The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Tue, 30 Apr 1996 18:47:36 +0100
Hiya folks... Here's some more computing stuff...and as I threatened before, there's still more to come...:-) Wishes & Dreams... - ANDREA -- ************<andrea@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk>************ ******************<ajc6@ukc.ac.uk>******************* *** *** *** THE LOONY BIN *** *** loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk *** *** *** ******************Internet Goddess******************* *********************ANDROMEDA*********************** You know you've been hacking to long when... ...not only do you check your email more often than your paper mail, but you remember your network address faster than your postal one. ...your SO kisses you on the neck and the first thing you think is "Uh, oh, {priority interrupt}." ...you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're doing it in octal. ...your computers have a higher street value than your car. ...in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10. ...more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in some programming language. ...you realize you have never seen half of your best friends. I once wanted to go to the basement and spent some time looking for the 0 button before I realized that the floor below 1 is not 0 but B. My alarm went off this morning, I hit the snooze bar, and when it went off again, I hit it again, and made a mental note that I could not do this much longer because my subroutine was mallocing memory (in the clock) each time it went off and printing the free memory on the front, and soon I would run out.... I had a similar experience while writing up my third year project. I was looking through my sports bag for my toothbrush one evening after a heavy day, when I found myself momentarily confused - some part of me was trying to do '/toothbrush' ! (search in vi text editor) You know.... when you are trying to recall something and hear in your head: "parity error at address..." ...you're writing a homework assignment, and get the end of the line in the middle of a sentence, tack on a '\', and continue writing on the next line. I spent the last couple of days working on several computer-related projects. Naturally, I was pretty tired, also pretty zonked. You just can't hack Minix all night and not be. So as I'm putting my head on the table for a couple hours of sleep, I think, "telnet sleep.morpheus.com". Woke me right up. I was just scanning the "Barnes and Noble" book catalog, and at one point there was a picture of two books, and I couldn't quite see the one at the back. "No problem", I thought, "I'll just click on its title bar to raise it to the front". Last evening, while cleaning up my desk, waiting for one stage of a large make to finish, I managed to stab myself under my thumbnail on a sharp piece of sheet metal. The sheet metal is an integral part of my desk, and was most likely put there to serve exactly the purpose it was serviing, ie. maiming me. Anyway, in intense pain, and with blood spurting out of my thumb, I started to make a dash for the bathroom, to find something to bind my wounds with. After a few steps I stopped, went back and hit RETURN on my terminal, so that the next stage of the make could progress while I was bleeding to death in the bathroom. Its a bad sign folks, even when in pain, I do my best to multitask... When you think of the lyrics of "Jump! Jump!" by Kris Kross and wonder if they can be assembled..... You know you've been hacking to long when you start typing semi-colons at the end of sentences instead of full stops; ... when you can't wake up in the morning because you forgot to push a return address on the stack the night before. This is someone I know, but I'm not saying who as I hope he has forgotten about it. Anyway, he was participating in a one-night stand with a woman. The next morning when he woke up, he thought that she was a PDP-11 and was trying to figure out how to boot her. Now that's someone who hacks too much. Even better, the next time this happened to him (!), he thought the other person was a VAX, and couldn't figure out where to put the floppy.... ... been hacking too long when under immense stress, the following sequence of thought occurs 'My load averages seem to be higher than ever before, the scheduler might die any moment, and I'm running out of swap space... better kill off some low-priority unimportant user processes' ... when, when reading a book in front of the computer, so, that the book is under the screen, pointing at me and I'm doing some odd jobs on the computer every once in a while, so the keyboard is on my lap, when I got to the end of a page, I pressed <space>! I have a Sparc 2 and an HP X-terminal on my desk. Both screens at the same height, both colour, both about the same size. I frequently get confused as to why attempting to move the mouse off one screen doesn't move it onto the other. After all, they're both running X.... Happened to me with a sun and an ascii terminal. It's tough when your keyboard focus moves as you drag the mouse to the edge, and then you notice the flashing cursor on the ascii terminal, so you start typing on the Sun keyboard and (if you're lucky) nothing happens. I hate to say this (really) but I used to work at a desk with 3 PC's (doing serial network developement) and often confused keyboard moniter correspondance. The confusion ussually didn't last long though. After a little banging away at a keyboard with no result appearing on the moniter, I'd hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and the location of the resulting disk- drive reseek noises would soon after clue me in. :) My brain always processes in the background. I obtain facts, and then the batch processor takes over, producing the answer a while later. Isn't it funny how the output queue always seems to be located in the shower? After fooling around all day with routers etc, you pick up the phone and start dialling an IP number... I had a cs lab practicum assigment due this Thursday. I didn't seriously get down to work until Monday. I had been using OpenWindow's TextEditor on a Sun, and switched to Emacs (FSF's manual in hand). After 47 hrs of using emacs w 9 hr.s of sleep interspersed, I was in hard core EMACS mode. Thursday night I said something in haste, and wanted to retract it. All I could think of was C-a C-@ C-e C-w ... when that home project you thought would only take a single weekend has now passed its first decade of development. The bell rings ending class while the prof is in the middle of a sentence, and you think, "How in the world is he going to carry that continuation back to his office?" It's been very cold here this past week. One day I was walking past one of those bank time/temperature signs, and it proudly proclaimed that the outside temperature was -0. For a while, I caught myself wondering if it was sign-magnitude or one's-complement... While heading for my car last week, my *very* first thought was: "grep keys /dev/pockets" Yesterday afternoon the following came into my head: grep homework /dev/backpack I got a device failure back; I had forgotten my backpack in the last class. ...you go to the movies and it takes 5 minutes to get used to the flicker (damn low refresh rate...). Once I even caught myself wondering what the colour depth was... When I see a flock of birds, these days, I sit there and try to figure out the algorithms that determine their movement. Erm... "taking precautions" whilst staying over at my girlfriend's last night, it crossed my mind that I could just comment out the code that causes her to get pregnant. Of course I can't comment that code out. Firstly, I do not have the source to my girlfriend, and even if I did, how am I going to recompile her? (I don't think that human beings are written in ANSI C, and the source would probably be many megabytes in length. :-) ) Yesterday when my alarm clock went off, I thought it was spawning new alarm clock processes and I had to kill it quickly so it wouldn't fill up the process table and prevent me from doing _anything_ about it. The only problem was, there was a monitor process that I didn't kill, and every time I killed off one of the ring_alarm(x) processes, it would wait 9 minutes then spawn another one. Have you ever done a kill -9 -1 in your dreams... I did, and then I did it again on the NFS server as root the following day.... ...you try to bring a window to the front of something, then you realize that "something" is a Post-It (tm) on your screen...