A coworker asked me what I’m doing for the holidays. My response? Commiting heinous acts in the name of Lord Satan.

Why do “money” and “monkey” differ by only one letter?

From the GNU Coding Standards: If you do support Windows, please do not abbreviate it as “win”. In hacker terminology, calling something a “win” is a form of praise. You’re free to praise Microsoft Windows on your own if you want, but please don’t do this in GNU packages. Instead of abbreviating “Windows” to “un” [sic], you can write it in full or abbreviate it to “woe” or “w”. On another note, I need to stop suffixing all of my post titles with “Of The Day. Read more

At work I’m doing some old school C programming, which made me think of the OS class I took at BU. Just for shits and giggles I looked up the man page for longjmp(). The best part of the page, by far, is the NOTES section: longjmp() and siglongjmp() make programs hard to understand and maintain. If possible an alternative should be used. Understatement of the millennium (and the last millennium too). Read more

What a weekend. I got back last night from my trip to Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama. My friend from college, Thomas, got married to his gorgeous girlfriend, Jennie. It was a helluva trip. We went to Waffle House a million times, drank every night and saw the biggest aquarium in the world. We even got in an accident and stood on the side of the freeway in the sweltering Georgia heat for an hour and a half. Read more

Me: man, I’m going to be such an awesomely ornery old man Andrew: you’re already an awesomely ornery young man Me: exactly! Andrew: all you gotta do is get old

Kerri and I finished watching an American Experience episode about the Summer of Love this weekend. The main point of the program was that the Summer of Love in San Francisco was a great countercultural success at the beginning but eventually failed because there were too many people doing drugs and freeloading. <typo:flickr img=”478751292″ size=”small” style=”float:left;margin:0.5em”/> It occurred to me that simply saying that druggies and freeloaders showed up isn’t quite enough to explain why the whole big experiment failed. Read more

Andrew: So what about this whole Gore mansion fiasco? Andrew: Think it’ll actually hurt him? Or fizzle out fast? Me: Fizzle fast Me: It won’t hurt him with the people he’s working to convince. Me: And face it: he wouldn’t have any credibility if he lived like an ascetic hermit. Me: The environmental movement needs someone who can show that you can “make a difference without becoming a hippie.”

Now that we have The Hitchings Factor, Vastly Important Notes, Geechorama, Dial M for Mr. Swanky (in no particular order) and, of course, Go Terk Yourself I think we need to create our own exclusive blog network a la 9rules. Names?

Over the past, oh, year and a half or so, I’ve followed the rapid ascension of Ruby on Rails to the top of the web development heap. In the process I read a lot of blog entries, a lot of “Hello World!” introductory articles and a lot of best practice documents. A big part of the thinking behind Rails is Test Driven Development (TDD) – the idea that you should write automated tests before writing code to make sure that a) you know what the code is supposed to do before you write it and b) once the code is working there is a quick, easy way to make sure it keeps working as you further develop your application. Read more