Dead Programmer's Cafe

Author: deadprogrammer

  • Signage or Hoked On Foniks or I’ve Got A Megacin And I Am Not Afraid to Use It!

    This sat in the garbage chute room in my building. Seems to have been written by a programmer :)
    Corrections / additions in pen are especially interesting.

  • Developers! Developers!! Developers!!!

    is my favorite Microsoft blogger:

    “… When I was interviewing for jobs, I got more questions about the very oldest job on my resume than any other. Interviewers would say “Monkey Boy? You put Monkey Boy on your resume?!”
    “Well, sure. I spent a summer in high school in charge of the care and feeding of 120 juvenile new-world monkeys. And I learned plenty that was relevant to the software industry. Like, when someone is being really disagreeable, you can just pin their little arms behind their back with one hand and control the legs with the other. Just keep their teeth away from anything you don’t want bitten.” … “
    (full article)

    I used to include my job at Nathan’s Famous of Coney Island in my resumes. Coding is just like working in a clam bar — you hands hate you for it.

  • Happy Crappy Cliche Photo Post

    In the third circle am I of the rain
    Eternal, maledict, and cold, and heavy;
    Its law and quality are never new.

    A service of Cliche Finder – Ten Random Cliches.

  • White and White

  • The Fug

    I think of my life as one long developing and debugging session. I try to improve my software and hardware, fight bloat, load more data in my databases, find new algorithms for doing things. And of course my life is full of little bugs, inefficiencies, crashes and weird behavior. Instead of making coding my way of life I try to make my way of life be more like coding.

    There are three classics of the genre of the heroic computer geek saga. First there’s Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul Of a New Machine“. Second is Douglas Coupland’s “Microserfs“. Third is G. Pascal Zachary’s Show-Stopper!. Pascal’s first name which he hides behind the initial “G” is Gregg. Yep, Gregg.

    Now I would like to add another book to the list. It’s Ellen Ullman’s “The Bug“.

    To describe what these books are about I need to borrow a name of Cordwainer Smith’s short story – The Burning of the Brain. Or Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Those are the things that come to mind when I think about the heroes of these books.

    Also comes to mind the episode of NYPD Blue where a doctor tells detective Simone that there is a possibility that the LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device) balloon pump might start “chewing up” his body. A poor choice of a metaphor in that case, but a very good one to describe what happens to the bodies and minds of the heroes of these books, be they real life superhuman engineers like Dave Cutler and Steve Wallach or more human but fictional protagonists of “Microserfs” and “The Bug”.

    “The Bug” has three main characters. A tester on her way of breaking out from the cocoon of useless liberal arts degree holder and becoming a QA engineer not only in title but in life; a miserable antisocial software engineer in a fight of his life; and a software bug called The Jester.

    At work I use Joel Spolsky’s most excellent bug tracking application called FogBugz. My project manager started calling especially nasty bugs “fugs”. Well, The Jester is a “fug” to the power of 10. To get the feeling of vertigo, the sense of spiraling into an abyss that “The Bug” invokes, i suggest listening to a piece titled “Spiral” on John Coltraine’s famous “Giant Steps”.

    And here’s my favorite quote from the book:
    “Look, Levin. Programming starts out like it’s going to be architecture–all black lines on white paper, theoretical and abstract and spatial and up-in-the-head. Then, right around the time you have to get something fucking working, it has this nasty tendency to turn into plumbing.
    “No, no. Lemme think,” Harry interrupted himself. “It’s more like you’re hired as a plumber to work in an old house full of ancient, leaky pipes laid out by some long-gone plumbers who were even weirder than you are. Most of the time you spend scratching your head and thinking: Why the fuck did they do that?”
    “Why the fuck did they?” Ethan said.
    Which appeared to amuse Harry to no end. “Oh, you know,” he went on, laughing hoarsely, “they didn’t understand whatever the fuck had come before them, and they just had to get something working in some ridiculous time. Hey, software is just a shitload of pipe fitting you do to get something the hell working. Me,” he said, holding up his chewed, nail-torn hands as if for evidence, “I’m just a plumber.” “

  • Jupiter and the Bull

    Ichor:
    Mythology: The rarefied fluid said to run in the veins of the gods.
    Pathology: A watery, acrid discharge from a wound or ulcer.

  • The Organized Labor

    NYC Unions are rather well equipped. For instance they have this gigantic blowup rat that they use in demonstrations. It’s blue, it looks more like King Kong, but it’s a rat. It has a tail. Judging by it’s looks it gets a lot of use.

    The strikers usually stand near the rat, dance, sing songs and chant “Scab! Scab!” at people who enter the building. When the morning rush is over they probably head to a coffee and donut place leaving a few people to guard the rat.

  • State Of The Art

    “Robert Natkin discovered his calling at age 17, in Chicago, when he opened a book and stumbled on the intense abstract art of Paul Klee. He was stunned by the beauty, the color harmonies, and the “music” in Klee’s work.” And decided to rip him off. Behold – the mural at the Newscorp Building (formerly Celanese Building):

    Apparently people pay Mr. Natkin to do this sort of stuff. This only shows that corporate art today ain’t what it used to be. Here’s a mural from the former Eastern Airlines Building (currently bleakly called 10 Rockefeller Plaza ):

  • It’s Not Freaking France


    If a statue wants to wear a yarmulke, it can.

  • Say No To Crack In NYC




    Hey, buddy, could you hold this thing for a minute? I’ve got some snow in my crack…