Ron’s Blog

Andrew, for those readers who don’t know by now, packed his bags and emigrated to the UK at the end of last month – and is now looking for a job over there.

Hence, this immortal Google Talk conversation:

Andrew
holy shit
there’s a lot of jobs for programmers

Me
so stop being lazy and get one!

Andrew
working on embedded c/c++ systems for the freaking army

Me
oh.

Andrew
at least i’m british born and can get clearance, so I can still apply for the silly things
coz they specifically ask for that.
but there’s the question, do I want to work there? o_O
sure, if I put a bug in a website, someone gets pissed off, but an accidental bug in a rocket launcher?

I’m still wiping the tears from my eyes at the thought of Andrew putting bugs in rocket launchers – the results would be similar to the results of my lack of skill wielding banana bombs in Worms…

Those who have visited the main part of my website lately will have noticed that it’s in serious need of some love and care lately – as soon as I have a free weekend coming up, I intend to do just that. Cue shouts of glee and happiness from those who actually visit that hideous thing.

“So”, you may be asking, “what’s up with the random blog post title”? Nothing random about it – let me explain. Given that I have PHP and MySQL at my disposal as far as my web hosting goes, it makes perfect sense for me to chuck out the old static pages and go with an open-source content management system. Now, the two obvious choices are Joomla! and Drupal, and yes, it’s pretty much six of one, half a dozen of the other as far as choosing between them goes. I have Joomla! experience but no Drupal experience so that may well end up being the deciding factor. If you believe that you can convince me otherwise though, leave a comment; I’d love to hear what you might have to say.

A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping ’round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;

This was posted in one of the Facebook groups that I’m a member of, and I can’t pass up posting it here.

Major bugs have little bugs, which, being fixed, can cause ‘em.
And little bugs from tiny bugs, and on it goes ad nauseam.
The bigger bugs themselves can be pernicious, tangled creatures;
So suck it up and ship the code and we’ll just call them “features”.

I’ve just been sent a link to an emerging programming language called “LOLCODE“, which is by far the funniest thing that I’ve seen for a long, long time.

Here’s an example of a Hello World program written in LOLCODE:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE

Or simple loops:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
   UP VAR!!1
   VISIBLE VAR
   IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

Or file and exception handling:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE “LOLCATS.TXT”?
   AWSUM THX
      VISIBLE FILE
   O NOES
      INVISIBLE “ERROR!”
KTHXBYE

Some people obviously have WAAAY too much time on their hands…