Just a random thought, but if there’s anyone out there working on a language where the following is legal, and worse still actually does something useful, then stop, for all our sakes:

$;=pop;$.<$;?print:&;while<STDIN>

With thanks to the noodle meister for the gobledigook.

Had a great, if not slightly drunken, time at Svetjana’s birthday drinks the other night. There was copious amounts of food, and some more of Meg’s friends for me to meet which was nice. In that order 😉

There was also a little game called Singstar, which is freakin awesome. If you haven’t played it you’re not living.

Said game is never far from it’s owner, the unstoppable .. the Superstar .. the mechanical voicebox .. the Bryninator.

The man’s no slouch, he didn’t rack up those 8520 points singing “Mary had a Little Lamb” but rather INXS’ “Never tear us apart” .. he’s not to be messed with.

Paul Wayper takes issue with the habbit kernel programmers have of #defining things as do { stuff; } while (0).

He points out that this can lead to:

if (x > y)
    exch(x,y);
    call_foobar(x,y);
else
    x = 0;

And says:

.. the exch() call completes the if statement and the call_foobar() call is executed unconditionally. Indenting in this case is worse than a sham, it actively deceives the programmer into thinking that the logic will work when it won’t.

Although I agree with his point, that mixing #defines that contain { } and if/else blocks that don’t can be dangerous, the example doesn’t actually compile. To trigger the bug you need:

if (x > y)
    exch(x, y);
    if (x)
        printf("hello!");
else
    x = 0;

Which after expansion of the macro looks logically like:

if (x > y) {
    .. guts of exch ..
}

if (x)
    printf("hello!");
else
    x = 0;

So it’s still nasty, but in the trivial if/else case you are safe.

Don’t miss some more of Paul’s excellent work.

Update: There’s another great track from Angus and Julia Stone at Triple J, it’s at the same URL as the previous track, so if you missed that one I guess it’s too late. The new one’s also nice and relaxed, although a bit less country and a little more funky.

If you’re looking to relax, check out this tune by Angus and Julia Stone, grab it from Triple J.

It might be a bit country, but hey that’s cool these days, and boy is it nice and chill.

They’ve got a bunch of other free downloads too.

If, like me, you’ve always found Gnuplot a total freakin’ pain in the you know where, then you need to grab quickplot. It probably can’t do all the fancy whatsits that Gnuplot can, but for basic stuff it’s a total no brainer and just works.

If you’re a Debianista or Ubunterian you should be able to just apt-get it.

I couldn’t help but laugh at this:

Web Results 1 – 10 of about 227,000 for #### sucks. (0.09 seconds)

I think that a quarter-of-a-million publicly expressed opinions can
be rounded up to “everybody”.

–names changed to protect the guilty

If you’re wondering where the jokers over at chucknorrisfacts.com got their inspiration, check out the original … antonblanchardfacts.com.

Anton Blanchard has killed Chuck Norris, twice.

…

Anton Blanchard only needs one turntable and no microphone.

…

Anton Blanchard can dereference null pointers.

This has been doing the rounds, so you’ve probably seen it, but I like it.

There’s some really great photos up at NASA’s image of the day. This one for example:

Don’t miss the archive either.