Freefall webcomic "quark" ice cream
I've just started reading the long-running webcomic "Freefall." I particularly like this joke about "quark" ice cream:
I thought everyone liked "quark" ice cream. I've got all three colors in all six flavors.
The Night Watch
Funny musings about how systems programmers are hard-core.
Excerpts:
The systems programmer has traced a network problem across eight machines, three time zones, and a brief diversion into Amish country, where the problem was transmitted in the front left hoof of a mule named Deliverance
A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.
Listen: I’m not saying that other kinds of computer people are useless. I believe (but cannot prove) that PHP developers have souls. I think it’s great that database people keep trying to improve select-from-where, even though the only queries that cannot be expressed using select-from-where are inappropriate limericks from “The Canterbury Tales.” In some way that I don’t yet understand, I’m glad that theorists are investigating the equivalence between five-dimensional Turing machines and Edward Scissorhands. In most situations, GUI designers should not be forced to fight each other with tridents and nets as I yell “THERE ARE NO MODAL DIALOGS IN SPARTA.” I am like the Statue of Liberty: I accept everyone, even the wretched and the huddled and people who enjoy Haskell. But when things get tough, I need mission-critical people; I need a person who can wear night-vision goggles and descend from a helicopter on ropes and do classified things to protect my freedom while country music plays in the background. A systems person can do that. I can realistically give a kernel hacker a nickname like “Diamondback” or “Zeus Hammer.” In contrast, no one has ever said, “These semi- transparent icons are really semi-transparent! IS THIS THE WORK OF ZEUS HAMMER?”
When you debug a distributed system or an OS kernel, you do it Texas-style. You gather some mean, stoic people, people who have seen things die, and you get some primitive tools, like a compass and a rucksack and a stick that’s pointed on one end, and you walk into the wilderness and you look for trouble, possibly while using chewing tobacco. As a systems hacker, you must be prepared to do savage things, unspeakable things, to kill runaway threads with your bare hands, to write directly to network ports using telnet and an old copy of an RFC that you found in the Vatican.
Nothing ruins a Friday at 5 P.M. faster than taking one last pass through the log file and discovering a word-aligned buffer address, but a buffer length of NUMBER OF ELECTRONS IN THE UNIVERSE.
You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.
That being said, if you find yourself drinking a martini and writing programs in garbage-collected, object-oriented Esperanto, be aware that the only reason that the Esperanto runtime works is because there are systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge.