About life, the universe and everything

Links of the day

doubleu — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:03:19 +0000

Pure genius

doubleu — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 22:57:59 +0000

The major problem which the medical profession in the most advanced sectors of the galaxy had to tackle – after cures had been found for all the major diseases, and instant repair systems had been invented for all physical injuries and disablements except some of the more advanced forms of death – was that of employment. Planets full of bronzed, healthy, clean-limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business were the psychiatrists – simply because no one had discovered a cure for the universe as a whole, or rather, the only one that did exist had been abolished by the medical doctors. Then it was noticed, that like most forms of medical treatment, total cures had a lot of unpleasant side effects. Boredom, listlessness, lack of – well anything very much, and with these conditions came the realisation that nothing turned, say, a slightly talented musician, into a towering genius faster than the problem of encroaching deafness. And nothing turned a perfectly normal, healthy individual into a great political or military leader better than irreversible brain damage. Suddenly everything changed. Previously best-selling books such as ’How I Survived an Hour With a Sprained Finger’ were swept away in a flood of titles such as ’How I Scaled the North Face of the Megaperna With a Perfectly Healthy Finger But Everything Else Sprained, Broken, or Bitten Off by a Pack of Mad Yaks’. And so doctors were back in business – recreating all the diseases and injuries they had abolished – in popular, easy-to-use forms. Thus, given the right and instantly available types of disability, even something as simple as turning on the Three-D T.V. could become a major challenge. And when all the programs on all the channels actually were made by actors with cleft-palettes, speaking lines by dyslexic writers, filmed by blind cameramen, instead of merely seeming like that, it somehow made the whole thing more worthwhile.

Poem

doubleu — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:37:19 +0000

Life is not about the destination, unfortunately that
is what is commonly believed, life is about the journey.
Life is about the story, the tale. What interest would life
bring if all you were ever told was the end of the story

The point of this is to tell you to enjoy life’s journey
Enjoy where it takes you and let it take you where it
wishes, you may well end up where you belong.
For it is the odyssy that is the great story not at
all the fact that odyssys made it home.
Let its wings take you were it wishes.
Ride the winds and go with the flow

from http://cv122.deviantart.com/#/d2zb3dq

Diablo Swing Orchestra

doubleu — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:19:59 +0000

Hoofddoeken vs Hoofddeksels

doubleu — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:42:03 +0000

Als we het nu gewoon Hoofddekselverbod noemen gaat het toch niet meer om het viseren van een godsdienst.

Sticky notes

doubleu — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:33:30 +0000

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Relaxing music

doubleu — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:26:50 +0000

Amity in Fame

doubleu — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:10:53 +0000

Choose: Memory Leak or Corrupt Stack

doubleu — Sun, 31 May 2009 15:34:56 +0000

I’m currently in the process of adding new functionality to our theatre control software. The software was written by JB Systems (pun intended) and in my opinion was the result of putting an infinite number of monkeys at work with Visual Studio and Delphi. Today I was lucky to uncover this nice little gem :

wchar_t * newGuid(void)
{
    UUID Uuid = {0};
    if (UuidCreate(&Uuid) == RPC_S_OK) {
        if (UuidToStringW(&Uuid, (RPC_WSTR*)&strGuid) == RPC_S_OK) {
            return strGuid;
       }
       return L"";
    }
}

If there was a record for writing as many bugs as possible in the smallest amount code, this piece would certainly qualify for it :

if UuidCreate fails the return is undefined
if UuidToStringW fails the return is static memory (L"")
Otherwise the return is a newly allocated string which should be freed by the caller

When using this function you have to choose between 2 defects :

Free the memory returned by the function and risk segmentation faults or stack corruption
Don’t free the memory returned by the function and leak memory after each call

Bekrompen zijn

doubleu — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:41:50 +0000

zo moet dat dus.

Jammer dat zulke mensen mee mogen helpen aan de vorming van een nieuwe generatie.