Interesting Links for 24-10-2015

[andrewducker]

• How to _really_ annoy a software developer
  • (tags: software unicode pranks )
• XKCD on World Polio Day
  • (tags: disease xkcd )
• Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children
  • (tags: sex gender toys monkey preferences behaviour hormones )
• Why you shouldn’t believe everything you’ve read about China this week
  • (tags: china

Comments

[gonzo21]

To an extent it doesn't matter ~what~ EVEL does, what matters is how it is perceived and how it is portrayed by the SNP...

And from now until the law is repealed, it will be portrayed as 'Those Evil English Are Denying Us Our Voice'.

Which is, I think, a very powerful narrative.

[momentsmusicaux]

Hmm you don't need mimic. Just other developers who change the line endings or change indentation to tabs is enough to annoy me :)

[simont]

I've always fondly imagined that one of these days I'd find the right occasion to sneak #define do into the top of someone's C program. (Or perhaps into the Makefile: CFLAGS+=-Ddo hidden somewhere obscure.)

The effect would be to turn every do-while loop into an executed-once bare block (or single statement) followed by an entirely separate bodyless while loop. And it doesn't rely on any high-tech Unicode wizardry, which I think makes it a more elegant prank :-)

(Though it doesn't quite cover all possibilities. Code of the form
if (condition1)
do { /* stuff */ } while (condition2);
else
/* stuff */;becomes a syntax error under this transformation - now the if statement terminates at the closing brace of the do-block, orphaning the else clause. So a developer on guard against this prank might make a point of including a construction like this in their application as a defence!)

[skington]

Surely you'd merely revert to the previous commit, or otherwise bisect your way from a known good point until you found the error?

[simont]

Well, yes, of course any source-code prank along these lines (whether my C-specific thing or the Unicode mimicry technique or whatever else anyone might invent) are tricky to hide in the presence of version control.

So perhaps the person to deploy them against is someone who's neglected to use version control!

(But it would be mean to do it to a total novice, of course. Someone who isn't using version control but should know better.)

[drplokta]

I still don't see how there can be an English law at all. Suppose you pass a law that just establishes a new steering group that meets quarterly to discuss education in England, and it costs £20 per year to provide tea and biscuits for that meeting. That £20 can't come out of the English budget -- because there's no such thing. It can't be added to English government borrowing -- because there's no such thing. And it can't be funded from English taxation -- because there's no such thing. So it can only come from national borrowing, national taxation, or cuts from the national budget, and so it's a national bill and not English bill. The only laws that can even possibly be English laws are ones that are exactly revenue-neutral, to the nearest pound, and make no difference whatsoever to government spending. And I fail to see how any law that does anything can not cost some money somewhere.

[andrewducker]

That's a very good point!

[agoodwinsmith]

My desk needs a drawer with a puppy in it.

[andrewducker]

My desk doesn't even have drawers! But if it did, they would clear be better with puppies in.

[cmcmck]

'Cultural apppropriation'

The kimono was 'appropriated' at least 200 years ago, so I think the ship has sailed long since on that one!