It’s crunch time down on de software plan-tay-shon, so I’m often spending time waiting for the computer to compile the latest build of the app we’re building. Might as well get a little blogging done…
…by Jorge Luis Borges. The world is an infinitely large library with an infinite number of books. In an infinity of books, you’d be able to find anything:
…the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
It’s one of my favourite short stories.
Last night, my co-workers John and Mohamed were debating the merits of brace styles. The argument is old enough and widespread enough to have its own entry in the Jargon File. Johnny’s a firm believer in the so-called “One True Brace Style” (a.k.a. “kernel style” or “K&R style” after Kernighan and Ritchie, the guys behind C and UNIX), but then again, he inhaled a lot of paint thinner, glue and no-stick Pam in his youth and exacerbated the situation by learning Perl. Mohamed and the rest of us follow the “Allman style” (a.k.a. “BSD style” since he wrote a lot of BSD utilities), a more readable style that makes it easier to ensure that brace pairs match. Don’t be fooled by self-proclaimed self-deluded arbiters of style. There are also two other styles — GNU and Whitesmiths — that are used by the maladjusted and unbathed.
In case you didn’t know:
There are two well-known insulting gestures in the United States. Both are recognized in all parts of America. They are:
Why fights always happen at the KFC in Lebanon:
If you lick your little finger and then brush it across your eyebrow, you are signaling that someone is a homosexual.
“Autralian Etiquette” — the biggest oxymoron since “Happily Married”:
When drinking in some Australian pubs, you can signal that you can win a fight with anyone in the bar simply by finishing your drink, turning the glass upside down and placing the glass squarely on the bar.
Want to know more? Check out Foreign Fingers and the Gestures pages on Web of Culture.
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