Bloggy » Funny

A few good bug squadders

mpyne — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:36:16 +0000

From IRC, a quote:

Son, we live in a world that has bugs, and those bugs have to be found by men with debuggers. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, OSS fan boy? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom…. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That the KDE 4.0 release, while tragic, probably saved developer resources. And that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves developer resources. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that bug, you need me on that bug.

And in other news, I’m officially on shore duty, at my next duty station. I got to “help” the nice Comcast guy with hooking up cable Internet with linux, but other than that things went smoothly. (Protip:Have a DNS nameserver not part of Comcast memorized before hooking up the Internet. If you’re unlucky you’ll get to a point where your Internet works but DNS does not.)

Funny video about a translator kicked out of the Army

mpyne — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:32:00 +0000

I saw this hilarious clip from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, about an Army Arabic translator who was kicked out of the Army for violating the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. (View video here). It also includes an interview with some doctor who is apparently completely retarded.

Apparently if gays were openly allowed in the military then the straight men are at risk of being raped. Also, gay men are likely to be easily distracted and do nothing but think about having sex all day long (according to this doctor). Thank God we straight men don’t have to worry about seeing women and getting distracted ourselves in our job! Oh, wait… we do see women. Hmm. (Actually that’s a teensy lie, there are no women in submarines at this point so that’s not something I’ll need to worry about).

The best part of all is that the Army is in such desperate need even now for translators that according to the latest re-enlistment bonus packages, translators who can read Arabic receive the absolute maximum amount Congress authorizes as a reenlistment bonus. They even get paid more than nuclear-qualified sailors. I guess the Army didn’t need this one bad enough though. Well, I shouldn’t say that, I’m sure the brass would have loved to keep someone with his talents if they weren’t forced by regulations to remove him. :-/

Nightly routine

mpyne — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 11:24:00 +0000

I usually read a little bit from bash.org
before going to bed at night. Or to be more specific, I’m at the site because
I’m bored, which convinces me to go to bed. But anyways, this quote was particularly funny.

So I was at work today, signing for a package from UPS.
When the FedEx guy walks in with a package of his own.
And at that EXACT moment, a customer changes the channel to TBS and
the Mortal Kombat movie is on, right when the fight theme music starts.
Did they break out into a delivery duel to the death?
I was prepared for parcel projectiles and fedex fatalities.
They eyed each other, and I knew something was about to
happen…
But then the guy changed the channel to “Trading Spaces” and
the fight was over.

As someone who used to sign for packages, I thought it was rather
funny.

Top Ten Amusing Code Snippets from KDE CVS

mpyne — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 10:42:00 +0000

tronical on KDE IRC gave me a link to an old file he had of the top ten
weirdest/funniest/stupidest pieces of code that were in KDE CVS at one time or
another.

Perhaps my favorite is this gem: emit newState( i18n("%1").arg(name())

This, of course, reduces down to i18n(name()). But wait,
we’re
not done yet! The i18n() call returns a translated
string from the untranslated one passed as an argument. I know our KDE
translators are good, but how are they supposed to translate a string
generated programmatically??

I have been led to believe that there is a newer version floating around
somewhere. I think that’d be pretty nifty to see. :-)