Jeff Epler's blog

Ingredients Fail

Thanks to Chris for noticing this one!

Bottle of organic lemon juce is labeled "contains juice from turkey"

Math is hard (even for google)!

Breaking down 47.000000 degrees into degrees, minutes, and seconds, google comes up with the bizarre "59 minute and 60 seconds of a degree". Floating-point round-off somewhere? Probably. Update, March 24, 2008: The bug is half-fixed. Today, Google displays +47° 0' 0.00", -119° 59' 60.00" as the coordinates of this location.

Collate this!

Turns out that when you don't LC_COLLATE=C; export LC_COLLATE, you'll eventually get bitten in the ass by the way character ranges in shell globs are treated:

$ (unset LC_COLLATE; bash)
$ touch A a B b Z z; echo [A-Z]; echo [a-z]
A b B z Z
a A b B z

In this case, my friend discovered the interesting behavior after executing 'rm [a-z]*', apparently hoping to keep files which started with uppercase letters. Whoops!

As seen in hell....

At the office, we have a saying: If your function takes more than 5 arguments, you forgot one. You can see the results of that mindset in this error message:

trade_secret.c: In function 'void f()':
trade_secret.h:187: error: too few arguments to function
    'void trade_secret(int, int, int, double, double, int, int, int,
        int, double, double, double, double, int, double, double,
        double, double, double, double, double, double, double, double,
        double, double, double, double, double, int, double, double*,
        double*, int*, int*, int*, int*, int*, double*, int*, int*,
        double*, double*, double*, int*, double*, double*, double*,
        double*, int*, int*, int*, int*, int*, int)'
trade_secret.c:9: error: at this point in file

As seen on the internet

void URLDecoder::getAsDec(char* hex) {
    char tmp = tolower(hex[0]);
    if(tmp == 'a') {
        strcpy(hex,"10");
    }else if(tmp == 'b') {
        strcpy(hex,"11");
    }else if(tmp == 'c') {
        strcpy(hex,"12");
    }else if(tmp == 'd') {
        strcpy(hex,"13");
    }else if(tmp == 'e') {
        strcpy(hex,"14");
    }else if(tmp == 'f') {
        strcpy(hex,"15");
    }else if(tmp == 'g') {
        strcpy(hex,"16");
    }
}

I am not making this up.

Acronym of the day: STEWD

STEWD: Security Through Endless Warning Dialogs. A phrase that will apparently become much more common when everyone is forced to buy a copy of Vista with new PCs, sometime early next year.

The stupidest thing I saw today....

From http://www.joinfear.com/main, and presented without further comment:

Whine!!!!!!!&exclam;

Terrible HTML documentation

Having recently tried to write some documentation, I'm a bit struck by how much all the alternatives I'm aware of suck. All I want is to get a nice HTML and PDF output of a document with a few tables. Some signs pointed towards this thing called "openjade", which is a "document style semantics and specification language" (I guess).

Imagine how unimpressed was when I got a look at the documentation they had produced—If anybody is going to have good-looking documentation it should be the people making the "document style" software! At first I thought of blaming myself because I had a wide screen, but it's even bad on a maximized window on a 1024x768 monitor, with its black text over a terrible dithered dark blue background.

I guess I'll go back to writing HTML by hand and using "File > Print" to produce PDF. Or maybe I'll write LaTeX again and berate people who don't seem to know how to use xpdf.