July 31, 2006
It was a dark and stormy night...
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has released its 2006 Results, a parody award for bad introductory sentences to fiction (Bulwer-Lytton coined the "It was a dark and stormy night" introduction so loved by Snoopy in a n 1830 novel). This years award was taken by Jim Guigli of Carmichael, CA for this garrulous introduction:
Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.
Noteable runners up (and other sub-category winners) include such wondrous confections as:
It was a dreary Monday in September when Constable Lightspeed came across the rotting corpse that resembled one of those zombies from Michael Jackson's "Thriller," except that it was lying down and not performing the electric slide.
The victim said her attacker was nondescript -- 5' 10 and 3/4", 163 pounds, with Clairol #83N hair (a hint of #84N at his temples) -- and last seen wearing Acuvue2 contacts, a white Hanes 65/35% poly-cotton t-shirt with a 3mm round Grey Poupon stain on the neckband, Levi's 501s missing the second button, and Nike Crosstrainers with muddy aglets.
Ramon kissed Juanita hard and fast, his tongue probing her mouth like an urologist's finger searching for a lone polyp on an engorged prostate gland, which reminded Ramon that he needed to get a colonic irrigation to make next week's annual physical more pleasant for both him and his doctor.
The day was like any other, except that this was a Wednesday so it was really only like 1/7th of the other days.
"Send a message back to Command Central on Earth and ask for their advice, which we will be able receive immediately even at this great distance, thanks to the ingenious manipulation of coherent radiation through a Bose-Einstein condensate and the bizarre influence of the Aspect effect, which enables us to impart identical properties to remotely separated photons," Captain Buzz told the feathered Vjorkog at the comms desk, "and tell them our life-pod is going to explode in eight seconds."
And many, many more.
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:36 PM
March 31, 2006
Unix, C and programming: my essential references
Another very dull and geeky post.
The guiding idea behind these is to have one book for each topic that has all the answers I need, even if finding the answers is hard work to begin with. You'll get used to the book layout and it will cease to be a chore, you'll have the answer at your fingertips without having to hunt through various volumes. This is not to say these are the only references on these topics that I own, simply the ones that are most often thumbed.
Mark G. Sobell, A Practical Guide to Linux(R) Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming Prentice Hall, 2005. I've been using Sobell's original "Guide to Unix System V" for over a decade. This is the updated, all-in-one reference for finding your way about a Linux shell, those cryptic arguments to commands, all in a format more accessable and informative manner than the online man pages. Covers a good many distributions.
Vicki Stanfield, Roderick Smith, Linux System Administration 2nd Ed. Sybex 2002. A solid reference, though one that I'll likely replace later in the year when a new edition of an alternate book is released.
Samuel P. Harbison, Guy L. Steele, C: A Reference Manual 5th Ed. Prentice Hall, 2002. A tremendous reference that covers the C in a very readable fashion.
Marc J. Rochkind, Advanced Unix Programming, 2nd Ed. Addison Westley, 2004. Distributions from BSD through Solaris and Linux, covering 307 (of 1107) system functions - and their gotchas. It assumes knowledge of C. A little light on multi-threaded programming.
Robert Sedgewick, Algorithms in C, Parts 1-5: Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching, and Graph Algorithms 3rd Ed. Addison-Wesley, 2001. Book 1 covers contains parts 1-4, introducing fundamental concepts associated with algorithms, data structures, sorting, and searching. Book 2 (Part 5), is entirely dedicated to graphing algorithms. This book is not without its critics (the majority complaining that the code not commented), butreading the text then reading and working out what the code does is far more beneficial than implanted crib notes. It also reduces the size of the book tremendously.
Tim Converse, Joyce Park, PHP 4 Bible Hungry Minds (Wiley), 2000. Excellent reference on PHP 4 (I do realise its now a version behind, but I don't use PHP all that often and this is an excellent reference). It assumes a knowledge of programming, though not nescasarily PHP.
Judith S. Bowman, et. al. The Practical SQL Handbook Addison-Wesley, 1993. (Now in its 4th edition, I still use the 1st). This is not as all encompassing as I would like, but it is a decent reference and introduction to SQL, which, like PHP, I don't write often enough to justify the purchase of a new edition.
Larry Wall, Programming Perl 3rd ed. O'Reilly, 2000. Written by the creator of Perl, this one is indispensible. I personally don't much care for Perl, but have occasionally needed to delve into it.
Here is where I break the "Just have one reference on a topic" rule (for two topics):
W. Richard Stevens, Steven Rago Advanced Programming in the UNIX(R) Environment 2nd Ed. Addison-Wesley, 2005. The original was the bible for Unix systems programmers. Substantially larger than the Rochkind tome (and the 1992 edition), there is suprisingly little overlap between the two volumes. It assumes knowledge of C, linkers and debuggers. Thoroughly updated by Steven Rago (one of the developers of Unix System V) after the passing of Mr Stevens.
Thomas H. Cormen, et. al. Introduction to Algorithms 2nd Ed. MIT Press, 2001. A mathematically rigourous treatment of algorithms. Samples are presented in pseudo-code. This is an academic tome, each chapter being more-or-less self contained (which also makes it an excellent reference).
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 09:27 AM