According to a survey commissioned by the Gospel Music Association, only 10 percent of born-again teens believe that copying CDs for friends and unauthorized music downloading are morally wrong . . . Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Computers
A Promising Email Turns Disappointing
I got an email today with the subject line i’ve had eonugh of your bluslhit This should be great!, I thought. I don’t know what I’ve done, but some illiterate has had enough of it and is now going to settle my hash! Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be just another ad for online pharmaceuticals . . . Read more →
Happy Birthday, Spam
On this date in 1994, a message was posted to some Usenet newsgroups by the law firm of Canter and Siegel, advertising its services for the Green Card lottery. Others soon followed in the footsteps of Canter and Siegel, torpedoing the usefulness of newsgroups with junk messages, which eventually spread from Usenet to email. According to Brightmail, most email is now spam. Read more →
Genius or Geek?
I was explaining to my boy how to generate a web page from a database, so I can display it different ways, add new stuff, and not have to rewrite the HTML . . . “I can see why you’re excited about that,” he said, “but I can’t really get excited about it myself because I’m not a computer gee—genius.” “Did you just say ‘computer geek’?” “Almost.” Read more →
A Brilliant Waste of Time
A colleague is internationalizing error messages for a login form. He can tell you that your password is wrong in 12 different languages, even though the users of the application all speak English. “This is a brilliant waste of time,” he chortles. “It sure is . . . if by ‘brilliant waste of time,’ you mean ‘waste of time.’” Read more →
Alan Turing
A colleague at work asked me, “Do you know how Alan Turing died?” “He ate a poisoned apple.” “His mom always maintained that he did that by accident.” “Does his mom also maintain that he just never found the right girl?” Read more →
Undercutting the Offshore Bid
Primate Programming Inc. Read more →
Life Imitates HTTP
I took my family to the airport today. Their flight was scheduled to leave from Gate 404. We couldn’t find it. Read more →
Useless Reports
A client is paying me to streamline its reporting system. Like many companies, they produce a lot of reports, most of them not very useful. So far, my choice for the least useful, or most useless, is one titled “All Sales Data in Database.” Guess what it prints? If you said all the sales data in the database, you’re right! It’s a big report . . . Read more →
How’s Business?
People often ask me: How’s the computer business? One thing I can tell them is that a significant number of my Merry Christmas emails from former colleagues end with something like this: P.S. Please let me know if you hear of any job leads as I am currently unemployed. Read more →
:-)
Research indicates that today is the 20th anniversary of the smiley 🙂 Read more →
Edsger Dijkstra, 1930-2002
I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, ‘Dijkstra would not have liked this,’ well, that would be enough immortality for me. — Edsger Dijkstra Dijkstra, a pioneer in computer science and structured programming, has died of cancer at age 72. He was widely known for his note “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” — published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM — which fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars. (For an opposing viewpoint, see “Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal.”) Reportedly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will, by policy, no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. Use of titles of the form “X Considered Y” remains a persistent in-joke. Another in-joke: Dijkstra and… Read more →
Fun Fact of the Day
If you leave the final “s” off the word “assess,” a spell-checker will not flag it as an error. This was an accidental discovery, like penicillin . . . Read more →
Leaving Silicon Valley
Notes from the Rainbow Hotel Casino, Wendover, NV: Belongings in a U-Haul in the parking lot. I liked the Bay Area, but it was indifferent to me. I sold online ads for an Internet company. I wore shorts to work and still made a lot of money. Then in October, the executives called a meeting and told us the company was closing. We had an hour to leave the building. I was really sad. I got another job selling ads for LookSmart. But LookSmart wasn’t as smart as it looked. In January, they laid off 30 percent of the staff, including me. There was good news too. I could always find 12 friends to go bowling on a Friday afternoon because they didn’t have jobs either. Now I’m going B-to-C. Back to Cleveland. Read more →