Fnord.

From “Understanding Art for Geeks,” this lovely juxtaposition:

(For explanation, see this Wikipedia page)

The set of pictures is excellent; see how many in-jokes you catch. Via the reliably-interesting Anarchia.

Via Dark Roasted Blend’s collection of best advertisements (Click for larger):

I laughed quite more than it probably deserves. I also liked this one:

(If you need a hint, it’s subtitled ‘The Cola Wars‘, so think of the cans as people…)This one is for Diego and Ben:

There’s more at this link.

1. Never try to move to a new hard drive while distracted by an infant.
2. Never assume that cp -a is as accurate a copy as, say, tar -p
3. Or rsync
4. Never power off the machine in frustration over the new drive, assuming that the data on the old will be unaffected. There may be connected RAID volumes that will Not Like This a Bit.
5. Never try to migrate ~240GB of data in 30 minutes. It won’t end well.

More downtime soon, after I do a correct transfer and try again.

Via Anarchia, the magnificent obscenity that is Bourne Shell Server Pages, with the appropriate extension of, yep, ‘.shit’. The author has a definite set of opinions that I found hilarious:

The basic idea behind all server page technologies is this: rather than writing code that generates an HTML document on-the-fly by writing it out as a series of print statements, you start with a “skeleton” HTML document and embed the code right inside it. Voila! Instead of having a tangled, unreadable, unmaintainable mess of HTML embedded in source code, you have a tangled, unreadable, unmaintainable mess of source code embedded in HTML.

Bourne Shell Server Pages are ordinary ASCII text files, with the special extension .shit, which denotes “Shell-Interpreted Template.” The result of invoking the page compiler on a .shit file, is, naturally, a shell script. (It occurred to me that this file extension might seem objectionable to some, but since it quite accurately—if unintentionally—conveyed my sentiments toward Web technology in general, I decided that it should be left unchanged.)

and, I have to agree with him here:

How does the Bourne Shell Server Pages technology fit into the bigger picture of Web Services? It’s a legitimate question. For that matter, what the hell are “Web Services” anyway?

I’ve read quite a bit about Web Services, and have had some in-depth, first-hand experience with the technologies that form their underpinnings. To the best of my knowledge, here is an accurate definition of the term:

Web Services

noun A software development meme that espouses the notion of tying together disparate software components via a crude, non-typesafe, remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism that consists of sending and receiving data encoded in an excessively verbose, plaintext format (XML) over a largely inelegant, stateless file transfer protocol (HTTP).

Whew. That doesn’t sound glamorous or exciting at all. It’s not even object oriented. There must be more to this than just inferior reinterpretations of old ideas? Sadly, there isn’t.

One particularly curious aspect of Web Services is that all communication between components must take place over TCP port 80. The other ports (all 65,534 of them) constitute a veritable Pandora’s Box of perceived dangers, horrors and evils, and so Thou Shalt Not Bind Them. It’s painfully clear that Web Services exists along three distinct axes: a technical one, an emotional one, and a decidedly religious one.

It’s a great essay, and an interesting idea. The code is tiny, too.

In the grand tradition of the Daily WTF, a simple error with variable printing on a magazine invoice:

Ooops.

Seen in a sig block on Timezone:

BoingBoing posts code to change the message screen on HP printers via PCL. My code for this is dated October…. of 2002. Yeesh. How avant-garde am I?

I really like this one. A nice double entendre.

(See previous post for others and context.)

Most of you won’t get this at all. Most of you haven’t ever heard Ernie Cline. Me, I own the CD. Which you can no longer buy, sorry.

Via Gizmodo, news that replica Airwolf helmets are for sale on eBay:

“Nothing is more Airwolf than Airwolf!”

(And don’t forget the poster, too!)

My office is in the Calit2 building on the UCSD campus. Leading up to the front doors is a tile walkway where, it appears, people could purchase their choice of etchings. As I’ve strode over it, I would now and then spot an interesting tile.

(Here’s a re-post of the walkway and building)

Today I took the time to capture a few that amused or interested me. Enjoy!

Some are cryptic, codes or ciphers of some kind:

Update 10/3/07: A contributor decoded this, it’s simply ASCII. Text is “John Tusson CS 2002″.

Some are humorous:

Heh, I can sympathize with that.

Or philosophical:

Or geek humor:

See this Wikipedia entry to explain some of the ‘hello world’ bit.

I suspect the text cipher to be a simple substitution cipher from the repeated ‘Hma’ block, but feel free to let me know what you find. The hexadecimal one, well I dunno yet. See above, decoded.