Dead Programmer's Cafe

Tag: Linguistics

  • Bling Bling For Your Ouchie

    One of the weirder items purchased recently in a drugstore: bandages with real silver pads:

  • What Up?


    Urban Dictionary is an awesome slang recourse. Thanks, , you non-blogging bastard. Before I used to go to Everything2 for all slang related research. But Urban Dictionary is so much better.

    For instance there I learned that usage of “word” as affirmation probably originates from “the word of God.”

  • My Star Trek Strategy

    As embarrassing as it is, my wife watches Star Trek. Even the new one with that terrible intro. What I like about Trek is how predictable everything is. For instance, for some reason Klingon ships almost always decloak and otherwise appear off the port bow.

    Like doctors, sailors have their own lingo for spatial orientation. Left/right is easy to remember : it matches port/starboard (l is before r and p is before s). Front/back is stern/bow, and I use a mnemonic “stern face”, as stern is the face of the boat. But ya all probably knew that.

    Well, let’s ask mighty Google:

    “port bow” klingon ship decloak : 59 pages
    “starboard bow” klingon ship decloak 32 pages
    “port stern” klingon ship decloak 4 pages
    “starboard stern” klingon ship decloak 1 page

    Well, it kind of makes sense that they appear from the back, buth why do they favor left? I’d make a special ship with more sensors, weapons and armor on the left and back.

  • Testing. Testing. 1. 2. 3?

    When programmers test their code, the need to come up with some kind of test data. And most programmers are not very creative (just as everybody else). Very often you can log into various websites with the login “test@test.com” and password “test”. I am afraid to even think about what test@test.com’s inbox contains. It’s a real email address you know, the emails don’t bounce.

    Here are some interesting test strings:

    Of course, everyone knows the famous “Hello, World” test string. I’ve heard that for the first time it appeared in the bible, but I am not sure.

    The other most famous test strings are “foo” and “bar”, which apparently come from foobar, which is derived from WWII slang. FUBAR is a relative of SNAFU.

    A professor that taught VB in college told us, that about the time he was developing a database application for a hospital. His favorite test person was James T. Kirk and his mates, and during testing the poor captain got every imaginable sort of ailment. With funny comments.

    When I worked at iXL, our tech lead, a German by the name of Lothar, liked to use a string “4711” as most people use “foo”. Once, in a meeting he asked if anyone new why he was using “4711”. He was pretty surprised that I new what “4711” was. “4711” is what some of you may know as Koeln Water, which was the first commercially produced perfume. That’s where the term “cologne” came from. And “4711” is the number of the building where Koeln Water was produced.

    I use “1729” for my testing needs sometimes.