IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres Alistair Dabbs is currently hanging upside down in a cave at an undisclosed location. While he slakes his thirst with the blood of those who crossed him, El Reg is re-running one of his timeless classic columns. My wife is looking at online porn again. This can happen accidentally to anyone from time to time, usually while …
@ Phil O'Sophical - I (male) have been asked the same question by a female engineering intern. It was one of the few times I was at a loss for words (anything I could think of saying had undesirable consequences).
After what seemed like several minutes, I replied with something innocuous and the tension was diffused. Can't for the life of me remember what I said.
// "give it a little more thought, it'll come to you"
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I like it - the zen fatalism appeals to me. I think I will change the office PCs' login message to:
"Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. Meantime - press CTRL+ALT+DEL and log into Windows"
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" I have a blind spot when it comes to this stuff. Blind spot is another metaphor, by the way: there is nothing functionally awry with my retinas."
Isn't the "blind spot" where the optic nerve connects to the retina in vertebrates? Or is the author a blood-sucking cephalopod? I suppose the tentacles can come in handy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_%28vision%29
Mnemonic phrase for the resistor color code.
So politically incorrect, I can't type it here, but it starts off: "Bad Boys..."
I am so glad resistors do not have colors on them any more (they're barely visible at this point), and that I do not have to teach this mnemonic to incoming engineers (female).
// vestige of a former time.
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"[...] Branch and Link [,,,] Instruction 69.[...]
That didn't ring true. The 360 opcode set was helpfully orthogonal. Every program seemed to start with BALR 3,0 to establish the base register address.- and the BALR opcode was 05. So the BAL variant would also have ended with 5 - and an RX format variant would start with 4.
Like all things of my youth that could be mis-remembered so I checked - BAL is 45.
It is Compare Double that is 69 according to this instruction set. Which definitely has erotic overtones.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/360_Assembly/360_Instructions
There's no better environment for releasing one's inner Benny Hill than a COBOL program.
Pick a few data names with an eye on what the future might bring, add some suggestive 88 levels for good measure, override the OS's facilities management and be creative with your internal procedure names and you are good to go.
And good for a visit from the extremely militant head of the all-female punchroom staff on account of the fact that your program was punched by one girl and verified by each of the others who wanted to get a look at it. As I recall she stood over me on the first run with a clenched fist aimed at my hurtybits should it not prove to be "a proper program".
On the plus side, first program ever with no punch errors.
I met a consultant years later, after I had gone freelance, who told me he'd worked on the thing as part of an ICL to UNIVAC conversion. He'd gotten into the most dreadful trouble because he assumed the thing was a joke and so rather than converting it he simply elaborated the story told in the procedure division and sent it back to the chief programmer.
I quite enjoy Mr Dabbs' articles. However, if a new article is not available please don't repost an old one.
How about a link to the original article instead?
Or, better still, a link to _all_ of his articles in a handy single page, or maybe a link to a random Dabbs article.
Anything is better than a repost like this.
My first job was translating software from English into German.
Whenever I didn't know what the translation was I just put in
"Scheisse" so I could for them later.
I then left the company, only to find out the software was shipped to a customer in Germany (a large hospital) without any QA what so ever.
Can just imagine.
Fehler: Scheisse.
I know this software ist Scheisse vat ist the Error
The software I wrote recently makes a SOAP call and displays the response. For a few known errors, it shows a reasonable error message. For unknown errors i was inspired by the Amiga, it shows "Guru meditation error:" (and whatever error response the SOAP call returned.)
I liked the "xv" picture viewer's error handling. So, in a typical program you try to save to a full disk, or print to a non-existant printer, and it'll pop up a message like "The file failed to save" with an "OK" button. In xv, with any error message the "OK" button says "That sucks!" 8-)
At the company I worked for before we devoted the side wall of an office cabinet to screenshots of bizarre error messages. The rules called for them to be genuine, as it's too easy to program a fake one. Unavoidably, some of them were augmented with more or less funny comments over time, like:
"Word cannot open a Word document", drawing the comment "Try OpenOffice".
The ones I personally enjoy most aren't those simply telling you that something went wrong, but those caring for you as only a mother would and then double-fail (excuse me for translating them back to English, the original English ones may be worded differently):
"The network connection has failed. Do you want Windows to look for a solution online?"
My all time favourite, though : "Unknown error on unknown device. Please contact unknown supplier for a solution."
>>The next time an ambitious junior manager at a client’s workplace tells me that he is “rising in the pegging order”, I shall be sure to offer him my hearty congratulations.
It's Pecking Order. As in "a hierarchy of status seen among members of a group of people or animals, originally as observed among hens."
It *sounds* to me as if you either have a problem with your hearing or your accent is so out of whack with how normal English is pronounced that you don't understand the words that are coming out of people's mouths.
At a former workplace one of the developers, who spoke English as a third or fourth language, was always quite happy to announce that he was able to reach a solution to a programming problem by using a workaround.
Or, as he put it, to give a reach-around.
I don't think anybody ever told him what that phrase meant.
Many oral phrases get disconnected from their original etymology - often getting corrupted to near homonyms. "Pecking" to "pegging" is a perfect example of a verbal consonant shift that has fuelled language divergence for thousands of years. Unfamiliar words are matched by the brain to their nearest known or feasible equivalent.
There is an interesting video experiment where someone says "Far" - but the accompanying image of their face is of them saying "Bar". Someone listening with their eyes closed hears the correct "Far". If they open their eyes so they see the lip movement - they hear "Bar". Eyes closed and it is "Far" again.
The current generation often seems to think that the expression "Toeing the line" is "Towing the line". Not quite sure what they think it means as a metaphor - or whether they just can't spell.
The network guys have just renamed some switches that they have inherited to make things a bit more standard. As part of the naming covention of what said switches do, the identifier is WANX.
Meanwhile when we moved office a few years ago, the Windows guys thought they have a laugh by using ANL as the location element of their naming convention.
Join the two together and I pointed out that any such switches in our office (of which there are none) could be called something like ANLWANX01 (or something).
Anon, just to be on the safe side!
No mention of male and female connectors?
Heh... well I do recall that some ICL engineers of my acquaintance some years ago would send diagnostic output to a file called testicl (I forget if they left off the last "e" or not).
Mind you, this was from a company that used to make a system that connected serial lines to its computers via connector blocks that were euphemistically referred to as "donkey wallopers". :)
I once worked on a clone implementation of PostScript. One part that I wrote was the "upath" (user path) parser, and it seemed innocently obvious to make a portmanteau of "upath" and "parse", so I called the file uparse.c. The next programmer to work on it read the name rather differently, and from then on it was referred to as "up arse.c".
I had spent two weeks training and this morning, I was being let onto the phones.
Telephone: Beep, service call.
Me: Good morning, British Gas Services, Dave speaking how can I help you?
Old woman: Hello, I'm waiting for an engineer to give me a service.
Me: I can see on the screen that he is due to see you this morning, between 9 and 12.
Old woman: Oh I do hope so deary, it's been a long time since I've had a good servicing, and I'm getting desperate.
I hit the mute button, the person sitting on the call with me is in tears and can't speak frantically waving for a supervisor. John, comes over..
John: Hello, I am David's supervisor, how can I help you?
Old woman: I'm waiting for an engineer to give me a servicing, It's been a long time since anyone took a look at it, and I'm getting desperate that he comes. I have to go out and do the shopping.
John hits the mute button and joins my colleague in tears trying not to laugh.
Taking a deep breath I reply : Well he is due to come before mid day, 1pm at the latest. I'm sorry we can't be more precise that that.
Old Woman: Ok thanks, I'll just have to wait for it then.
Me: Ok thank you for calling us and have a good day.
Old woman: bye.
Me: bye..
Does anyone remember this one? Some good old computing references in here..... I remember being emailed this one around 20+ years ago....
Micro was a real-time operator and a dedicated multi-user. His
broadband protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous
input/output devices, even if it meant time-sharing.
One evening he arrived home just as the Sun was crashing, and had
parked his Motorola 68000 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100 bus
that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring
the daisy wheels in his garden. He thought to himself, "She looks
user-friendly. I'll see if she'd like an update tonight."
He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin 32-bit
floating point processors, and inquired, "How are you, Honeywell?"
"Yes, I am well," she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly
and smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions.
Micro settled for a straight line approximation. "I'm stand-alone
tonight," he said. "How about computing a vector to my base address?
I'll output a byte to eat and maybe we could get offset later on."
Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds, then transmitted 8K,
"I've been recently dumped myself and a new page is just what I need to
refresh my disk packs. I'll park my machine cycle in your background
and meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her
solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what a global variable! I wonder if
she'd like my firmware?"
They sat down at the process table to a top of form feed of fiche and
chips and a bottle of Baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and
expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional
acknowledgements although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest
and least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the
old line, "Would you like to see my benchmark subroutine?" but Mini
was again one clock tick ahead.
Suddenly, she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the
full functionality of her operating system. "Let's get BASIC, you RAM"
she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware policing
module had a processor of its own and was in danger of overflowing its
output buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulted his analyst about.
"Core," was all he could say, as she prepared to log him off.
Micro soon recovered, however, when she went down on the DEC and opened
her device files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully
packed root device and was about to start pushing into her CPU stack,
when she attempted an escape sequence.
"No, no!" she cried. "You're not shielded!"
"Reset, baby," he replied. "I've been debugged."
"But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support child
processes," she protested.
"Don't run away," he said. "I'll generate an interrupt."
"No!" she squealed. "That's too error prone and I can't abort because
of my design philosophy."
But Micro was locked in by this stage and could not be turned off. Mini
stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike into his main
supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep.
"Computers!" she thought as she compiled herself. "All they ever
think of is hex!"
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