The Register: IT managers stick with Windows. They’re not concerned about Microsoft’s upcoming “License 6.0″, which increases penalties for slow upgraders (or increases incentives for fast upgraders, depending on your point of view). Of course, these are the same people who weren’t particularly worried about Y2K until 1999. Really. I was working on a large-scale ERP system in 1999, and it occurred to our CTO in September that we might have Y2K issues. (We did, naturally. None in the database, but we had poorly-written homegrown date parsing logic strewn throughout our 2500 Powerbuilder objects. I will toot my own horn a little here and say that the entire process was sped up considerably by a source code data mining system I developed in-house that allowed us to quickly identify similar patterns of bugs. So once we found one Y2K bug, we could find other instances of the same mistake within minutes. Oh sure, you think that sounds easy, but it’s not, because Powerbuilder locks your code away in proprietary PBL files, so you can’t use any outside tools to do global regular expression-based searches or anything.)
The Wisdom of Supermodels [via Don McArthur] ON INNER STRENGTH: I love the confidence that makeup gives me.
(Tyra Banks)
Fury.com: AOLiza. Read transcripts of strangers unknowingly conversing with an Eliza bot running on AIM. (Presented in a convenient horizontal scrolling format, *grr*. Requires Javascript, double *grr*. Still worth it though.)
Personally, I’ll stick with the Emacs Psychiatrist. It seems more intimate somehow, and I know it won’t go blabbing my personal problems all over the Internet. You know, like, uh, I do.
Reading through those AOLiza transcripts reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon, which I’ll paraphrase because Google inexplicably hasn’t developed cartoons.google.com yet.
(Dilbert shows Dogbert a poem he wrote.)
Dogbert: “They say that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare.”
Dilbert: “And my poem?”
Dogbert: “2 monkeys, 10 minutes.”
