Frivolous Friday, 07.30.2010: I/T bar jokes

A Lenovo laptop walks into a bar. "Hey!" yells the bartender, "This place is non-smoking!"

A Windows program walks into a bar populated by Linux programs, who eye it suspiciously. "I hope you don't think that 'free as in beer' applies to you?" asks the bartender sarcastically. "It's cool," says the Windows program; I can work with WINE."

An iPod Classic walks into a bar and chats up an iPod Touch. The pair seem to be hitting it off well when the iPod Classic pays its bill, puts on its coat and starts to walk out. As it passes the bartender, the barkeep whispers, "What went wrong? You two looked like you were getting on." The iPod shrugs and says, "Eh, I guess we just didn't click, you know?"

A group of .ADD, .DEV and .DRV files walks into a bar. All, save for one, order drinks. As he hands the non-drinking file its complimentary Coke, the bartender winks and says, "You must be the designated driver."

Tux the Penguin walks into a bar with an egg tucked under his arm. "You sure you wanna bring your kid in here?" asks the bartender worriedly, "This place gets pretty rough." "Hey, it's my kid we're talking about," protests Tux. "Of course it's got a secure shell."

A USB drive walks into a bar. "What can I set'cha up with?" asks the barkeep. "We got beer, wine and mixers." "Not quite my style," says the USB drive, "but I wouldn't say 'no' if you have a port available."

A touchscreen walks into a bar, counts the money in its wallet, and asks "How much for taps?"

A Windows installer walks into a bar and proceeds to imbibe heavily. At closing time, the barkeep pessimistically assesses the installer's ability to drive. "No worries," the installer reassures him, "I was just about to call a .CAB anyway."

A Windows registry and a group of Windows programs walk into a bar. The programs become progressively inebriated, while the registry stays stone-cold sober. "They're gonna make it home okay, right?" the bartender sternly asks the registry. "Absolutely," replies the registry, "I've got all their keys."

A group of *nix command-prompts walks into a bar and outstays all the other patrons. Finally, the weary bartender announces, "Alright, folks: You don't have to 'cd /home' but you can't stay here."

Walking into a truism

A brief browser plugin issue with one of "my" power-users pushed the transitioning part of the application to a newer platform. Most days, owning the application that no one else wants to figure out can probably be considered a blessing. The downside, of course, is that no one has your back when you go spelunking in years-old code that's been the work of many hands. And it leaves you as the sole translator not only of the "how," but the "why" to boot.

Such brain-dumping, IMO, is the real reason for word processing--particularly when your brain's in firehose mode. It took two pages of twelve-point Times New Roman, multiple files open in the IDE, multiple tables and functions displayed in the database client, and the text search grinding (multiple times) through hundreds of pages of code before I remembered the adage, "If you truly wish to understand something, try to change it."

Ouch. It's not the first time that lesson's hit home for me. But usually it doesn't hit quite so hard. And knowing that I'm not nearly finished with that list only makes it worse.

Another anecdotal argument for diversity

We're putting the house back together in the whirlwind wake of the Siding and Window Dudes. The dust kicked up by a single window replacement was more evident in the bathroom than elsewhere, due to its preponderance of flat, shiny surface. Then, too, the guyzos had to wash their hands someplace, so the vanity bowl was pretty spattered. So as long as I'm wiping off dust and scouring off spatters, it wasn't that much more work to make it extra-pretty.

Somewhere along the line, Dennis, whose hobbies stretch to the study and re-creation of medieval armor, discovered that the Gel-Gloss he uses to shine and rust-proof armor works amazingly well on a clean vanity. The surfaces can be polished to beyond what Windex can offer, and for the next week or so water beads up in the sink-bowl, the better to race down the drain and not pool into scale. Lovely stuff, that.

The point--the thicker end of it, anyway--is that a fringe perspective provided a better solution than a conventional one (i.e. relying on a standard household cleaner) would have done. The sharper end of the same point is "Don't dismiss out-of-left-field ideas out of hand."

Is the internet making us weirder?

Dennis used to brew his own beer--sort of turned himself into kind of a beer snob, IMO. Which, no doubt, is what prompted my co-worker to email me an article about the world's strongest, most expensive, and probably most oddly-packaged beer. A somewhat more SFW edition is here, although it omits the part about the "koozies" being (humanely?) sourced from roadkill.

I passed the original link on to Dennis thinking that our species is becoming weirder by the nanosecond. Then I thought better of that sentiment. Rather, I think that the perception of weirdness is like the perception of violent crime, at least in one respect. Gallup and other organizations have noted that violent crime has dropped off since the early 1990s, but the zeitgeist has yet to catch up with reality . Largely thanks to the internet, crime reporting is padding for the 24 hour news cycle. For instance, child abductions are tweeted in real-time, rather than having to wait for their turn on a new print run of milk cartons. Similarly, weird doesn't have to wait for word of mouth or write-ups in irregularly-published fanzines.

But there ends the similarity. While the inflated perception of crime doesn't equate to a heightened endorsement of it, propagating the weird via the internet probably makes that little (or large) slice of whimsical weirdness that lurks in many of us feel less alone. That, to my mind, is an excellent thing. And although the decadence of a 110-proof critter-encased brew is solely the perogative of the rich, weird comes in all price ranges, even free. And, mostly thanks to the internet, much of it is open source to boot.

Programming off the grid

I had hoped to be wrong about what working in a new platform would be like without access to internet resources, but it so far is going pretty much as expected. In other words, I find myself plundering the indices of the two Android books I own. My habit for skimming is proving to be a detriment rather than otherwise, simply because of the differences in the way books and internet information are (typically) organized. To some extent, I already appreciated this, but even a few hours of conscripting a motley platoon of bookmarks really brought the point home--and slammed the door behind it.

One thing that does surprise me, however, is how much mileage I'm getting from NetBean's auto-completion feature. It's not "Help" in the disturbing sense of Microsoft's much-despised "Clippy," or even so much the way a spreadsheet tries to guess what you're typing in a cell based on the values already there. Auto-completion in this case can be used to show you the classes within a package or the variables, constants and functions within a class. Which, given the fact that the books I'm using don't include a complete Android lexicon, is very useful.

That being said, the concept of learning to program from a mere book--whose examples may or may not address what I'm actually trying to accomplish--is pretty foreign now. I never, EVER want to go back to that world.

Experiment ahead (early Sunday post)

The CenturyLinq tech. who "fixed" the internet access that spontaneously died sometime after 8 am Thursday arrived & left without bothering to verify that our modem could actually talk to their servers. The earliest we can expect the problem to be addressed is Monday. Which, for me, guarantees that no significant web work will be done. In the spirit of lemons -> granitas, I'll use it an excuse to get some Android dirt under my fingernails. But with much of the development information (language syntax, examples, Q&A sites, blogs) online, that should be an...interesting...exercise.

Confession: I'm "cheating" by taking all 56Mb of the JavaSDK docs on a USB drive--I may be odd, but I'm insane. In any case, it should be an eye-opener to see how dependent I've become on internet access. Will report back Monday.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend, all. I just noticed this bright yellow thing in the sky that I think I remember seeing somewhere before--just not positive it was in La Crosse, though... ;-)

Skunkworks = Proactive pessimism

I finally managed to carve out a few hours to take a hard look at the bug/feature-tracking web application that could replace the office currently uses (that's no longer by its open-source developers). The irony is that, as much as the existing system is tolerated (at best), replacing it--even with something better--will not be pretty. For the time being, I'm deluding myself that I have no illusions about that. [insert wry expression]

Pity is, it's too late in the game to "smuggle" it into use as a skunkworks project. "Smuggle" as in, "Pssssst! Hey, look at this thing I'm using to hack into the system! If you promise not to tell anybody, I'll create an account for you." (Hey, I might as well get some use from the gossip factory, for a change...)