Humour

Have a webby Christmas

Simon Willison — 2005-12-01T13:24:07-00:00

Sadly there's no Perl Advent Calendar this year, but the slack has been picked up by Drew McLellan's 24 ways to impress your friends - a neat web development tip every day until Christmas.

Lazyweb request: 24 ways is currently devoid of baubles, reindeer, animated doors and DHTML snowflakes. Someone needs to write a Greasemonkey script (now Firefox 1.5 compatible).

No such problem over at radiac.net, where Richard has outdone himself.

Slashdot Humour

Simon Willison — 2004-04-21T01:52:03-00:00

Spotted in a thread about a newly discovered TCP/IP vulnerability:

No problem (Score:5, Funny)
by niom (638987) on Tuesday April 20, @03:18PM (#8920438)

I'll just switch to UDP.

Re:No problem (Score:5, Funny)
by TheTomcat (53158) on Tuesday April 20, @03:25PM (#8920559)

more like:
UDP just I. switch ll'll to I just

Internet culture

Simon Willison — 2004-03-20T01:00:38-00:00

In what could be the most significant internet cultural event of the decade, Strong Bad has answered his 100th email. Attempts to guess the URL ahead of time were futile.

Alex Russell was sporting a The Cheat T-Shirt at SxSW. He said that they're the single best present to buy for anyone who likes Home Star Runner. I'm inclined to agree.

We've found the weapons of mass destruction

Simon Willison — 2004-03-08T17:19:04-00:00

At work while poking around the official website for Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority we stumbled across some interesting meta tags:

<meta name=" keywords" content="Coalition, Saddam, Hussein, War, Iraq, Oil, army, health, Gulf War, military, humanitarian, operations, Medical, assistance, mass, destruction, Military, medical, news, Bremer, forces, RPGs, national, guard, defense, DoD, security, war, contracts, contracting, civilian, KBR, Bechtel, Halliburton, electricity, baghdad, Iraqi, Iraqis, Sunni, Shiite, kurds, , defense, bombing, missile, weapon, weapons, WMD">

The nod towards Halliburton is a nice touch as well.

LugRadio

Simon Willison — 2004-03-04T21:30:16-00:00

LugRadio rocks. It's a collaboration between Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Stephen Parkes and Matthew Revell, all members of the Wolverhampton Linux User Group. They've just released their second episode after over 1,000 people downloaded the first one. It's witty, laid back, saracastic and quintessentially English - in fact just listening to some genuine British banter is enough to make me a little homesick. Thoroughly recommended.

"I'm Brian and so's my wife"

Simon Willison — 2004-02-24T01:26:57-00:00

I'm subscribed to a whole bunch of mailing lists, mostly as a lurker as I have a hard enough time just keeping up with some of them. One of those lists is Bugtraq, which is pretty much required reading for anyone with sysadmin responsibilities for a server connected to the public internet. Bugtraq is the central hub of the "public disclosure" security community and is actually surprisingly low traffic with only twenty or so messages a day. It's fascinating to watch the latest exploits for all manner of popular software packages tick by on an hourly basis.

Last week, someone posted to the list asking if anyone knew of a contact address for the security team at Bank of America. Today, they posted a follow-up which included the following gem:

I'd also like to thank the 0-day social engineers for their variety of approaches used to attempt to gain access to this exploit. We received responses ranging from fraudulent "Bank of America" employees to phone calls from people claiming to be from Bank of America's IT Security. (One caller claimed to be from Bank of America's IT Security but didn't know what PGP is and then said he couldn't give his PGP key due to security restrictions. And when we asked him to provide information so we could verify the contact, he said he would call back but never did. To this caller: Yes, your social engineering failed and your caller-id spoofing was almost perfect. Emphasis on "almost".)

For some reason, I'm reminded of a classic scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian.

If foxes can learn Ruby, why can't you?

Simon Willison — 2004-02-20T01:31:08-00:00

Why The Lucky Stiff's (poignant) guide to Ruby is shaping up to be a masterpiece. Trust me, you've never read a programming language guide that's even remotely comparable. Even if you have no interest in Ruby you should check it out, if only for the cartoon foxes. Here's Why's explanation of Ruby's array syntax:

An array is a list surrounded by square brackets and separated by commas.

[1, 2, 3] is an array of numbers.

['coat', 'mittens', 'snowboard'] is an array of strings.

Think of it as a caterpillar which has been stapled into your code. The two square brackets are staples which keep the caterpillar from moving, so you can keep track of which end is the head and which is the tail. The commas are the caterpillar's legs, wiggling between each section of its body.

Once there was a caterpillar who had commas for legs. Which meant he had to allow a literary pause after each step. The other caterpillars really respected him for it and he came to have quite a commanding presence. Oh, and talk about a philanthropist! He was notorious for giving fresh leaves to those less-fortunate.

The foxes say it best:

Command line Futurama quotes

Simon Willison — 2004-02-05T23:14:07-00:00

Today's command line amusement:

lynx -mime_header http://slashdot.org/ | head -n 6 | tail -1

The return of the Spong Monkeys

Simon Willison — 2004-02-04T06:12:57-00:00

Via Eric Meyer, at least I'm not the only one selling out. Joel Veitch's infamous Spong Monkeys can now be seen in two TV ads for Quiznos sandwhiches: We love the subs and Take a buck off (Quicktime movies). It's nice to see such awesome and uniquely British talent recognised at a global level.

Backseat driving

Simon Willison — 2004-01-10T06:25:40-00:00

extreme programming, noun

A method of software development that combines all the charm of backseat driving with all the efficiency of a marital squabble.

Just one of the many gems to be found in Greg Knauss' Devil's Dictionary.

Language wars, distilled

Simon Willison — 2003-10-22T05:40:53-00:00

A snippet from Every Language War Ever:

I2: A programmer can write unmaintainable code in any language. Let's compare a carefully prepared code snippet from MFL with a horrifically bad snippet from YFL written by a drunken monkey.

Google Life Guidance

Simon Willison — 2003-10-19T23:40:05-00:00

Friends don't let friends...

... use AOL
... vote democrat
... dress like The Crow
... use camera phones
... drive drunk
... type Qwerty
... drive SUVs
... starve themselves
... start blogs
... drive naked
... heavy breath on teleconferences
... and many more.

There goes the neighbourhood

Simon Willison — 2003-10-07T14:32:40-00:00

Blogs just stopped being cool.

Opening times for online forums?

Simon Willison — 2003-10-07T00:31:35-00:00

Here's something I've never seen before. The BBC's Neighbours messageboard currently has a note up saying "This messageboard is currently closed", with a link to the opening times: 9am until 10pm weekdays, opening 10am at weekends. You can still read the forums but you can't post anything. This is obviously a moderation tactic to ensure there is always an administrator available to delete offensive material should any be posted - I'm writing about it here because I've never seen this approach used before.

You may well ask what I'm doing on the Neighbours messageboard in the first place. Let's just call it a guilty addiction - the temptation of 25 minutes of brain-dead telly at lunch time just proves too much. I check out the message boards because they have a great tradition of posting acerbic reviews of each day's episode, which are far more entertaining than the actual show.

Alarm Bell Phrases

Simon Willison — 2003-10-02T18:32:49-00:00

Alarm Bell Phrases on Ward's Wiki are just great. As with all links to the Wiki though, be warned: click too many links and hours of your life will inexplicably vanish...