Thinking about the box: Marketing WTFs

Posted on October 21st, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, General/Misc., Thinking Outside the WTF.

Have a marketing WTF? Tell us about it! outsidethebox@strafenet.com

On a job description for an analyst position:

We value assertive individuals who “think outside the box.”

The fascinating thing about the phrase thinking outside the box is how inside the box it’s managed to become. When did the phrase thinking outside the box become so cliche that it actually became its own antithesis?

In other news:SMART Architecture: i think the power of diagrams like that
: is they churn the processing power of the brain
: but the image has no inherent meaning to the uninitiated
: the churn, lacking any input, generates a sort of hypnotic glaze over the viewer that weakens their powers of resistance
: making them vulnerable to an elevator pitch even without a natural 20

0 comments.

Perl oddities

Posted on October 19th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc., Product Design, Programming.

Since Gas is writing about UI, I’ll do programming for now:

Today’s example is about Perl, and a curious example about hashtables. A hashtable, as you may know, maps a key to a value.

%names = ("smith" => "john", "krall" => "diana");
foreach $lastname (keys %names)
{
print "$lastname, $names{$lastname}\n";
}

In essence, this hashtable allows you to take a lastname and find a firstname with it. If we look up “smith” in %names, we get “john”; if we look up “krall,” we get “diana”.

The second part of the code–the foreach, takes each key in %names and prints it out. So the output is as follows (the order may be switched):

smith, john
krall, diana

Perl, of course, is not without quirks that make this seemingly simple behavior complicated.

Quick quiz: What does this code do?

%hash_to_the_l = ( "turner",
"baggage" => "smashing",
"cheeseball" => 43, "ducks");
foreach $key (keys %hash_to_the_l)
{
print"key $key = $hash_to_the_l{$key}\n";
}


Answer:

(more…)

7 comments.

Apple preinstalls virus: Blames Microsoft

Posted on October 17th, 2006 by Tim.
Categories: Politics.

Link: http://news.com.com/Apple+loads+Windows+virus+on+i…

Of course! This was obviously Microsoft’s fault! SHAME ON YOU MICROSOFT!

0 comments.

Simply amazing

Posted on October 10th, 2006 by Tim.
Categories: Tim.

The newest addition to my list of RSS subscription is written by the son of the president of Nigeria. That sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. Apparently, this guy was an intern about 5 years ago, and is now an FTE in the Windows Live group. I know he’s for real because he talked about the intern barbeque event at BillG’s house, which only an intern would know/care about. He has an absolutely amazing blog entry written yesterday about a meeting he had with Bill Gates recently. Read it here, it’s worth the time.

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