Developer humor

Top 12 things a Klingon programmer would say:

12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!

11. This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!

10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.

9. Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!

8. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.

7. Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' -- they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.

6. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.

5. I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again.

4. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!

3. By filing this SCR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!

2. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!

1. Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!

S.S. Estonia

Scott at BalticBlog has a new post about a Swedish exhibition on the tragic sinking of the ferry S.S. Estonia eleven years ago. He also posts an excellent historical article that I have reproduced in its entirety here. He comments:

Pain, definately. Controversy, no. Not among people that don't fall easily to conspiracy stories. Even if the ferries from Estonia were carrying Soviet military gear from time to time, there's no evidence, so far, that this particular vessel was carrying such equipment. Even if, so what? The Soviet Union had the ship blown up? The Americans, who were to receive the supposed equipment? Heh.

Read both his post and the article...

The picture at right is of the bell on a monument to the people lost on the S.S. Estonia. This monument is located on a spit of land on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa — the closest piece of Estonian land to the site of the sinking. I've visited this monument a half dozen or so times, each time I've visited Hiiumaa; I find it very moving in its lonely, windswept location...

Journalistic responsibility

Claudia Rosett has a new column on Opinion Journal that urges the U.S. press to use its freedom and strength to report not only from a U.S. focus. Her conclusion:

The tragedy in all this is that while the entire world is by now acquainted with tales — true and false — about Abu Ghraib and Guantanomo Bay, the information pretty much ends there. When it comes to the Islamic world's most despotic states, almost no one outside their borders can reel off the names of the prisons they run, let alone tales of what happens within. Afghanistan is still recovering from the Taliban blackout of the human soul — which at the time received almost no coverage. Saudi Arabia--whence the Arab News, in its disquisition on Newsweek's story, denounces the U.S. as "ignorant and insensitive" — provides no accounting to the world of its dungeons. Can anyone name a prison in Yemen?

The point is not to engage in a tit-for-tat recitation of prison management, or invite a reprise of those absurd old Soviet debates, in which Moscow's reply to charges of millions dead in the gulag was that America had street crime.

But to whatever extent the press is engaged in the business of trying to report the truth, or contribute to the making of a better world, it would be a service not only to U.S. journalism, but to the wider world — including Muslims — to spend less effort dredging Guantanomo Bay, and more time wielding the huge resources at our disposal to report on the prisons of the Islamic world. It is in such places that the recent riots had their true origins.

If you're willing to believe that the U.S. press in general is motivated primarily by a desire to report the truth, then it is plausible that Ms. Rosett's call could be heeded. But if you're as cynical as I am, and you believe that the U.S. press is motivated primarily by ideology, then it seems likely that Ms. Rosett's plea will fall on deaf ears. More specifically, if Newsweek's motivation is ideological, then reporting on the prisons of the Islamic world will not help them achieve their goals. Implying that the current administration allowed (or even encouraged) desecration of the Qu'ran would.

Let's see if their behavior changes.

I'm not holding my breath, though.

Quote for the day

To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girlfriends.

   Benjamin Franklin