For the geeky people out there

The 500 mile email via rahaeli

Affirmations by Ellen Degeneres

Via aint2nuts

I am the worlds tallest midget.

I'm a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout.

I bet nobody knows I'm crazy.

I look good in bell bottoms.

Archie would rather date me than either Betty or Veronica.

I can walk through walls. Ouch! No, I can't.

I mean for my hair to look like this.

The Great Spirit smiles on me. On me and only me. The Great Spirit hates everybody else. We're best friends.

I don't need to exercise. I have the perfect shape.

I'm smarter than my dogs. Well, smarter than one of my dogs.

I look good with back hair.

Being grubby equals being cool.

I sing better than Bonnie Raitt. I have as many Grammys as Bonnie Raitt. I am Bonnie Raitt.

It's not important to know what everybody else seems to know. I dont care how much they laugh at me.

La la la la la la la la la la-Talk all you want, I can't hear you-la la la la la la la la. La la la.

If I put my mind to it, I could do anything. I just don't feel like putting my mind to something. So there.

I have X-ray vision. Wait a minute. I don't. These glasses are a rip-off.

I meant to get ripped off.

I've fallen and I can get up.

I'm good at watching TV.

I can come up with better affirmations than these.

Bush says

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome.

Of course, that was back in 1991, when there was a slightly saner Bush in the White House.

Coding question

As an estimate, what percentage of your coding time do you spend writing algorithms and what percentage do you spend finding little niggling problems where something in the development environment/system/language you're programming in?

(no subject)

Microsoft have been unveiling their plans for the next version of Windows over the last few days - they look pretty exciting and seem to be nothing less than a complete revamp of the way that programmers will be accessing the internals of the OS. Everything from the windowing system (which will be using the latest 3D hardware to make things run smoother than ever before and provide a richer experiene, much like OS X does for the Mac) to the filing system (which will now have a database working with it, holding metadata on all of your files so that you can search for them in an instant and combine them in any way you choose) to the connectivity (all of the internal plumbing is being replaced, learning from their previous mistakes). Everything's moving to the Common Language Runtime (as used by all .NET languages) and it's the stated aim of several of the product groups to reduce the amount of work you have to do to produce a functional program by a third.

Of course, all of this has to wait for the next version (codename Longhorn) to ship - probably in late 2005/ early 2006, but according to people at the developers conference it's already looking fairly spectacular. The required specs are pretty high, and it looks like it'll take a couple of years for that level of hardware to be generally available. As a side note, as large amounts of the system will be written using the CLR, the whole system will be much more portable. With AMD and Intel going for different approaches to 64-bit chips, it looks like MS might manage to cut the chains tying them to one architecture with this one.

I've played with VS.NET a fair bit, and been rather impressed with it. As a programming environment it pretty much kicks all the other one's I've worked with into touch. The only problem I found was that because of the vast amount of power available, I felt like it was going to take me months (if not years) to become comfortable with a wide-enough range of the tools to know that I was using the right ones. I managed to make a start at using ADO/XML to store information before becoming completely mired in a lack of understanding of the basic principles of what I was supposed to be doing - all the documentation I've come across so far assumes that you were comfortable using previous versions of the MS systems.

The challenge, of course, is to find myself a position where I get to play with all of this at some point over the next couple of years. Time to start looking around to see which bits of the company will get to do this...

One of the best short stories ever

Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"

Pardon me while I suppress a giggle

LATEST: Iain Duncan Smith has lost a vote of confidence in his leadership of the Tory party. 90 MPs vote against, 75 for. A leadership election will now take place. More details soon ...

That's from the front page of the Guardian website.