Speaking of Bad Code, I just ran across “The Who-Knows Code“.
Either someone out there has a very VERY sick sense of humor, or otherwise he or she should be tracked down (we might want to put the FBI on this) and restrained by whatever means necessary from ever using a programmable piece of technology ever again.
Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself. “GOTO Considered Harmful,” indeed!
They don’t know it yet, but several of my fellow geeks at Drexel are about to be the recipients of some Bad Code Offsets.
They’re like carbon offsets, only for lazy geeks who take the easy (and often ugly) way out when writing code. Things like allocating a huge honkin’ array at runtime instead of coding a linked list, or doing a sort in n2 time instead of n*log(n), just because you couldn’t be bothered to implement Quicksort.
I know I’m guilty. My code gets more maintainable as I get older, but not very quickly. If style violations were actually illegal, I’d be on a first-name basis with most of the folks at the Criminal Justice Center downtown, just on the basis of the last microcontroller project I did alone. It’s part assembly (some of it autocoded by a hacked-together FreeBASIC program), part macros, and there would have been some C thrown in for good measure if I hadn’t run out of time. Prior to that, I did another project where a VBasic GUI running on one machine worked alongside a QBasic program running on another, driving a microcontroller running a program written in assembly — and none of it presentable. (I guess I’m one of those programmers that Dennis Ray warned us about, way back when!)
The best part about these offsets is that the money goes to open-source projects. (I chose Apache as the beneficiary for the offsets I bought.)
I plan on putting these offsets to good use by starting an impromptu Bad Code Contest. No rules, except that the badness has to be confined to one egregiously bad line of code in the language of your choice. Something of such horribleness that it would make Dijkstra shudder from half a world away, in the same way Obi-Wan Kenobi felt a disturbance in the Force.
Bonus points for the Bad Line Of Code being implemented in assembly!
Some things just go together. You know, peanut butter and jelly; summertime and Beach Boys music; apple juice and Graham crackers; credit-reporting sites and Facebook…
Wait, WHAT?
I’ve been using CreditKarma for a while now, since it charges no fees, appears to be ad-based (which is okay by me since they’re providing a service), and generally above-board.
But browsing the site today, I came across a reminder of why you have to really watch what you click on the ‘Net.
I have a Facebook account (mostly to keep people from bothering me to do so, but also to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances whom I don’t see very often.) I’m generally leery of linking other applications and sites to my Facebook account, though (this blog being a notable exception) — and as of this evening, I can now point to at least one concrete example of why this is not (just) paranoia.
(Image heavily redacted, but you get the point…)
Why oh WHY would anyone want to post his or her credit score on Facebook? I know I’m over 30 and therefore at least two generations removed from being uber-cool (or so Madison Avenue would have the world believe) — but seriously, folks: no good can possibly come of this, no matter what your credit score is. That little check box might as well read: “Check this box if you’re STOOPID-spelled-with-two-Os.”
If your credit score is bad, you absolutely don’t want to put it on Facebook. ‘Nuff said, right?
If it’s good, why would you publicize that on Facebook, and invite identity theft? (I mean, they’re already browsing your Facebook account — and if you posted your credit score there, they probably already have your DOB, SSN, ZIP — and you’re SOL.)
That leaves “mediocre” (whatever that is.) Chances are that there’s overlap between “good” and “bad” — in that a score high enough to be able to qualify for some credit cards and invite identity theft could still well be low enough that you wouldn’t want friends, family, and employers (potential or actual) to see it.
Such things are private for a reason, folks. Caveat emptor.
Ever been logged in to a computer via Remote Desktop, and wanted to put said computer into Hibernate mode? Yeah, neither had I, until today. I was running an experiment in the electronics lab and wanted to put my laptop (back at my desk) into hibernation, in preparation for heading to class later.
A quick Google search later, I found the answer:
rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate
Have fun!
