New Zealand Linux

From time to time I have noticed you get some interesting comments in various programs. I thought I would share some of the more amusing comments I’ve found.

In http://code.google.com/p/xee/source/browse/trunk/XeePhotoshopLoader.m?spec=svn28&r=11 . Clearly a programmer whos had a bad day.

Photoshop loader is DONE for now, fuck you
Adobe

// At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
// PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
// insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
// worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
// that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
// If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
// places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
// too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
// that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
// should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
// or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
// Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
// of course, uses all three, and more.
// Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
// your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
// birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
// at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
// responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
// Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
// I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
// me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
// other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
// difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
// was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
// so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
// Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
// them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
//
// PSD is not my favourite file format.

Heres another amusing one.

* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!IF YOU CHANGE TABS TO SPACES, YOU WILL BE KILLED!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!DOING SO FUCKS THE BUILD PROCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At the top of a particularly convoluted and otherwise completely uncommented code:
// Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
In some PHP code for a webpage :

// Since this file is loaded on every page, and since
// I want the following function on every page, I’m going to
// cheat and include it here even though it has nothing to
// do with the other things in this file.
// If you don’t like it, bite me!

Seen, and believed…

[some long and messy code] # too drubnk to make this workkkkj. debugg latter.

The source code of PerlLanguage’s Net::IRC modules has numerous chunks of funny conversation from the #perl IRC channel in it. My favorite:

# — #perl was here! —
# Larry Wall is a lot sexier than Richard Stallman
# But I’ve heard Stallman is better in bed.
# Does he leave the halo on?
# * aether cocks her head at skrew…uh…whatever?
# Stallman’s beard is a sex magnet.
# Larry’s moustache is moreso, Fimm.
# oh yeah…women all over the world are hot for stallman….
# Moustaches make my heart melt.
# I dunno, there’s something about a man in hawaiian shirts…

Spotted this in the source code for one of the ApacheAnt tasks:

: /*
: * build notes
: * The reference CD to listen to while editing this file is
: * Underworld Everything, Everything
: * variable naming policy from Fowler’s refactoring book.
: */

/usr/src/linux is full of fun.

/*
** “seek and ye shall find”…praying never hurts either…
** ggg sacrafices another 710 to the computer gods.
*/

* These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver
* to work on every motherboard design that uses this screwed chip seems
* bloody well impossible. However, we’re still trying.
* skb to avoid No=0 (choose one: Ugly [ ] Tasteless [ ] VMS [ ]).

For an illuminating experience, try grep -ir word /usr/src/linux, where word is one of the following: fuck, shit, damn, hack, kludge, “:-(“, “no idea”, awful, stupid, and of course XXX… I’m sure you can think of your own candidates.

One could probably make some significant contributions to the Linux codebase simply by doing this, then seeing if they can figure out how to fix the problem the coder was griping about. Hell, there are probably several Linux kernel hackers who do just that, though admittedly a lot of the problems are related to bizarre hardware or outside software which the system has to interface with, which the coders can do much about. Even so, it would probably be a useful thing to do. KiboDebugging??

* Found at the beginning of a loop that could run forever:
/* And now, ladies and gentlemen, the chord from HELL! */

* Found near a particularly nasty fix for a fencepost error:

/* There are dumber f**ks than me out there, but not many */

* Found near a piece of code that handled memory resizing, it made the new generation of neural nets inside the space for the previous failures. If it didn’t have to realloc at all the branch that executed was labeled:

/* These clothes are a little tight, but the price was right */

* Finally, there was an error message in some of a test code that said:

“Nostradamus told me this would happen. Smug bastard.”

Here are excerpts from some code found whilst doing an upgrade to a new server structure.

#include <wchar.h> //I hate strings.
#include <tchar.h> //I HATE STRINGS!!!
#include <string> //I HAT TEH STRINGES!!! DIE! DIEDIE! DIE!!!!!!

/// A class for interfacing dotnet code with (product)’s plugin API.
/// As you may have noticed, making .NET code work with API code is a
/// pain in the ass, because it never occurred to Microsoft that .NET code
/// might one day have to exist on the same computer as API code. As
/// unbelievable as it is, programmers need to have their non-.NET software
/// [use] functions that were written in managed code. So, to better the meet the
/// needs of their developers, Microsoft made the process as inconvienient
/// as they possibly could. Enjoy.

/// This function converts stuff from a .NET String to an LPTSTR.
/// May whoever decided it should be this complicated be required to
/// write it 20,000 times on a tiny whiteboard with perfect penmanship,
/// rot in jail for two years, then have to try clean it all off using
/// nothing but his own saliva and a toilet brush without getting any
/// ink on his gloves.

Found in a depracated .c file:

/* fit round peg into square hole, if necessary… */
/* well, actually any damn peg into whatever hole we have to work with… */
/* use (the) force, if necessary */

If you are running a multiuser system like Linux, you should expect to find other users on your system. (I guess that’s why it is a multi-user system.) Although there are many built-in mechanisms to keep users separated, sometimes you will want to communicate with other users.

Linux provides several tools to do this, depending on exactly what you want to accomplish. If you simply want to send a quick message to someone, for example, to remind him or her of a meeting, you might use the write program, which sends (writes) a message to his or her terminal.

In contrast to some other systems (say, the winpop mechanism under Windows), each line is sent when you press Enter. If you are on the receiving end of the message, the system lets you know who sent you the message.

If the person you are trying to contact is logged in more than once, you need to specify the terminal to which you want to send the message. So, if I wanted to talk to the user jimmo on terminal tty6, the command would look like this:

write jimmo tty6

If you omit the terminal, write is kind enough to let you select which terminal to which you want to send the message.

It might happen that someone tries the above command and receives the following message:

write: jimmo has messages disabled.

This message means that jimmo has used the mesg command to turn off such messages. The syntax for this command is

mesg n

to turn it off and

mesg y

to turn it on. Unless the system administrator has decided otherwise, the command is on by default. I have worked on some systems in which the administrator changed the default to off.

An extension of write is the wall command. Instead of simply writing the message to a single user, wall writes as if it were writing on a (where else) wall. That is, everyone can see the message when it is written on a wall, and so can every user. The wall command is often used by root to send messages about system status (e.g. when the system is about to be shutdown. Even if a user has disabled messages, the root user can still send them messages using wall.

If you want to have an interactive session, you could send write messages back and forth. On the other hand, you could use the talk program that was designed to do just that. When talk first connects to the other user, that other user sees on his or her screen

Message from TalkDaemon@source_machine… talk: connection requested by callers_name@his_machine talk: respond with: talk callers_name@his_machine

As the message indicates, to respond, you would enter

talk callers_name@his_machine

You might have noticed that you can use talk to communicate with users on other machines. If you omitted the machine name, talk would try to contact the user on the local machine (localhost). The preceding message would simply say

talk: connection requested by callers_name@localhost

You can also disable talk by using the mesg command.

It is common practice to use a couple of terms from radio communication when using talk. Because you cannot always tell when someone is finished writing, it is common to end the line with -o (or use a separate line) to indicate that your turn is “over.” When you are finished with the conversation and wish to end it, use oo (over and out).

Both of these mechanisms have some major problems if the user is not logged in: they don’t work! Instead, there’s mail or, more accurately, electronic mail (or e-mail).

On most UNIX systems (including Linux), e-mail is accessed through the mail command. Depending on your system, the mail program may be linked to something else. On my system, the default was to link to /usr/bin/mail.

Last-Modified: 2007-03-07 19:38:50