I was watching 24 the other day and (without giving anything away) Edgar Stiles had to "patch a system call" to save the world. After chiding his assistant for giving him the wrong opcode for a "load A, conditional" the following briefly appears on the screen.

It's actually a pretty good piece of technobabble. The register names and use of 0x80 suggest whoever wrote this has at least some familiarity with x86 assembly. It would have been slightly better if they called the "microshell" a "microkernel" and put the system call in eax before calling the interrupt, but if you believe Jack's amazing ability to get cell phone reception then it's only a small issue!

posted at: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:22 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

What is it with the price of cables? Even leaving aside patently absurd enhancements such as gold plated optical connectors, who is buying all these ridiculously overpriced Monster cables?

Thus when purchasing a new cable today it was a pleasant surprise to find a cable company who are happy to state their business model prominently in their name: ConCord. The only thing that would have made it better was if their tag line was "we're screwing you for this cable, but at least we're telling you straight up".

It reminded me of the apt rename of the UNSW student centre to the NewSouth Q, which I assume was done to more accurately describe its function as a gigantic queue (though they might as well have gone the whole way and called it the "NewSouth QForAnHourAndWellSayWeCantHelpYouAndYouNeedToStandInThisOtherQ").

posted at: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:25 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (1 others)

On the bus yesterday I noticed a graffiti etching clearly left by someone employed by IBM. In fact the guy in the row in front had an IBM tee-shirt on, and I suspect he is the culprit, or possibly one of the OzLabs people.

The photo is crap (it's hard to take a photo of a blukhead in the dark from the middle of the back seat on a crowded bus with a phone camera without arousing suspicion) but it clearly says

   I
(heart)
 POWER5

Check out my CSI style image enhancement:

If you're ever on Sydney Buses bus number 2660 it can probably still be seen on the driver side window on the back seat. Maybe what Itanium needs isn't higher clock speeds, lower power, faster FSB, etc., but a concerted tagging effort on public transport around the world!

posted at: Thu, 04 Oct 2007 08:53 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

I defy anyone to tell me what an offline status of online actually means. Or what an offline status of offline means. Would this mean that if I'm online my current online status is offline, or are both my online and offline status online?

posted at: Fri, 04 May 2007 12:03 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

Today we received the following email

Congratulations to Yose Widjaja on winning the inaugural Microsoft 1st
Place Performance Award and Alexander Kuptsov on winning the 2nd Place
Performance Award.  Yose receives Windows Vista Ultimate and the
Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 valued at RRP $968 and Alexander receives
a copy of Office Ultimate RRP $868.

Thank you to the Microsoft Australia (www.microsoft.com.au) for
providing these new awards!

The Microsoft Performance Awards will be annually awarded to the first
and second place winners of the CSE 3rd year Performance Awards.

The awards will be presented at the annual CSE Prizes Reception on
Friday April 20th.

Of course, well done to the students on their performance. But their prizes seem a little shallow, considering that the first prize winner could legally obtain Windows Vista Business Edition via the CSE MSDN Academic program completely free of charge, and Microsoft themselves are selling Office Ultimate to students for $75 on their itsnotcheating.com.au website.

I am glad to also be announcing the inaugural Open Source prize, which consists of a Debian install CD and a copy of Open Office. Prizes can be collected from me at any time!

Update: Luckily I was informed that this blog post was eligible for the Microsoft "Golden Blog" award, because it mentions the word "Office" and links to the get-office-cheap website. Here's hoping I can also win a copy of Vista ULTIMATE!

posted at: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:49 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

Just for fun I took a photo of the LCA 2007 speakers whilst they were on stage. It didn't turn out too bad, but if anyone can help add notes around the people I don't know (click on the photo for the Flickr interface) that would be cool!

posted at: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:55 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

I recently saw an ad for the new Nokia NSeries where a smiling guy takes some happy snaps and clicks a few buttons to upload them to Flickr.

I was that guy (well, without the Nokia) until I got my bill for doing it.

The resultant photo is completely crap, but it cost so much I can't bring myself to delete it.

I'm pretty sure the guy in the ad won't be smiling when he gets his bill, especially since the NSeries has got another megapixel over my phone's camera!

posted at: Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:12 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

The magic internet fairies have updated DNS entries, rsync is syncing, Apache is re-writing and CGI is gatewaying, and with some shoelaces and string everything is holding together.

In case anyone reading has not been calling me because they fear for my health should I have to pick up my phone -- rest assured that thanks to a new NICTA initiative my handset can now double as an operating theatre.

posted at: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:06 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (1 others)

Al Gore on his new movie

And you inject some humor into your presentation.
It's hard to believe - I benefit from low expectations.

posted at: Mon, 22 May 2006 13:29 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

Now the next time someone emails me at work asking about machines to make gelato (it happens more than you would think), I can point them at the MooBella on-demand ice cream maker.

posted at: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 12:09 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

posted at: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:09 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (1 others)

In this weeks LWN there was a reference to the editors "L1 Bookshelf" -- i.e. what he could grab without moving.

I thought it might be interesting to find out what others had on thier "L1 Bookshelf". Mine consists of

• A folder labeled "ELF/ABI stuff" with ELF and ABI documentation.
• A folder labeled "Superpage" with papers about superpages
• A folder labeled "IA64 Architecture Stuff" with more papers
• Latex Line by Line - Diller
• Understanding and Using COFF - Gintaras Gircys
• Operating Systems Internals and Design Principles - Stallings
• Algorithms for compiler designed - Kakde
• Programming with POSIX Threads - Butenhof
• TCP/IP Illustrated - Stevens
• ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E) - C99 Standard
• IA64 Linux Kernel - Design and Implemenation - Mosberger and Eranian
• Box of Earl Grey Tea
• Various Linux CDs

posted at: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:01 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

I watched a documentary on Michelangelo the other day, which went into some detail about his David. Despite having seen the real thing, it suddenly struck me how much Frodo from Lord of the Rings looks like him. It's that same pensive "oh shit" look they both seem to have, I think. Or maybe I'm just nuts.

posted at: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 12:48 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

From comp.lang.c

Question: How can I optimise code better than the compiler?
Answer: If you ask, then you can't.

posted at: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 09:46 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

With reference to Peter Hardy's day. Luckily these machines are smart enough to turn off when the ambient temperature gets to about 50^oC!

posted at: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:46 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)