Mel Kaye
In programming folklore Mel Kaye is an archetypical Real Programmer. Kaye was formerly a programmer at Royal McBee Computer Corporation. Ed Nather’s “The Story of Mel” details Mel’s prowess at programming. Although originally written in prose, Nather’s story was repeatedly distributed by email — the resulting wrapped lines were taken to be free verse, and were kept in this form at many sites.
According to the Jargon File appendix where the story may be found, Kaye is (or was) indeed a real person. In a FOLDOC document he is credited with doing the “bulk of the programming” on the Royal McBee LGP-30 computer. In Nather’s story, Kaye is portrayed as being prone to avoiding optimizing assemblers in favor of crafting code to take advantage of hardware quirks, for example taking advantage of the rotation of the LGP-30’s drum memory to avoid writing delay loops into the code. The story as written by Nather involved Kaye’s work on porting a blackjack program from the LGP-30 to a newer Royal McBee system; company sales executives had requested the installation of a cheat code allowing the customers to always win the game, a request that Kaye reluctantly acceded to, but accidentally changed the odds in favor of the dealer rather than the player. Subsequent to Kaye’s departure, Nather examined the code and found out that an apparent infinite loop had in fact been coded in such a way as to take advantage of a carry-overflow error, causing program control to shift past the loop to a jump instruction.
Google’s suggested completions to “why”
I use Firefox, and started typing a question into the search bar. I got distracted after I had only typed in “why”, and here are the results that google suggested:
Particle physics gives me a Hadron
There are lots of nerds on the Internet, and most of them are selling shirts to commemorate their particular flavor of nerditude.
LHC-Themed T-Shirts Commemorate the Non-Destruction of Earth
NMAP Dragon
Found at the end of the configuration of the NMAP source code package:
( ) /\ _ (
\ | ( \ ( \.( ) _____
\ \ \ ` ` ) \ ( ___ / _ \
(_` \+ . x ( .\ \/ \____-----------/ (o) \_
- .- \+ ; ( O \____
) \_____________ ` \ /
(__ +- .( -'.- < . - _ VVVVVVV VV V\ \/
(_____ ._._: <_ - <- _ (-- _AAAAAAA__A_/ |
. /./.+- . .- / +-- - . \______________//_ \_______
(__ ' /x / x _/ ( \___' \ /
, x / ( ' . / . / | \ /
/ / _/ / + / \/
' (__/ / \
NMAP IS A POWERFUL TOOL -- USE CAREFULLY AND RESPONSIBLY
Erdős Number
The Erdős number, honoring the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific writers of mathematical papers, is a way of describing the “collaborative distance”, in regard to mathematical papers, between an author and Erdős.
Erdős wrote around 1,500 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly co-written. He had 511 direct collaborators; these are the people with Erdős number 1. The people who have collaborated with them (but not with Erdős himself) have an Erdős number of 2 (8,162 people as of 2007), those who have collaborated with people who have an Erdős number of 2 (but not with Erdős or anyone with an Erdős number of 1) have an Erdős number of 3, and so forth.
Erdős numbers have been a part of the folklore of mathematicians throughout the world for many years. Amongst all working mathematicians at the turn of the millennium who have a finite Erdős number, the numbers range up to 15, the median is 5, the average Erdős number is 4.65; and almost everyone with a finite Erdős number has a number less than 8.
Given that Erdős died in 1996 and no works of his remain to be published, it is no longer possible for a person to be newly assigned an Erdős number of 1. Likewise, when everybody with an Erdős number of 1 passes on, it will be impossible for a new person to obtain an Erdős number of 2, and so on. As a result of this drift, the mean Erdős number of living people must increase over time.
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by Layne
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Blinkenlights
Blinkenlights is a hacker’s neologism for diagnostic lights on old mainframe computers and modern network hardware. The Jargon File gives the following etymology:
“This term derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled mock German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world.”
Blinkenlights – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Text Form:
ACHTUNG! ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS! DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN. IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS. ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.
Blackletter-Gothic Rendered Form:
Robots Unite!
I saw this in a robots.txt file on a friend’s webserver:
# robots unite!
# please contact robots (at) jtolds (dot) com to enlist in the grand robot army.
# to be eligible you must pass a simplified turing test.
Britney Spears guide to Semiconductor Physics
It is a little known fact, that Ms Spears is an expert in semiconductor physics. Not content with just singing and acting, in the following pages, she will guide you in the fundamentals of the vital laser components that have made it possible to hear her super music in a digital format.
New nicknames?
This evening I received a rather strange, simple email from someone in Germany:
Subject: That bed
Body: hey
The noteworthy part was the choice of receivers. The email was sent to all of the following addresses at charter dot net:
- mat_the_w (that’s me)
- mat_the_mormon
- mat_the_skipper
- mat_the_spark
- mat_thematic
For some odd reason, mat_thematic seems pretty cool. I may consider switching.