Tech Comics: Real Geeks Dont Need Oxygen

http://www.datamation.com/cnews/article.php/3866046/Tech-Comics-Real-Geeks.htm

Not talking about Hacking

Funny, the original poster "talks" about "not talking about hacking". But he does. Hilarious, in a way:

Welcome to Hacking. The first rule of Hacking is: you do not talk about Hacking. The second rule of Hacking is: you DO NOT talk about Hacking! Third rule of Hacking: if someone yells "stop!", goes limp, or gets arrested, the hack is NOT over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a hack. Fifth rule: one hack at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the hacks are bare Windows PC's. No Linux, no Unix, no Macs. Seventh rule: hacks will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at hacking, you have to hack.

http://www.dailytech.com/Australian+Federal+Police+Mock+Hackers+Only+to+be+Hacked+in+Return/article16023.htm

25 years of storage

... and one small MicroSD card. Nice :)

New programming jargon

• Egyptian Brackets
• Yoda Conditions -- hello, Java programmers!
• Nopping
• Loch Ness Monster Bug
• Ninja Comments
• Smurf Naming Convention
• Jenga Code
• ... and more!

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jargon.html

The Only Reason To Go

http://cheezburger.com/5800815616

Log-off, restart and power-off in Windows 8

Recently I've installed a Release Preview of Windows 8 in virtual machine. Luckily apart from completely new Start menu, all other major features are similar to Windows 7. Also the new Windows Explorer includes the scenic ribbon, which I prefer much more than previous "hidden-until-alt-key-pressed" regular menu.

But there are some basic things in Windows 8 I needed to re-learn, even though I find it unnecessary to be so complicated (compared to previous Windows):

• Power options: (restart, hibernate and power-off)
  
• Logging off
  
• Swithing users (WinLogo+L)
  

To find how to turn off the system I needed to consult Windows Help (it proved to be helpful this time). But to find out how to use new "Sign-out" function I needed to use Google for it, but again I've found what I was looking for:

http://www.askvg.com/how-to-log-off-restart-and-shut-down-windows-8-pc/

To be honest, sign-off is now similar to web e-mail programs, where one needs to click user account image to close the session (okay, I consider this to be a slight improvement). But putting power options inside a hidden, pop-up vertical bar of new Start menu is way too complicated! Since Windows 95 a user needed just to click "Start" to find option to close the system - now it's so well hidden I suppose less experienced users will just pull the physical plug than to find where the damned power-off button is.

A New User Guide to Linux Communities

http://linux-blog.org/a-new-user-guide-to-linux-communities/

Defeat stupid quotes on web forum

Once in a while someone writes a smart (in his own opinion) rebuttal, but inside puts one of the stupid quotes. Here's how to cleverly defeat that:

"What's the point of this operating system?"

Say you and your wife decide to have another baby. After a lot of hard work, she gets pregnant. After nine difficult months and the troubles of childbirth, you bring a new beautiful little person into this world. You could not be happier. This is the best moment of your life.

Then imagine me walking in, and saying: "What's the point in yet another human being?"

Other annoying quotes are at the original site: http://www.osnews.com/story/21944/The_10_Most_Annoying_Things_in_Internet_Comments

Logout Vista button required 43 people

I read this once but I lost the URL, and now I've found it! It's an old one, but a good one:

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

And the moral of this story? Weekly meetings, multiple layers of management and the end result which people still don't like much. Shame on you, Microsoft. :-(

WTFPL - The ultimate free license

http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
In a word: cute!

Spaghetti code? Meet lasagna and ravioli code!

An old joke, but a good one: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/pasta.code.html

There are plenty more: http://www.gnu.org/fun/humor.html

And my favourite: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/helloworld.html
However there is an ugly error, in the code they use void main():

New professional

 #include <stdio.h>
 
 void main(void)
 {
  char *message[] = {"Hello ", "World"};
  int i;
  for(i = 0; i < 2; ++i)
  printf("%s", message[i]);
  printf("\n");
 }

This is non-standard (process returns a random number upon completion). It should rather be int main() instead - with a correct, standard behavior (process returns 0, even if final return 0; is omitted). Using void main() implies the dreaded "undefined behavior"...

Boss and wallpaper change (Polish)

Szef i zmiana tapety

Szef mojej lepszej połowy wezwał informatyka, aby ten zrobił mu porządek z laptopem.
Z tej rozmowy niestety - zostało zapamiętane tylko jedno:
Szef: Proszę mi zmienić tapetę, bo ta już mi się znudziła!
Informatyk: Nie mam czasu na pierdoły - i wyszedł.

http://www.joemonster.org/art/4101/Ciezka_dola_serwisanta_VIII

Linux is Making Me Fat and Lazy

Original blog entry by Carla Schroder - I translated it into Polish and posted to LinuxNews.pl

Why the Skilled Quit First

The reason that skilled employees quit, however, is a bit more complicated. In virtually every job, there is a peak in the overall value (the ratio of productivity to cost) that an employee brings to his company. I call this the Value Apex.

On the first minute of the first day, an employee’s value is effectively zero. As that employee becomes acquainted with his new environment and begins to apply his skills and past experiences, his value quickly grows. This growth continues exponentially while the employee masters the business domain and shares his ideas with coworkers and management.


However, once an employee shares all of his external knowledge, learns all that there is to know about the business, and applies all of his past experiences, the growth stops. That employee, in that particular job, has become all that he can be. He has reached the value apex.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx

Unbelievable C loop optimization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff's_Device

Linux the better choice

YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxt6cIf0qFc

Computer languages and beards

So it seems like if you really want the computer language you've created to succeed, you'd better grow a beard!

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/04/28/computer-languages-and-facial-hair-take-two.aspx

One especially interesting aspect is that I intend to learn Python in its 3rd incarnation (so called Python 3000) when it is finished later this year. So hooray for Guido!

The Spider of Doom

From http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Best_of_2006_0x3a__The_Spider_of_Doom.aspx

Josh Breckman worked for a company that landed a contract to develop a content management system for a fairly large government website. Much of the project involved developing a content management system so that employees would be able to build and maintain the ever-changing content for their site.

Because they already had an existing website with a lot of content, the customer wanted to take the opportunity to reorganize and upload all the content into the new site before it went live. As you might imagine, this was a fairly time consuming process. But after a few months, they had finally put all the content into the system and opened it up to the Internet.

Things went pretty well for a few days after going live. But, on day six, things went not-so-well: all of the content on the website had completely vanished and all pages led to the default "please enter content" page. Whoops.

Josh was called in to investigate and noticed that one particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted *all* of the content on the system. The IP didn't belong to some overseas hacker bent on destroying helpful government information. It resolved to googlebot.com, Google's very own web crawling spider. Whoops.

After quite a bit of research (and scrambling around to find a non-corrupt backup), Josh found the problem. A user copied and pasted some content from one page to another, including an "edit" hyperlink to edit the content on the page. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, since an outside user would need to enter a name and password. But, the CMS authentication subsystem didn't take into account the sophisticated hacking techniques of Google's spider. Whoops.

As it turns out, Google's spider doesn't use cookies, which means that it can easily bypass a check for the "isLoggedOn" cookie to be "false". It also doesn't pay attention to Javascript, which would normally prompt and redirect users who are not logged on. It does, however, follow every hyperlink on every page it finds, including those with "Delete Page" in the title. Whoops.

After all was said and done, Josh was able to restore a fairly older version of the site from backups. He brought up the root cause -- that security could be beaten by disabiling cookies and javascript -- but management didn't quite see what was wrong with that. Instead, they told the client to NEVER copy paste content from other pages.

And there's a great moral in it:

Try not to pass parameters in the URL the can make changes to your application, the URL should be "idempotent", that is, the same URL should display the same results each time (to certain extent). E.g. passing a parameter to delete something is a really bad idea most of the times.

http://www.pradosoft.com/forum/index.php/topic,6977.msg31702.html#msg31702

#40 Apple Products - Stuff White People Like

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/39-apple-products/

Best comments:

“Never tried Linux, but I have friends that swear by it, however my software won’t run on it.”

Linux users are like American soccer fans–they smugly predict that their fetish will take America by storm “any day now!”, and every year when nobody has bothered to give a crap about their obsession, they revel in being one of the select few who “gets it” instead of the rest of the troglodytes in society. Makes them feel better about enjoying something so relentlessly unpopular.

Oh, and if I want to upgrade the memory in a Sony I don’t have to buy a whole new computer because they don’t solder the memory to the motherboard like Mac does.

Oh I’m jealous because I don’t have one. Is that like the Prius owner saying I’m poor because I don’t have one. Yeah, I have five laptops and refuse to pay twice the amount of money for a PC with a Mac case that runs an OS designed so that any idiot can use it without f-ing it up because, well, I actually know what I’m doing.

The Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation

Why Apple fans hate tech reporters
http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2008/03/18/true_enough_excerpt_2/index.html

Why Apple fans are so pissed off all the time!
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=16803

Best comment:

It’s actually very simple: there are a few iconic products in the market. Products that give the owner some of their image. For us mere mortals, that would be a BMW, a Boss suit, a few others and.. . an iPod / iPhone / iMac (with the iPod and iPhone being more valuable as you carry it around for poeple to see).

Now think about it. If those people define some of their ego through those products, how will they feel if you you are looking for weaknesses in the product? They will feel attacked. Very simple. Personally attacked, for it’s their ego choice that you’re scratching at. So they shoot back. Try it with someone who owns a 3 series BMW. It works exactly the same way.

The rule is: YOU MUST NOT CRITICIZE MY EGO BOOSTER