you have asked me.

It is a long story, or rather it is an old story, but it is quite short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book in the early 1960s, called "Parkinson's Law'', which contains a lot of insight into the dynamics of management.

[snip a bit of commentary on the book]

In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the age of the book.

Parkinson shows how you can go into the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.

In Denmark we call it "setting your fingerprint''. It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say "There! I did that.'' It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.

--Poul-Henning Kamp < phk@FreeBSD.org> on freebsd-hackers, October 2, 1999

The Little Engine that Could is an article about the Linksys WRT54G and what you can accomplish with such a small piece of kit. I'm surprised that it's not happening around the globe.

The Daily WTF is a fine site pointed to me by Fintan. Some of the entries have me really saying WTF are they thinking of?

Some people have all the luck. One of the guys in the office won the Spaced Special edition DVD set. Can you guess who it was. Turns out that one of the other co-workers was looking for his web log when he encountered the fact that he'd won. Got to love the sideways web. Then I loaned (yes, I know, technically illegal) my DVDs of spaced to one of the co-workers who had never experienced it so that he could be one with the geek.

Myself and Nicky from the office went to see Oldboy tonight. Oh my god. It was great, disturbing and sick at the same time. It did my head in ... it's Seven meets a love story. Deeply chilling, darkly humourous and definitely a head job.

William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, Maria Bello. Damn it's a sweet movie. William H. Macy plays a cooler. His job is to cause people to lose money in the casino. Every time he bets the house wins. The only problem is that he falls in love and it causes him to win.
It's deeply, deeply cliched - The loser is a total loser, the mobster/casino owner is a complete f**ing asshole. but overall once you get to the end of the movie it gives you a good feeling - in just the same way that Magnolia did.
I'll give it a thumb up bob!.

Top trumps ... with 'great' dictators. Looks like it could be fun, if a bit limited. I want to play Junta with the Bush(shrub) cabinet! Minister for Internal Security, El Presidente for life! Viva el Prez.

Almost everyone who has worked with programmers or mathematicians knows someone with at least a light form of Asperger's Syndrome: the well-recognized symptoms include an inability to interpret peoples' emotions from their facial expressions, incredibly logical thought processes that make math easy but human relations darn near impossible, and fear of physical contact with other people.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is quite possibly the best book I've read this year. It purports to be a novel written by Christopher Boone, a fifteen year old boy who suffers from Asperger's, and it hits the mark spot on. Christopher finds a neighbor's dog dead with a pitchfork stuck in it:

I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

It's funny, but it's also logical, in the irritating way that so many programmers are logical beyond reason. Poor Christopher can barely take a train -- the man behind the window asks him if he wants a single ticket or a round trip, which he doesn't understand.

"And he said, 'Do you want to go one way, or do you want to go and come back?'
And I said, 'I want to stay there when I get there.'
And he said, 'For how long?'
And I said, 'Until I go to university.'
And he said, 'Single, then'."

Solaris security suffers image problem - Apparently there's a buffer overflow with the Xpm library. It's just a shame that I don't use Xpm files for anything anymore - all the gnome applications use .pngs's and I don't think I've seen an .xpm file over the web in years - they're just too big for anything other than icons.

Ok, it all works correctly in the office, as we have a 802.11g wireless hub, but when I'm at home this isn't the case - it's only 802.11(a/b).
All I get is a complaint that it can't set the bit rate.
Grrrr.