• Your weekly beach volley ball matches are between teams named ‘Proxies’ and ‘Stubs’.
• You read ‘ATL Internals’ while waiting in line for the next ride at Universal studios
• You are locked outside your house without your keys and the sticky note at the door reads ‘CoLockObjectExternal’ when your wife gets back.
• You ask your bank if they can send your monthly balance statements in XML format.
• You return your neighbor’s telephone call saying it was an interapartment callback.
• You ask your cable television company if they support Channel Hooks.
• You decide to do some detective work by night and call yourself the IMallocSpy.
• Your kid asks you what a female Ox is called and you reply OXID.

Aravind Corera
Originally written for IDevResource
Private Email

A programmer who coded in C
decided he hated GC.
“It’s bogus” he said,
“I keep track in my head -
and always remember to free!”

Jason Whittington [jasonw@develop.com]
Private Email

A parody of Eddy Poe’s “The Raven”

Once upon a platform tired, while my code was stranded, mired in a pool of leaky pointers running up the mem’ry load, while I started to debug it, suddenly I screamed “Oh f*** it!”, and decided to just chuck it in the hallway guest commode.
Then discovered: managed code.

Ah, distinctly I remember, bugs caused by a private member, and later having to call AddRefs and Releases by the busload, These things, they fill me with regret, time wasted on pointer management, Now, simply Fire And Forget! Oh the freedom newly bestowed!
Thank you, thank you, managed code.

Of course the bloat is sometimes scary, and IL can be kind of hairy, And there’s this Tower of Babel thing that is threat’ning to explode. I mean, Perl and Python and Eiffel and all the scripting langs are just a ball but please, for God’s sake, NOT COBOL! Java, even, but not THAT toad,
running in my managed code.

I traded in my GIT and SCM, my registry (which was kind of dumb) and in return I got C# and the CLR, my new abode. And VS7, though often crashing, as a tool is really smashing. I shan’t bore you by rehashing the gifts .NET has bestowed.
Just be grateful: managed code.

Justin Gehtland [ justin@DEVELOP.COM]
brains@develop.com

Read all about it…

Rohit Khare
Posted There: Fri, Aug 2, 1996 20:27:42 -0400

I spoke at a college last week for a friend of mine who’s an adjunct professor (Cal Caldwell). During the talk, one of the male attendees bolted <sigh>, but on his way out, trusted sources say that, when sighting a young coed whom our our bolter was clearly interested in engaging with in some way, he said, “Hey! Do you know who’s in there? Chris Sells!” Clearly this young man was misguided in his attempt, but I’m glad to hear that someone thinks that using my name will help in attracting members of the opposite sex. It’s never worked for me… : )

In Japan, it is said, the impersonal and sometimes unhelpful Microsoft error messages have been replaced with Japanese haiku poetry. Maybe in the next upgrade to our Windows…

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

The website you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent and reboot.
Order shall return.

Aborted effort.
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No-one hears your screams.

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.

I ate your Web page.
Forgive me; it was tasty
And tart on my tongue.

First snow then silence
This thousand dollar screen dies
So beautifully.

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao, until
You bring fresh toner.

With searching comes loss
and the presence of absence:
“My Novel” not found.

See how in Haiku
All error messages are
Somehow more peaceful

Richard Blewett
Ian Griffiths
George Shepherd
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