Monthly Archives: May 2010

Math Joke 1

Until yesterday I knew exactly 2 funny math jokes. Now I know three. Here’s the first one.

Two math professors are arguing in a cafe about the education level of the average person. One insists that the average person has little grasp of mathematics beyond arithmetic. The other asserts that the average person knows at least rudimentary calculus. They pass their lunch in fruitless debate.

Finally, the first professor goes to the bathroom. The second professor waves the waitress over. “I am having a bit of a debate with my friend here. When he returns, I’ll ask you a question. If you answer with the exact phrase ‘one third x cubed’, I’ll leave a ten dollar tip.”

“Ten bucks? You bet,” says the waitress.

The first professor returns. The second professor announces, “Here, I’ll prove it to you.” He turns to the waitress and asks, “What is the integral of x squared?”

“One third x cubed,” replies the waitress. They both laugh and the second professor leaves the $10 tip.

As they’re leaving, the waitress mutters, “…plus a constant.”

Create Your Own Programming Language

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I’ll write more about this soon. For now, you need to be writing your own programming language, and this book will show you how.

Click Here (Disclaimer: Marc is marketing his book through affiliates, and I make a commission if you buy this book.)

I’ve read this book and it’s amazing. I will post a full review soon, along with tidbits of the languages I’m creating. Short version: in a few hours you’ll write an interpreter; in a weekend you’ll write both a native compiler and a bytecode compiler. By next Monday your language will be running on the JVM. It really is that awesome.

Straight Out of Dilbert

I approached the IT office delicately, knowing that I was in violation of process, procedure, protocol, and a few other pro- words.

“Um,” I said. Sysadmin heads swiveled my direction. “I need to manually report a trouble ticket.”

“You need to file tickets with the online helpdesk,” said Senior Sysadmin.

“Um, yeah…” I replied. “My ticket is that the helpdesk is down.”

“No it’s not,” said Junior Sysadmin, without looking at his computer.

I pondered for a moment how to counter this logic. Finally I settled on, “Yes it is.”

My debating skills having proven too much for them, they both turned to their computers. The helpdesk came up immediately.

“No it’s not,” repeated Junior Sysadmin, with just a hint of smugness.

“I wish to amend my ticket,” I said after a moment of thought. “The helpdesk is not reachable from my computer.”

Junior Sysadmin knowingly told me to use https, because everybody forgets it. I said I had checked that.

Senior Sysadmin asked if I knew how to spell “helpdesk”. All traces of intimidation gone, I gave him a stare. He turned back to his machine and typed some more. Finally he shrugged and said, “It works on my machine.”

“Do you see that your machine is not my machine?” I asked sweetly.

“I’ll go check it out,” said Junior Sysadmin.

NOTE: This is a true story that happened to me yesterday; in our Sysadmins’ defense all of this was done in a spirit of teasing, not of mean-spiritedness. The problem actually turned out to be IT’s fault, by the way–they had configured my machine to use the wrong DNS server.