update employee set numberofsuperior = ora_hash(name, 20) + 50 where ora_hash(surname, 6) > 1
Creating random test data is a fetish of mine
“… you need TV Hat.”
Uh… that thing looks fsckin’ ridiculous. However, this guy seems so casual while wearing it.
as seen on TVHat
That is some weird-ass recursive shit right there son
Edit: phoxbox tagged his repost #google-glass and this is hilarious
The command line in terms of human interaction is really quite brilliant. While daunting at first. Anyway. Highlighting a couple issues with it here for some reference and such:
- Discoverability of commands is essentially none. There is little (tab completion and guessing at what a name does) to…
Worried about command line interaction? Try using KSH on AIX. Is the worst shell I’ve used so far. For example: when you press the “up” key it doesn’t gives you the previous command… IT FUCKING MOVES THE POINTER UP!
After using ZSH for a while now, I really couldn’t deal with that. What’re you doing on AIX though? Hopefully worth the pain D:
So far the dumbest shell I’ve used is the Oracle SQL+. At least rlwrap gives you command history for free, and it looks like it has tab completion too, after come configuration
I’ve started to use the ZSH, and damn, this thing is awesome, and I didn’t even start to tweak it to my liking yet!
The first of kvey’s point is ambigously moot, I think. Graphical shells (i.e. desktops) keep an associative list of filename extentions and applications, and leave the applications mess with the list at install time and while it’s not perfect it usually does the Right Thing™ until I try to vgrep my source files on a Windows machine at it pops up a gigantic IDE that takes half an hour to start up then spit in my face a string of stupid error messages about how there’s no build file and do I want to create an empty project and hey look there I don’t recognize that class are you sure it’s properly imported YEAH I KNOW for fuck’s sake please just open it up in Notepad++ you fucking OS that’s shipped with a standard editor that can’t even display Unix newlines properly and don’t even think of changing my quotes for quote-unqote “”“smart quotes”“”, I will rip out your heart and eat it while it’s still beating if I find that garbage in my precious ASCII.
But to get back to my main point, there’s no reason why I can’t just type a filename (or more like type the three first letters of a filename and hit tab) and leave the shell to open it for me? That’s probably because of the Google/7zip cartel makes too much money selling compress utilities to all those people googling how to open their .tar.gz under Linux and don’t you forget the fucking -f switch because do you really have a tape reel attached to your computer you drooling cretin? Do you even *imagine* all those utilities from the mid-80’s that would fuck up if we *ever* decide to give tar a different behavior? I hear ZSH has that, which brings me to an even earlier point I was trying to make, that is, Q: why don’t use use ZSH and why isn’t this sort of thing default A: because of histerical raisins being backward combative. The other point is that we now have harnessed the power of natural language recognition (sort of), which allows us to just Google a three-word description of what we’re trying to make and let the machine (or some guy that the machine figured answers the TWQ in a satisfying fashion) explain it to us, or more often just have a quick rundown of the runes that have to be invoked for the cast, which are most of the time -xvjf did your father drop you on the floor at your birth because I just don’t see what’s so complicated in setting the -j switch to puff a .gz file. The Internet has gave us access to every Unix guru on the planet, for better or for worse.
Kvey’s *other* point is shared with graphical shells, however, in a subtler manner.
Instead of leaving the user to invoke commands ex-nihilo from memory (*hrm* the Google *hrm*), it leaves it to select the one he wants among the entire array of existing commands, or via an ersatz of modal interface we call either menu trees or dialog boxes. Yeah, don’t bullshit me, they fucking *are* modal interfaces. That encourages documentation-less exploration, at the expense of space, and to be fair the absolute level of complexity isn’t even that much different; sure, it’s kind of cool that I can click on the Underline button and select the formatting options from a menu in Word, but is it really a win if explaining anything more complex than that involves contrived tree-walks such as File->Tools->Preferences->Bullet format in some dialog boxe’s left-hand side option list then on some checkbox somewhere versus just typing the runes the manual tells me to type to do task x?
Sure, commands can be invoked without being typed in WIMP metaphors, which means you can set arbitrarily large button and menu descriptors without the upper bound of error-less typing, but that has the effect of increasing the mental load associated with searching for the button to click, and leaves less place for the main panel of the app.
Some designers have took the approach of using visual metaphors, which can be liberating sometimes but leaves us with weird relics of ancient devices such as diskettes as “saves” (replaced by even weirder “clouds” as in “save in the cloud”), or just questionable choices such as gears or tool benches to signify “settings”, “administration” and such, because were you even *born* stupid or did it happen recently of course whenever you see gears, you’re *fixing* a machine I won’t even explain the toolbench one since it’s just so damn ovbious. You’re crafting a file system in wood, and now you need to partition it with your band saw. Simple!
But to be fair my main gripe with graphical shells is their pathetic reliance on the mouse even in moments where I already have my hands hovering over about a hundread different buttons.Ok.
The internet’s kinda cool, but it does kill the fun sometimes.
Ok where does this come from Boards of Canada has used a sample of this very speech in one of their song it is of utmost importance that I know what exactly is this show.
Thank you.
(Source: r8x0, via born-opiate)
Wanna have some?
iBecause deep inside, we’re all born in the wrong era. :wq
I memoriam, Michael Php, who needed to display the result of an SQL on his personal home page so badly that he created yet another crufty DSL that managed to be even more painful than the Perl he used previously.
Of all the TDWTF I’ve read; that one brings home the What The Cup.
How do you read nonfiction books?
I have reading aspirations. Many of these involve the completion of dense, lengthy nonfiction books. Some are even textbooks.
Tell me about your reading habits. How do you read nonfiction books? Do you have any strategies?
Nonfiction takes a long time to read, relative to fiction. It is requiring a lot of discipline on my part. I attempt to read the books linearly. I do not carry a writing utensil with me when reading.
I like a good mix of obsessive interest and doing every single excercises for a few interesting chapters and the skimming the rest of the book leaving myself do a few admirative “whoa”s from time time and then some bragging about all those huge books I’ve read.
I love to download illegal PDF’s of really expensive and deep math manuals, really get into the first chapter reading them on my laptop, then quit and dream about having the money to buy the thing since it’s so cool, and checking out if I’m not overflowing my books-to-buy counter which is an unsigned 8-bit int. The amount of cash I have on hand for that sort of thing I can store it in a bool.
I absolutely adore reading manuals about specific programming languages (like “The Foo Programming Language”) because I can judge every single technical decision like a Briton judging Prince Harry. I am utterly fascinated by language-agnostic Algorithms ‘n Data Structures books; I have been thoroughly enlightened by Thomas S. Standish’s one at time where I was trying to write Python in Lisp.
I say language agnostic even though there’s a big “C” on the front because seriously, you *can* do linked lists and balanced trees in most languages that support pointers/references.
I don’t really like manuals about specific languages that aren’t those made by the creators of the language .They don’t have the sort of tell-tale authenticity of the Dr. Frankenstein talking of the Creature, and the world have gave us Google, StackOverflow and Javadoc-style ‘net-accessible technical litterature for when it comes to idioms and specific features. Yet another job stolen by machines, alas.
I have a recurrent (hard not to type recursive) trip about compilers since when I started to code, and that usually leads me in very dense books at the intersection of discrete math, computational theory and formal grammar, and to be fair I think that represents my hard limit of how theorical a book I can get into.
That’s a fair roundup of what I read and how. I aggregate a lot of politic and scientific news and read a lot of it, but I don’t really read non-fiction books around those subjects. I did read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, which is a mish-mash of biology, anthropology, geography and geopolitics and so much more, and to be fair it has changed the way I see humanity in general. To get more into the details of the how, well, I didn’t really feel the need to get into the details and breezed through it, since there are a few fundamental concepts presented backed by immense amounts of research, data, examples and counter-examples as well as some fascinating anecdotes from the author’s seemingly fascinating life. It definitely is a brick, though.
