Here's some amazing pixel art : a whole simcity alike town on a webpage. Can you spot the peeping tom; the balloon with the erroneous URL; the titanic reenactment; the car chase on the bridge?
At the top of a particularly convoluted and otherwise completely uncommented code:
// Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
The c2.com wiki has a page with all the funny and weird stuff that can be found in source code.
Feed your sigmonster : the Contempt page contains some fine quotes from people like Dijkstra, Pitman and Baker ventilating their opinion on computer languages. C or Perl zealots may put on their asbestos suit :
"The perl programmer who veers off the road into the forest will get out of his car and cut down each and every tree that blocks his progress, then drive a few meters and repeat the whole process. whether he gets where he wanted to go or not is immaterial - a perl programmer will happily keep moving forward and look busy.
What really pisses me off with Perl is that people work so hard doing so terribly little while they think they have worked very little doing something really nifty. Fools!"
Tour de Babel is a writing of a Amazon/Google employee, talking about the computer languages he loves and loathes. Of course featuring C, Java, Perl, Python and Ruby. Take a peek into his other writings too, very interesting !
As seen on Planet Grep : Chunky Bacon is the most daft introduction to Ruby I've ever seen.
Time to switch back from all this wedding stuff to our regular technical postings, shall we ? Koders.com is a search engine for open source code. This search engine provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to search for source code examples and discover new open source projects which can be used in your applications.
Dirk was the first to tell me that there was something wrong with the layout of this site in Internet Explorer : some links could not be clicked, like the one in the 'Top 2005 space images' post. I immediately thought of a typo in the specification of the link, but a quick check told me that this was 100% valid HTML code. So the error must be in the stylesheet. I replaced it with the default one in Drupal, and made some minor cosmetic changes. Seems to work better now in Internet Explorer, though the issue isn't completely solved.
All software sucks : since I upgraded to Drupal 4.6.4 due to a security fix, the 'next page' links on the bottom of the pages stopped working; Dirk was the first to notice that to me. Apparently, I hit this bug in Drupal; the attached patch fixed everything nicely...
I already told you about my old computer's failing CD writer. So I was looking for a new computer, and lo and behold, right at this time, Aldi came again with a very interesting offer : the Medion MD8800, a PentiumD based dual-core 64bit system, with wireless lan aboard, a tv card, SATA disks and much more. It took a while before I wiped out the Windows XP installation, cause I needed all the info about the included hardware.
I chose for a Debian unstable based install, simply because it's the only distribution I know to have good x86-64 support (except maybe Gentoo). The installation wasn't very easy, cause the Debian installer contained a 2.6.8 kernel, which had great trouble detecting my SATA disks. Using the updated netinstall iso from Lennart Sorensen fixed this problem.
I completed the install without any problem (a fully based 64 bit system !), but now the real work starts : building a customized kernel, restoring my personal files & preferences, and populating the system with the everyday used programs. The machine is called Gundabad, after the Orc capital in the north of the Misty Mountains (yep, I keep using Tolkien as a source to name my home computers).
The box is fast; so fast it makes my ADSL connection to crawl like a snail. Oh yes, when I'm done setting up the machine, I'll put up a page with all the information on it in order to install Linux on it.
How do you stay organized? PDA? Paper? Maybe, you're not and need to start? However you may organize yourself, you might what to have a look at this tool even, if just for the sheer beauty of the concept and implementation. PocketMod is a browser-based tool and the only requirement is that you have the Flash player plugin installed. Once there, you'll be able to build a portable paper organizer that gets printed on one page of paper. You then fold it in a special way to create a little book.
And if you think PocketMod is cool, you should take a look at Douglas Johnston's D*I*Y Planner, a series of lots of templates distributed under a Creative Commons license, including a 'widget kit' in OpenOffice.org Draw format to assist in creating your own! The D*I*Y Planner is available in several sizes, and new templates are included in every release.