Ok, for those who haven’t been following along, the summary:
- I used to work as a sysadmin for the College of Engineering and Mines at the University of Arizona
- My boss’s boss was a soulless little troll who is incapable of making rational decisions
- I refused to play along with his little political games and quit before he could fire me for insubordination
- Hedwig and Nobby are no longer hosted on university webspace
The official server status report is being kept on my general access university space at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ammon.
Today marks the third time in living memory that Ammon has been brought to tears by a cartoon. The first was a result of the ‘baby mine’ scene in Dumbo when I was quite a young child. The second happened somewhere along the line when I was watching Ai Yori Aoshi a year or two ago.
Today, I sort of fast forwarded through scenes of Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. I think I might have only actually sat all the way through three or four of the fourteen episides. For some reason, the general emotional tenseness that pervades the series coupled with Mitsuki’s perpetual state of relative undressedness had the effect of preventing me from making any serious attempts to watch the show in its entirety.
So… I have managed to watch the first few episodes and the last few. I skimmed over everything in between, stopping when things looked funny or relevant to the plot. All in all, I don’t really recommend the show. That is to say, it is not required viewing. But it had an ending that had me fighting tears for about 15 minutes before I just gave in. It is too easy to relate to.
Wow. Either somebody at Microsoft is playing a very cruel joke on their PHB or their recruiting department truly is lacking every possible shred of a clue. I like it.
Apparently, they just approached ESR as a potential hiree. The Slashdot article is here
and Eric’s rather entertaining response may be found on his blog here.
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/43223/ShowPost.aspx
An old friend from TAMS sent me this url today. It links to a particularly … horrid example of programming practice. Our conversation follows.
(15:40:34) Matt: must… not… look…
(15:40:52) Ammon: huh?
(15:41:00) Matt: (look 
)
(15:41:29) Ammon: …
(15:41:34) Ammon: _wow_
(15:42:00) Matt: hooray for exceptions
(15:42:05) Ammon: that’s just obscene
(15:43:13) Ammon: … it
(15:43:17) Ammon: it hurts my soul
(15:43:27) Matt: deep down, where the pie goes?
(15:43:28) Matt: yeah
(15:43:32) Ammon: yeah
The code in question (for those who don’t want to follow the link)?
try
{
int idx = 0;
while (true)
{
displayProductInfo(prodnums[idx]);
idx++;
}
}
catch (IndexOutOfBoundException ex)
{
// nil
}
I don’t know if I really want to explain what’s wrong with this for those non-programmers who might be reading… No. I don’t. But I will anyway.
Since time immemorial, the most common way to iterate over an list of values has been to use an index variable that is incremented until it reaches the size of the list. And then you stop. And you don’t continue to look at things. If you try to look beyond the end of the list, strange and unpredictable things can happen – exactly what happens depending on the system involved.
This program … does an infinite loop, increments its counter, and then crashes when it runs past the end of the list of product id’s to be displayed. But, it plans on crashing. So it knows to just ignore the disturbance in the Force that is generated and continue running despite the millions of souls crying in agony before being silenced by the idiot programmer who is being paid to murder them in their sleep.
I have recently (ok, well, not so recently, really) become interested in finding out more about the the Captain Harlock animes. As far as I am able to gather, there are numerous conflicting timelines and several other series set in the same universe (but not necessarily at the same time).
I know that I saw some of this stuff as a kid. It looks too familiar for me not to have. So far, my checklist of things to investigate is: Arcadia of my Youth, Galaxy Express 999, Maetel Legend, Queen Emeraldas, Queen Millenia, Harlock Saga, Galaxy Railways, Spaceship Yamato, Gun Frontier, etc…
It’s times like this when I sincerely wish I were more fluent than I am. I figure a few quick pokes at some Japanese fan sites or something would answer all of my questions. As it is, the best I can do is dig through outdated English information compiled by people who didn’t know Japanese either 
* - Ammon [9/9/05]
*/
if( $_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] != 443 ) {
header("Location: https://".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
die();
}
?>