Tip: if you would like your own cow sticker, take a cute child through the checkouts at your local Whole Foods.

posted at: Sun, 09 May 2010 21:31 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

From RFC3164, which is otherwise about syslog formats:

6. Security Considerations

An odor may be considered to be a message that does not require any acknowledgement. People tend to avoid bad odors but are drawn to odors that they associate with good food. The acknowledgement of the receipt of the odor or scent is not required and indeed it may be the height of discretion to totally ignore some odors. On the other hand, it is usually considered good civility to acknowledge the prowess of the cook merely from the ambiance wafting from the kitchen. Similarly, various species have been found to utilize odors to attract mates. One species of moth uses this scent to find each other. However, it has been found that bolas spiders can mimic the odor of the female moths of this species. This scent will then attract male moths, which will follow it with the expectation of finding a mate. Instead, when they arrive at the source of the scent, they will be eaten [8]. This is a case of a false message being sent out with inimical intent.

...

Along the lines of the analogy, computer event messages may be sent accidentally, erroneously and even maliciously.

This smells more like "I bet nobody ever really reads this RFC, let's put some stuff in the middle to see if they do!".

posted at: Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:23 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (0 others)

I was recently driving through the California desert and came across the Salton Sea. Long story short - it rained a lot and the Colorado River overflowed a bunch of dams and dikes meant to contain it and created a huge inland sea. Oops.

Some enterprising souls must have decided that despite the lack of any natural flushing dooming the sea to a salty, polluted existence, there was ripe opportunity to create a sea-side metropolis.

From the ground, it is a bit of a fun ghost town to explore. The typical "everything just abandoned" type thing. But when I came to geotag some photos I took there, I was quite astonished to see this.

That looks exactly like what I used to do in SimCity. I'd use the F-U-N-D-S cheat at the start to max out my money, then build my little empire with neat roads and school and harbours and whatnot — they've even got an airport! Then I'd press "go" and people would slowly move in to the residential areas, one house on one block at a time.

I guess poor old Salton City never made it past "turtle speed"!

posted at: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:26 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (3 others)

My attempt at answering that most important of questions : where should one place their plate in the microwave to achieve maximal heating?

posted at: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:23 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (1 others)

Rob Landley writes:

A common trick years ago was to set up your routing tables and then have PID 1 exit so the kernel paniced, because the paniced kernel would continue to route packets with _no_userspace_running_. Darn hard to hack a system like that.

This is such a ridiculously stupid idea I think it has wrapped all the way around to the point where it just grazes "genius"!

posted at: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:04 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (1 others)

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 (3 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)