The Olympiad of Misguided Geeks, or, One More Reason I'm Going Straight to Hell

Most hilarious programming competition ever, The Olympiad of Misguided Geeks. The whole point is to produce the most interesting "WTF" program.

For those of you just joining us, a "WTF" is a program or information technology system (this includes security policies) that has one of the following qualities:

• Totally unreadable or otherwise unmaintainable code. This is sometimes called the "job security" programming paradigm.
• Attrocious over-engineering that implies a novice understanding or unwillingness to use readily available library functions.
• Lack of documentation or, just as bad, excessive documentation. Also, horrible user interface.
• Convolution, metasolutions, failed attempts at cleverness.
• Security by obscurity or use of the Ostrich Algorithm.

I don't know how Thom and I are going to do it, but we, two college-educated professionals, have to create a working program so amateur that we're both going straight to hell for it. I can't give any details here, but so far our program leaks memory like a sieve, overly complicates operations so simple as adding two numbers, and throws a segmentation fault every once in a while just for good measure. Oh yeah and so far it doesn't work. We'll have to fix that.

More updates later, space cadets.

Feisty Fawn

I've started using Ubuntu 7.04 on my macbook pro, and I've gotta say that the setup is worlds different from 6.10 (Edgy Eft). I was initially put off of Feisty because I couldn't boot from the liveCD. I got an issue with the VESA video drivers, but installing the ATI drivers for Xorg fixed that. The following commands

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
sudo aticonfig --initial

fixed that right up. It's a little weird, but just roll with it.

Once the ATI driver problem is fixed, the installation goes swimmingly. I was a little troubled that it auto-installed grub over my previous installation of lilo (I miss lilo), but I was pleasantly surprised that the auto-installation of grub works better than lilo. And all this without my intervention. Seeing as my macbook pro is hardly typical linux hardware, I'm pretty pleasantly surprised over here.

Unlike with my vanilla installation of Edgy, sound (ALSA) is fully operational, as are the drivers for my ATI graphics card and synaptics touchpad. Feelin' pretty excited over here.

Thought of the Day

max
All these questions. Even the answers overwhelm me.

nicole
all of physics is overwhelming. I don't even know the stuff we DO know.

max
The Universe is such a fucked up but beautiful place. . . . There's so many times that I'm just really glad to be here and thank God for having me. Like I'm on His talk show or something.