At the risk of turning this blog into The Wedding Blog (“All weddings,
all the time!”), I’d like to congratulate John Bristowe, friend and
fellow techie, on his engagement to Fiona. Nicely done, you two!
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"Western Standard" Writing Contest
The Western Standard, a Canadian conservative magazine, is hosting a writing contest:
Do you have a hot news story that you’d like to write about? Or maybe a strong opinion about something in the news?
Well, now’s your chance. Enter the Western Standard’s writing contest,
and you could win cash prizes – and have your work published in our
magazine!
You’d better enter soon – there are thousands of dollars in cash prizes
up for grabs, and EVERYONE who enters gets a free, year-long
subscription to the magazine, too – a $75 value! (If you already have a
subscription, you can give the extra one to a friend.)
I’ve
got a boatload of technical articles to write, so I’ll probably be a
bit too busy to put in a submission. In case you were looking to make
some extra cash and a brand new writing career, you may want to consult
its blog, The Shotgun,
for some writing tips. As a service, here are some more jumping-off
points for articles that should curry favour with the judging panel:
- Darth Vader: That Liberal Pussy
- “That Colby Cosh Feller Looks A Little Liberal Sometimes Too. Keep a 28-Gauge Trained On Him.”
- “And once all the CBC employees are back at work, that’s when we set off the fertilizer bomb”
- Holy shit, you mean Swift’s A Modest Proposal Was Satire?
- Ruhipnol + Texas Dating Sites = Green Card, Here I Come!
- Ontario Must Be Destroyed
- Quebec Too
- Oh Yeah, The Darkies, Too
- And While We’re At It, The Homos
- And Did We Mention CBC Employees?
The official photos (taken by Joe Demb) for the best damned wedding ever are now available online. Friends, family, guests and extremely curious strangers can pruchase prints online too!
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Dial “M” for MAXINT
[I originally posted this to The Farm, but thought that it might be of general enough interest to post here.]
This one got pointed out to me by Alain Chesnais, Tucows’ new Director of Product Management. Google the following phone number:
There are nearly 19,000 results for this phone number at the time of this writing. That’s a little odd.
Also of note is the fact that although 214 is the area code for central Dallas and parts of northeast Texas, the first page of Google results also reports that the number for four cafes with free wi-fi in San Francsico, Santa Cruz and Fremont, all cities hundreds of miles to the west, in California. It’s also reported as the phone number for the Jackson County, Florida Chamber of Commerce. And an inn in Labrador.
What’s happening here?
I looked at the number on Friday morning, not thinking much about it until lunch, when it occured to me that I if I ignore the phone number formatting, it becomes:
2147483647
…which should look very, very familiar to most programmers. That’s the largest value for a signed integer that can be represented in 32 bits, or MAXINT for many programming languages…and databases.
These Google results for the MAXINT phone number are most likely coming from database-generated pages (and maybe a few static pages in which someone dutifully copied the number from a database-generated source) in which the phone number was stored as a signed 32-bit integer value.
This will work for phone numbers with the following area codes…
- 201: Jersey City/Hackensack NJ
- 202: Washington, DC
- 203: Connecticut
- 204: Manitoba
- 205: Alabama
- 206: Seattle, WA
- 207: Maine
- 208: Idaho
- 209: Fresno, CA
- 210: San Antonio, TX
- 212: New York City
- 213: Los Angeles
\
and some subset of numbers in the 214 (Central Dallas) area code.
The moral of the story: don’t store phone numbers — or for that matter, any number that has no actual value as a quantitative amount, such as social security numbers, serial numbers and so on — as integers!
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We’re in Today’s Toronto Star
More later, but in the meantime, here’s the link to the story (free registration required)!
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Blogacatmas Participants [Updated]
My thanks to these Blogacatmas participants, who posted cat pictures on their blogs in honour of this very special day:
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Blogacatmas, Part Three
Yes, even more cat pictures…
Single girl + living alone with cat = big trouble. I know this from experience.
“I know kung fu!”
The trick is to gain the baby’s confidence, after which kitty can suck out its breath at will.
“Put down and catnip and back away slowly…”
Atkins-compliant!
“Everybody get on this side of the table if you want to be in the picture!”