Google+
In the future, the ultimate insult will be in the form: I know you can't see it, but I've added you to a Google+ circle called __.
May the 4th Be With You!
Happy Star Wars Day!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyYTATfgPZk
http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2009/05/04/may-the-4th-be-with-you/
Overheard at the office: Perl edition
Coworker evaluating a stack of resumes: "This guy blatantly lies on his resume. Nobody has 15 years of Perl experience!"
Me: Um... I do.
C.e.a.s.o.r: What?
Me: (thinks a bit) 1991. Either July or August. Perl was at 4.032 or 4.033 if I recall. That would be (thinks for a second) 19 years!
C.e.a.s.o.r: (look on his face of shock and horror) Oh. I guess he isn't lying.
Me: Damn kids! Get off my lawn!
(this happened last year... I delayed this post so-as to obscure any possibility of identifying information)
2010: The Year in Review
First was January. This was followed by February which transitioned rather abruptly into March. April followed, as did May. June, July and August were next, in that order. September came and went. October followed September, just as it has for as long as I can remember. Soon it was November and lastly December.
I look forward to seeing what 2011 brings.
Is your ISP for the birds?
How do you demonstrate that your ISP is crap? Implement RFC1149 (IP over Carrier Avian) and show that the ADSL line being provided is "slower than a bird"! That's what people in South Africa did to embarass Telkom. Telkom has not yet commented.
There are images of other implementations of RFC1149 in our book, The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs.
Small Silicon Valley-based startup completes exit strategy
SANTA CLARA -- Sun Microsystems, a small "Silicon Valley" startup finally achieved it's goal of being acquired by a larger company this week. They have been purchased by Oracle.Most startups plan their exit strategy as either being an IPO or being acquired. Sun's unique strategy was to do both with a 23-year gap in between. This long, painfully slow, strategy included years of selling their products to big name Wall Street firms, developing cutting edge operating systems and microprocessors, convincing the entire world that RISC is better than CISC, and blowing it all by ignoring the rise of cheap x86-based PCs. Sun is also reported to have invented "the dot", an enabling technology that precipitated the "dot com" revolution.
The purchase by Oracle surprised and stunned industry observers that had been on vacation and hadn't been paying attention to anything for the last few months. Said one analyst on vacation in the Bahamas, "When I left for holiday I heard IBM was going to snatch them up. Whatever happened to that?"
The original founders, Andy von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy, were excited to make the announcement at a press conference in Mountain. Now that they have completed their first startup the entire world is watching to see what they do next.
Tony Hoare apologizes for inventing null pointers
We forgive you, Mr. Hoare. If you hadn't invented them, someone else would have.http://qconlondon.com/london-2009/speaker/Tony+Hoare
Presentation: "Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake"
Track: Historically bad ideas
Location: Abbey Room
Abstract: I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. In recent years, a number of program analysers like PREfix and PREfast in Microsoft have been used to check references, and give warnings if there is a risk they may be non-null. More recent programming languages like Spec# have introduced declarations for non-null references. This is the solution, which I rejected in 1965.
Happy April Fools Day
"The Complete April Fools RFCs" is now available on Think Geek. Pick up your copy today!My apology to Rob Glenn and Stephen Kent
The Complete April Fools RFCs (edited by myself and Peter H. Salus) includes one RFC that, it turns out, was not a joke. The book reprints all the April Fools and various "funny" RFCs and includes commentary not available online. And, err, umm... we recently learned that it includes on RFC that was not meant to be funny at all. We apologize if this has created any confusion.
RFC 2410: The NULL Encryption Algorithm and Its Use With IPsec by Rob Glenn and Stephen Kent, it turns out, is an actual part of the IPSec standard. (Thanks to Merike Kaeo for reporting this to us.) If you want to use IPSec to encode your packets without any of that messy "encryption" getting in the way of reading the payload, I'm sure RFC2410 is a great technique.
The first clue that this RFC was real was that it wasn't published on April 1st like other funny RFCs. However, in our defense, neither was RFC 527: ARPAWOCKY or other documents we reprinted in Part III: Poetry in Motion.
Ironically we had thought of picking a random non-funny RFC and publishing just to see if anyone noticed. Originally all RFCs were published on the first of the month, so many many many RFCs were published on April 1st of each year. Sorting through all of them to find which were fake was a difficult task. The RPC mechanism that resulted in NFS have so little security was published on April 1st. Was it a joke all along? That would explain a lot.
The book, with unpublished commentary from some big names in the history of the Internet, can be purchased from booksellers such as Amazon.com. More information on www.rfc-humor.com
--Tom Limoncelli
Are you ready for April Fools Day?
April Fools Day is only 2 weeks away. I've seen some well-executed pranks played at work, and some that ended up in people getting fired.
The times people got fired often involved violating corporate policies, such as forging email from important people. I once saw a person forge email from a manager... oh, I won't finish the story, that's enough of a "no no" at most companies. Of course, if they had warned the manager he could have been involved and it would have been even funnier.
We once convinced a manager to email out a new data storage policy: Since the voice mail system deletes messages that are more than 10 days old, why not do something similar on our NFS servers? Certainly a file that hasn't been used in 10 weeks can't be too important. Imagine how convenient it will be to have your home directory automatically cleaned this way? Most everyone thought it was funny, except one person that was very embarrassed when he took his complaint to the VP, who had a much better sense of humor.
The RFC documents that define how the internet works includes many fake documents that are hilarious. www.rfc-humor lists them all. This includes the famous RFC for how to send TCP/IP packets over carrier pigeon.
Peter H. Salus and I compiled all the funny RFCs and put them into a book. Why sell something that you can get for free online? Well, first of all we added commentary, some of which is written by famous industry folks. Secondly, it's nice to have all the RFCs in one place. It looks great on a coffee table or in your office. (Oh, and you get to see the brilliant cover design that I did.)
You can still order it in time for April 1st. Makes a perfect give for the geek that has everything. Order today!
