CS Pranks: Push it!

While working as a Sunlab consultant at Brown, my buddy and I would frequently find ways to 'spice up' the workspace. If we ever found the other person's workstation empty without being properly xlocked, we'd usually pull pranks on each other: 'alias ls='eject; ls' being a popular harmless one, or writing zwrite <username> -m "PAUL LOGGED OUT" on my .logout file, executed anytime I logged out.

The sad thing about these pranks was that occasionally someone else would do a more malicious one, and we'd get blamed :( But there's still so much fun to be had from finding ways to shake things up.

This tweet by Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood gave me the idea for the next one:

by law, every fifth push to DVCS must be followed by this video link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCadcBR95oU

Naturally, the youtube link plays this:

Gotta love the 80's.

Were I still there, I would love to institute this. But for now, I'm setting it up on my machine, to keep things from getting too boring. To do this yourself you'll need the following:

• mpg123, a simple command-line mp3 player. Easily installable.


• An mp3 of Salt-n-Pepa's Push It

Given all this, the rest is easy as pie. There are surely more elegant solutions than what I did:

• Store the number of pushes in an external file echo "1" > how_many_pushes.txt


• Write a script to keep track of and increment that number as time goes on. Here's my Ruby script:
  
  
  
  


• Execute git config --global alias.psh !push_wrapper.rb.

Now just use git psh instead of git push, and have a surprise every now and then ^_^

moar remixes

I'm a tired, grumpy Geodude, but I have to post these remixes, because they're quite lovely. 16 pop tunes:

Glenn Beck/Donald Duck. It only really picks up after 3:00 or so.

Not a remix, but this short was used as an illustration of how one can be an atheist and still at peace with the world. I don't know if I agree with that assessment, but it is a wonderful piece:

Vimcakes, Backin' Up Song

I found an awesome little post on Vim, which itself links to other excellent Vim posts. BFS these links, kids, and learn you a console editor if you haven't already!

Also, I meant to squeeze this video in here somewhere, by the guys who did the Bed Intruder song:

Source material here. But do you see this? We have a hilarious remix coming from an attempted rape, this one from an attempted robbery ending in gunshots, and the last post was about the internet taking down an 11 year-old.

Remixes man, how do they work?

Because I backtraced it!

Here's another story of Internet lore, documented pretty well here at Know Your Meme. I've posted before about remixes 1, 2), and the internet making a story huge, and this one kind of combines the two.

First we have an incredibly foul-mouthed, unusually sexually knowledgeable 11 year-old girl:

Before we continue, lets learn a few things here:

• This girl did wholly dumb, irresponsible things (there's a lot more than this video). She's 11 so you can only blame her so much, but parents: please be involved in your children's lives.


• While I don't think what follows is at all appropriate, she isn't faultless. Frequently in conflicts both sides are guilty; just that one side might be guilty on the scale of three counts of murder and the other "only" involuntary manslaughter.

So the greater trolls at 4Chan see this, and pounce. They google bombed her, file fake police reports, call her mom pretending to be the police, spam her inbox, &etc. &etc. &etc. She's left to a smoldering pile of ashes, when her dad makes her sadness unintentionally hilarious:

Another thing, parents: don't make threats you can't back up. Saying "I'm her father!" doesn't incite fear in kids the way it used to, and don't invoke "calling the Cyber Police!" unless you've actually spoken to them.

Look at the girl in the first video, and ask if that kid would have been threatened by the father in the second video.

I only mention this story because it led to one of my favorite remixes:

It's not as entertaining, of course, when you know the whole story. Gawker has another write-up.

A few other reactions to this story:

• Another reason why computer science is great to study! It's a hell of an investment, since technical knowledge follows you everywhere (don't forget that it's just amazing as hell, too).


• I look forward to when everyone's lives are more public. In the midst of the Christine O'Donnell brou-haha is that she admitted to once dabbling in Witchcraft. Ignoring the fact that if Obama or Pelosi had 'dabbled in voodoo' or warlockery, her supporters would be having a conniption, to me the greater point is that people can start to forgive poor choices or experiments people have participated in because we all do.
  
  I really hate that employers look on Facebook for incriminating photos to "gotcha" with, even if the photos aren't incriminating. Don't confuse me: if your employer finds you snorting a line of coke on your Facebook, I think they're totally right to deny you the interview, since that's completely stupid. I'm talking about the case where they find a picture of you holding a Corona, then go "oh shit he's out of the race because he should know that I'll look on here, and he has a picture with a beer!"
  
  Lame employers, I'll save you the trouble: beer,beer, beer, party, party. Now a better question, did you go to a party? Is it surprising that in 5 years of undergrad, I did? Denying me an interview from 5 photos over 5 years of the ~600 photos of me on Facebook tells me I'm better off without you, because you don't want to talk to or hire people, but some imaginary, outdated standard of a person.
  
  Tying it all together: as more 11 year-olds rant stupidly into a camera, or misspell on their status updates, or have dumb photos up, we'll be better prepared to be reasonable as well.

Need cheering up? Robot Unicorn Attack! Or my favorite this week, the Haskell alphabet!

Living Openly

I just wrote a long blog post talking about why it sucks playing Zerg in Starcraft 2. But friends, there has been too much whining on this blog of late! It's time to bring back two things we've missed for some time: computers and whimsy!



So a few things: I'm living the dream, and finally installed Linux on a personal box. It's a small step (this is my laptop, not my main) but Perfect is the Enemy of the Good, and after using Mac, Windows, and Linux at work, it's incredibly obvious which direction I'd like to move in for the future.

Currently I'm running Ubuntu. I wanted to run Debian like we did at Brown CS, but I'm too much of a weenie at the moment. Besides, Ubuntu's easy as a dream to set up, and I've done it for work twice already. Naturally, I'll be using XMonad as my window manager ^_^

I've written twice that I've "picked up" ScrabbleCheat again, but they were lies. This time I've actually picked it up again (see the commit history!) and it's finally going in the right direction. I had a substantial amount in the first tagged release, but that approach (the anagram solver) was ultimately doomed because it didn't take the board into account when generating words for moves. If I ever get productive again, I'll write about this process, this has been the most fun I've had coding in a while.

Part of the fun has been because of Erlang, which has just had another release. There are so many reasons to use Erlang, and this application contains almost none of them (not super parallelizable, no need for hot-swapping patches, binary syntax, or fault-tolerance). That being said, I really miss my functional programming, and refactoring calls to a series of folds and maps just feels nice. I can't imagine how powerful I'd feel if I'd properly learned macros, or had use of Haskell's type system. Those are for the next ones ^_^

Finally, Diaspora open sourced today. It's too early to really tell anything about its future, but I'm thinking of looking at it and seeing what they did. If we're lucky, the community will take well to this I can finally stop being a dumb fuck who trusts Zuckerberg.

(Note that while I don't love all aspects of the product, my family will always be eternally grateful to Facebook for helping us communicate to so many, so easily during the roughest parts of Annalisa's recovery. I also think their approach to engineering, like many of the coders I know there, is brilliant).

Finally, I'm turning in my iPhone in late October and getting me an Android (probably an Evo), since I'll be paying that bill pretty soon and will use the opportunity to go to a more open land, containing the closed platform I work on ^_^.

So that's it, kids! Open source OS, programming an open-source hippie language, slowly migrating out of Facebook while decking it out with a new, more open phone. All that will be left will be a bed that's also a Reprap.



I'll try to post more; I still sleep next to too much cardboard and styrofoam, and will probably be comfortably moved in and adjusted after Christmas ^_-.

Strong words, Bed Intruder

A few things. One, cursing, and strong words!

I happen to agree. I swear very little, and do so very carefully (which is to say I treat swear words like any other word). But still, someone who thinks they have no place has never seen them put to great use (my favorite example is still the Pope Song).

Strong words!

Slurs, on the other hand, are pretty awful. I handle how I feel about these case by case. I happen to think, like swearing, we put too much weight on these as a society, but that's easy when you're tall, skinny, straight, and pass for white like I do. Normally I'm happy to leave well enough alone. But this Daily Show clip wins.

Finally, I love 2010. First you get this story on the news:

Which, naturally gets remixed:

But here's the best part: a school picked it up and playing it for marching band!

Are we lucky to be alive now, or what?

In light of the Essays that were the last two posts...

... enjoy some lulz. Some Nirvana meets Jackson 5:



And "I'm retarded, I guess":



Why do I enjoy this? A former music TA of mine summarized it best. "This should not be."

MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?

Let this be a myriad post with some of the trends that currently come up in this blog:

Music. This was shown to me by a former roommate, and while acapella isn't normally my thing, I found this pretty hip:

Internet lulz. I never really cared much for Insane Clown Posse (see this lame interview, where they manage to make Bill O'Reilly look like the slightly saner party). I had never been exposed to this, a 2009 release that compares to Brokencyde in claw-your-facedness:

What makes this more notable is the meme arising from the line "Fucking magnets, how do they work? And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist; Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed."

Murrrrrrrrr.

(edit: Madly Brilliant throws me the link to an SNL parody of the video, which I found sufficiently lulzy).

Programming languages. I like the tone and content of Mozilla's "A re-introduction to Javascript." While I don't love everything Douglas Crockford writes, but I agree with him in that there's a beautiful language trapped deep inside Javascript trying to get out. This helps us get there.

Also, reddit has started a mini-course on programming language math and formal specification/semantics. While it's too early to tell how successful it will be, I'm rooting for it!

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I have lots more to write about in the coming days: soon I move to San Francisco, and I just took a trip to the Midwest. Now though, I have to pack!

I WANT AN IPHONE 4!!!!

This was done by a Best Buy employee, who almost certainly got fired afterwards. I lolled.

It's not just the sentiments about the iPhone in particular, but the "Facts vs. Stupid" frustration that makes this a winner.