soledad penadés

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He ought to be happy now!

You're going to love this one-month-old news (well… not) but it wasn't until today that I managed to listen to the Zuckerberg keynote at past SXSW. I had read it had generated a fair amount of discussion although I didn't know exactly why.

In any case, once you listen to the podcast you can easily understand the attendees' indignation. Roughly, it is pretty much an hour of:

Sarah Lacy:

Absolutely irrelevant or bland question | Right | A-ha | My book…

Mark Zuckerberg:

helping people communicate more efficiently … communicate … mission … communicate … efficiently … website trend … helping people communicate more efficiently… tool … communicate …
connect …

No wonder people made fun of the whole situation! There's even a cartoon!

In case you're really curious here's the podcast, from the podcasts page.

After the good feedback on the Tex & Knuth quotes (including e-mail and IM messages), I thought why not? Let's have more funny stuff…

Today is a little bit about hot stuff. Incendiary. The type of people which can shake and stir readers' opinions until spawning pages and pages of infuriated responses in forums, mail groups and blogs alike, but have sufficiently founded arguments as to not to be labelled as trolls, and that's probably what makes their words so outrageous!

One

First, there's this guy called Erik Naggum. He's a genius in borderline trolling; and being a Lisp programmer, he seems to find Perl particularly irritating.

Casually, I once had to deal with a piece of legacy code written in Perl which wasn't behaving properly, and all I got was a lousy notion of how it worked, plus a big headache. So when he says this:

Part of any serious QA is removing Perl code the same way you go over a dilapidated building you inherit to remove chewing gum and duct tape and fix whatever was kept together for real.

… I can't but agree!

There's some love for C++ as well:

C++ is philosophically and cognitively unsound as it forces a violation of all known epistemological processes on the programmer. As a language, it requires you to specify in great detail what you do not know in order to obtain the experience necessary to learn it. C++ has taken premature optimization to the level of divine edict since it cannot be vague in the way the state of the system necessarily is. (I'm not talking about totally vague, but about the kind of vague details that programmers are supposed to figure out even after a good design has been drawn up.)

In other words, a C++ programmer is required by language design to express certainty where there cannot be any.

(from here)

The really good part is that he's not wrong. If you have done any C/C++ after working with dynamic languages for a while, you know perfectly what he's referring to. Will it be an unsigned char, a char, an int, unsigned int…? Updating the .h and the .cpp, then the other sources which refer to that class too, blah blah…

In a way, it's like playing cluedo with the compiler :-)

Of course, you can't advocate using dynamic languages for writing a kernel module, yeah, we know that part already; this was about funny quotes, remember? ;-)

There are more quotes by Erik in his own wikiquote entry, should you feel the need for more Naggum-isms.

… and two

The second and final dose of incendiary fun, while it's not strictly a quote, but coming really hot from the oven, comes from the one and only Linus Torvalds, this time reporting an error in Fedora when trying to play a Youtube video:

Description of the problem: youtube no workee - fedora 9 not usable for wife

Incidentally, this has taught me a new expression: rick-roll - which means either watching Rick Astley videos or getting them posted into any place! In other words: spreading the Rick Astleyness as much as possible! So let's all sing something to the tune of Never gonna give you up to celebrate, while we wonder if Linus' bug reporting was intended to be an April Fool's joke in fact!

UPDATE: Now that you know what Rick-rolling is, you have the chance to attend the first ever RickMob, 6pm, 11th April at Liverpool Street station, London, of course!

The version number of TeX is converging to π and is now at 3.141592

Found here (warning, PDF!!! Package information).

On a side note: I can't but wonder at all things Knuth:

Remember his words about email:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

He quitted in the best moment, right before spam came in. A true visionarie!

And this chapter of xkcd was terribly funny too… not that it is directly a Knuth-thing but it is related and came to my mind :-)

As if it wasn't enough to have to avoid not saying terms in English while speaking to Spanish people, Google mixes up everything for me to add to the confusion!

I guess that's the result of it autodetecting my browser's language plus redirecting to google.es because I'm using an spanish ip (obviously, due to the fact that I'm in Spain for some days). I think I would be happy with the language mix up (although it looks decidedly weird) but the redirections are very confusing.

Specially when you're in one country (say, UK), a friend (in Spain) tells you to look for something which appears in a certain position in his Google results and you just get completely different results because you got redirected to .co.uk and he went to .es

Not that it's specially important but it's disturbing nevertheless. In a way it looks as if their templates have hard coded English values but the variables are translated… and I could also moan about accessibility issues but blah… I'm on holidays! ;-)