Category Archives: Completely Different

Steve Koppelman explains how their similarly Sovietized hunting habits demonstrate that Vice President Cheney is at least 175% the leader Boris Yeltsin was.

Read it, and then consider whether there's anything fishy about this AP story,

President Bush skipped a third round of fishing on his ranch pond Saturday with a crew from an outdoors show, though his performance the day before was something to brag about.

“He took the biggest one of the day,'' a bass nearly four pounds, said Roland Martin, host of the Outdoor Life Network program, “Fishing with Roland Martin.''

Wow, lab reporting styles have really changed since that miserable summer I spent in a lab counting chromosomes in transformed chinese hampster ovary cells. Nobody wrote like this. (Spotted via Dave Farber's IP list)

Attention Nietzsche scholars. America's Finest News Source™ discloses New Nietzschean Diet Lets You Eat Whatever You Fear Most. [Link updated thanks to Hugh Hyatt]

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The Watley Review reports on what people are finding in the Win 2000 and Win NT source code leaked from Microsoft:

“The profanity which pervades the code was the first thing to leap out at you,” said Paul Mayberry, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. “But people have been finding all kinds of strange things in that code.”

The code appears to have been used as a storage file of sorts where Microsoft employees parked other documents they were working on, including personal letters, salary records and disciplinary actions, and, most strikingly, a nearly complete romance novel in 13 chapters distributed among the code.

“There are several remarkable features about this text,” said Mayberry. “In the first place, it does not inspire confidence in the integrity and efficiency of Microsoft's coding to know that someone was able to insert a 30,000 word document with no apparent effects.”

The novel, entitled “Forbidden Love in the Evil Empire,” describes a torrid affair between improbably attractive coders working for a megacorporation similar to Microsoft. Several of the characters appear to be adaptations of Star Trek characters, and at least one, inexplicably, is covered in fur.

What a pity that the Whatley Review describes itself as “dedicated to the production of articles completely without journalistic merit or factual basis, as this would entail leaving our chairs or actually working.” Because I would have loved this to be true.

In the comments to a Very Serious discussion of debugging at Slashdot, appear the Top 10 Rules of Debugging:

• 10. Code is always Beta. It's never done until it's no longer in use or support no longer exists.
• 9. The better the SDK, the more sophisticated the bugs.
• 8. There's always more bugs in the other guy's (girl's) code.
• 7. Declaring code bug-free is asking for it to fail at the worst possible time with the greatest visibility.
• 6. A good design is as likely to have bugs as a bad one. Bugs are equal opportunity.
• 5. Debugging time is inversely proportional to coding time.
• 4. If it works the first time, there's a bug, but you won't find it until you roll it out.
• 3. Debugging is fun. Really! It's when you run out of bugs that you should wonder if you got them all, that's not fun.
• 2. The most difficult bugs to find are in the most straightforward looking code.
• 1. That's not a bug, that's a feature.