What Was Jesus

 Internet  No Responses »
May 022012
 

There were 3 good arguments that Jesus could have been Black:

  1. He called everyone “brother”
  2. He liked Gospel
  3. He couldn’t get a fair trial.

But then there were 3 equally good arguments that Jesus was Jewish:

  1. He went into His Fathers business.
  2. He lived at home until he was 33.
  3. He was sure his Mother was a virgin and his mother was sure he was God.

But then there were 3 equally good arguments that Jesus could have been Italian:

  1. He talked with his hands.
  2. He had wine with every meal.
  3. He used olive oil.

But then there were 3 equally good arguments that Jesus could have been a Californian:

  1. He never cut his hair.
  2. He walked around barefoot all the time.
  3. He started a new religion.

But then there were 3 equally good arguments that Jesus could have been Irish:

  1. He never got married.
  2. He was always telling stories.
  3. He loved green pastures.

But the most compelling evidence of all – 3 proofs that Jesus could have been a woman:

  1. He fed a crowd at a moment’s notice when there was no food.
  2. He kept trying to get a message across to a bunch of men who just didn’t get it.
  3. And even when He was dead, He had to get up because there was more work to do.
 Posted by at 2:19 pm

The Evolution of a Programmer

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
May 022012
 

High School/Jr.High

  10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
  20 END

First year in College

  program Hello(input, output)
    begin
      writeln('Hello World')
    end.

Senior year in College

  (defun hello
    (print
      (cons 'Hello (list 'World))))

New professional

  #include <stdio.h>
  void main(void)
  {
    char *message[] = {"Hello ", "World"};
    int i;

    for(i = 0; i < 2; ++i)
      printf("%s", message[i]);
    printf("\n");
  }

Seasoned professional

  #include <iostream.h>
  #include <string.h>

  class string
  {
  private:
    int size;
    char *ptr;

  string() : size(0), ptr(new char[1]) { ptr[0] = 0; }

    string(const string &s) : size(s.size)
    {
      ptr = new char[size + 1];
      strcpy(ptr, s.ptr);
    }

    ~string()
    {
      delete [] ptr;
    }

    friend ostream &operator <<(ostream &, const string &);
    string &operator=(const char *);
  };

  ostream &operator<<(ostream &stream, const string &s)
  {
    return(stream << s.ptr);
  }

  string &string::operator=(const char *chrs)
  {
    if (this != &chrs)
    {
      delete [] ptr;
     size = strlen(chrs);
      ptr = new char[size + 1];
      strcpy(ptr, chrs);
    }
    return(*this);
  }

  int main()
  {
    string str;

    str = "Hello World";
    cout << str << endl;

    return(0);
  }

Master Programmer

  [
  uuid(2573F8F4-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820)
  ]
  library LHello
  {
      // bring in the master library
      importlib("actimp.tlb");
      importlib("actexp.tlb");

      // bring in my interfaces
      #include "pshlo.idl"

      [
      uuid(2573F8F5-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820)
      ]
      cotype THello
   {
   interface IHello;
   interface IPersistFile;
   };
  };

  [
  exe,
  uuid(2573F890-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820)
  ]
  module CHelloLib
  {

      // some code related header files
      importheader(<windows.h>);
      importheader(<ole2.h>);
      importheader(<except.hxx>);
      importheader("pshlo.h");
      importheader("shlo.hxx");
      importheader("mycls.hxx");

      // needed typelibs
      importlib("actimp.tlb");
      importlib("actexp.tlb");
      importlib("thlo.tlb");

      [
      uuid(2573F891-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820),
      aggregatable
      ]
      coclass CHello
   {
   cotype THello;
   };
  };

  #include "ipfix.hxx"

  extern HANDLE hEvent;

  class CHello : public CHelloBase
  {
  public:
      IPFIX(CLSID_CHello);

      CHello(IUnknown *pUnk);
      ~CHello();

      HRESULT  __stdcall PrintSz(LPWSTR pwszString);

  private:
      static int cObjRef;
  };

  #include <windows.h>
  #include <ole2.h>
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include "thlo.h"
  #include "pshlo.h"
  #include "shlo.hxx"
  #include "mycls.hxx"

  int CHello::cObjRef = 0;

  CHello::CHello(IUnknown *pUnk) : CHelloBase(pUnk)
  {
      cObjRef++;
      return;
  }

  HRESULT  __stdcall  CHello::PrintSz(LPWSTR pwszString)
  {
      printf("%ws
", pwszString);
      return(ResultFromScode(S_OK));
  }

  CHello::~CHello(void)
  {

  // when the object count goes to zero, stop the server
  cObjRef--;
  if( cObjRef == 0 )
      PulseEvent(hEvent);

  return;
  }

  #include <windows.h>
  #include <ole2.h>
  #include "pshlo.h"
  #include "shlo.hxx"
  #include "mycls.hxx"

  HANDLE hEvent;

   int _cdecl main(
  int argc,
  char * argv[]
  ) {
  ULONG ulRef;
  DWORD dwRegistration;
  CHelloCF *pCF = new CHelloCF();

  hEvent = CreateEvent(NULL, FALSE, FALSE, NULL);

  // Initialize the OLE libraries
  CoInitializeEx(NULL, COINIT_MULTITHREADED);

  CoRegisterClassObject(CLSID_CHello, pCF, CLSCTX_LOCAL_SERVER,
      REGCLS_MULTIPLEUSE, &dwRegistration);

  // wait on an event to stop
  WaitForSingleObject(hEvent, INFINITE);

  // revoke and release the class object
  CoRevokeClassObject(dwRegistration);
  ulRef = pCF->Release();

  // Tell OLE we are going away.
  CoUninitialize();

  return(0); }

  extern CLSID CLSID_CHello;
  extern UUID LIBID_CHelloLib;

  CLSID CLSID_CHello = { /* 2573F891-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820 */
      0x2573F891,
      0xCFEE,
      0x101A,
      { 0x9A, 0x9F, 0x00, 0xAA, 0x00, 0x34, 0x28, 0x20 }
  };

  UUID LIBID_CHelloLib = { /* 2573F890-CFEE-101A-9A9F-00AA00342820 */
      0x2573F890,
      0xCFEE,
      0x101A,
      { 0x9A, 0x9F, 0x00, 0xAA, 0x00, 0x34, 0x28, 0x20 }
  };

  #include <windows.h>
  #include <ole2.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include <string.h>
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include "pshlo.h"
  #include "shlo.hxx"
  #include "clsid.h"

  int _cdecl main(
  int argc,
  char * argv[]
  ) {
  HRESULT  hRslt;
  IHello        *pHello;
  ULONG  ulCnt;
  IMoniker * pmk;
  WCHAR  wcsT[_MAX_PATH];
  WCHAR  wcsPath[2 * _MAX_PATH];

  // get object path
  wcsPath[0] = '\0';
  wcsT[0] = '\0';
  if( argc > 1) {
      mbstowcs(wcsPath, argv[1], strlen(argv[1]) + 1);
      wcsupr(wcsPath);
      }
  else {
      fprintf(stderr, "Object path must be specified\n");
      return(1);
      }

  // get print string
  if(argc > 2)
      mbstowcs(wcsT, argv[2], strlen(argv[2]) + 1);
  else
      wcscpy(wcsT, L"Hello World");

  printf("Linking to object %ws\n", wcsPath);
  printf("Text String %ws\n", wcsT);

  // Initialize the OLE libraries
  hRslt = CoInitializeEx(NULL, COINIT_MULTITHREADED);

  if(SUCCEEDED(hRslt)) {

      hRslt = CreateFileMoniker(wcsPath, &pmk);
      if(SUCCEEDED(hRslt))
   hRslt = BindMoniker(pmk, 0, IID_IHello, (void **)&pHello);

      if(SUCCEEDED(hRslt)) {

   // print a string out
   pHello->PrintSz(wcsT);

   Sleep(2000);
   ulCnt = pHello->Release();
   }
      else
   printf("Failure to connect, status: %lx", hRslt);

      // Tell OLE we are going away.
      CoUninitialize();
      }

  return(0);
  }

Apprentice Hacker

  #!/usr/local/bin/perl
  $msg="Hello, world.\n";
  if ($#ARGV >= 0) {
    while(defined($arg=shift(@ARGV))) {
      $outfilename = $arg;
      open(FILE, ">" . $outfilename) || die "Can't write $arg: $!\n";
      print (FILE $msg);
      close(FILE) || die "Can't close $arg: $!\n";
    }
  } else {
    print ($msg);
  }
  1;

Experienced Hacker

  #include <stdio.h>
  #define S "Hello, World\n"
  main(){exit(printf(S) == strlen(S) ? 0 : 1);}

Seasoned Hacker

  % cc -o a.out ~/src/misc/hw/hw.c
  % a.out

Guru Hacker

  % echo "Hello, world."

New Manager

  10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
  20 END

Middle Manager

  mail -s "Hello, world." bob@b12
  Bob, could you please write me a program that prints "Hello, world."?
  I need it by tomorrow.
  ^D

Senior Manager

  % zmail jim
  I need a "Hello, world." program by this afternoon.

Chief Executive

  % letter
  letter: Command not found.
  % mail
  To: ^X ^F ^C
  % help mail
  help: Command not found.
  % damn!
  !: Event unrecognized
  % logout

Anonymous

 Posted by at 2:08 pm

We can’t send email farther than 500 miles from here

 Internet  No Responses »
May 012012
  
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email.
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 14:57:40 -0800

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible...  I almost regret posting
the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over
drinks at a conference. :-)  The story is slightly altered in order to
protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and
generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago
when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte.  "Come again?"

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated.
"A little bit more, actually.  Call it 520 miles.  But no farther."

"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying
to keep panic out of my voice.  One doesn't display panic when
speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished
department like statistics.  "What makes you think you can't send mail
more than 500 miles?"

"It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily.  "You see,
when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"

"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.
"And you couldn't send email this whole time?"

"We could send email.  Just not more than--"

"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that.  But why didn't
you call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now."  Right.  This is the chairman of
*statistics*. "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look
into it--"

"Geostatisticians..."

"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we
can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles.  There are a number
of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or
reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands.  "When did this start?
A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at
that time?"

"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."

"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely
believing that I was playing along.  It wasn't April Fool's Day.  I
tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails.
This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail
to my own account was delivered without a hitch.  Ditto for one sent
to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington.  Another to Princeton (400
miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles).  It failed.
Boston, failed.  Detroit, failed.  I got out my address book and
started trying to narrow this down.  New York (420 miles) worked, but
Providence (580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity.  I tried emailing a
friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle.
Thankfully, it failed.  If the problem had had to do with the
geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I
would have broken down in tears.

Having established that -- unbelievably -- the problem as reported was
true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file.  It
looked fairly normal.  In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory.  It hadn't
been altered -- it was a sendmail.cf I had written.  And I was fairly
certain I hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option.  At a
loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port.  The server happily responded
with a SunOS sendmail banner.

Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner?  At the time, Sun was still
shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8
was fairly mature.  Being a good system administrator, I had
standardized on Sendmail 8.  And also being a good system
administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long
self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8
rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in
Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the
dregs of my now-cold latte.  When the consultant had "patched the
server," he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so
doing *downgraded* Sendmail.  The upgrade helpfully left the
sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5 -- at least, the version that Sun
shipped, which had some tweaks -- could deal with the Sendmail 8
sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained
unaltered.  But the new long configuration options -- those it saw as
junk, and skipped.  And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled
in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the
sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to
the remote SMTP server.  Some experimentation established that on this
particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until
hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to
connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would
actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the
destination rather than by incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
        * 558.84719
        / 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

Trey Harris
 Posted by at 8:57 am
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