Comic is as comic does

Well, have you noticed that the latest PhD comic strip changed overnight? (I mean, my night; I don’t know the time zone of my less-than-25-on-average readers.)

This is what currently appears on their site:

But yesterday night (that is, uhm, at least 20 hours ago) the third and fourth scenes (what’s the proper English term? I can’t remember it… I don’t even know if I have ever know it!) were different!

Third scene

Mike Slackenerny: Do I really have that much independence?
Professor Smith: Given how much I’ll ignore you, yes.

Fourth scene

Mike Slackenerny: Have you ever done a post-doc?
Professor Smith: Heavens, no! I wasn’t that lame.

So, uhm, I wonder: why has it ever been changed?…

(Oh, and if you have noticed this post categorized as personal, well, yes, it’s because it’s personal.)

GitHub surprise

It may be of interest to some of you that Luke Amdor started hosting RubyFIT on GitHub. This GitHub thing seems to have really been going viral, at least as far as the Ruby world is concerned.

Flashward the Course of the Comics Empire Takes Its Way

So, if you subscribed the Dilbert comic feed, you could not have missed to notice that today’s strip has not been delivered. Just in case you are an avid Dilbert reader (probably because you are an engineer, like myself, or you just have an inclination for geeky and nerdy, and/or enterprise-y humor), at the end of the day you have headed towards the Dilbert comic website, to find a new “beta” featuring a flash-based strip visualizer, and today’s strip, in full color.

The only comics still resisting the Flashy new course amongst the ones I read are the Peanuts and Get Fuzzy. Oh, also Garfield minus Garfield, which, if you have not checked it yet, you should definitely do. It’s not funny (well, to be fair, it wasn’t funny even when Garfield was left in place… I remember having a Garfield agenda/diary during primary or secondary school… and what I did really appreciate was the laziness philosophy underlying the cat, while sketches were, uhm, well, perhaps good for a smile of two) but it is exactly what it says on the tin: a comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life; which, if you are or at least have been a schizophrenic, bipolar, desperate person whining about the emptiness of your life (and of course the life of everyone else you know or just exists on the planet), you immediately recognize as a quite polished mirror of your best (meaning worst) moments.

In fact, other strips are only delivered by their official website: for example, Calvin & Hobbes, and Doonesbury. And of course I am reading those by religiously visiting their site, and wandering through the calendar if I happen to have missed the strips for some previous days.

I’m all for maintaining and respecting the reproducing rights of copyrighted images, as it is for, I believe, all of the comic strips mentioned in this post. (I just have a doubt about the Garfield minus Garfield thing, really.) And, instead of reproducing or directly linking the images, I would very appreciatingly link the web page for a comic strip on a given day. Unfortunately, strip archives have this uttermost tendency to disappear: in particular, monthly archives vanish after the month has passed, breaking any link pointing to the web page (so, again, not directly the strip image) of any strip published online in the previous thirty (sometimes thirty-one, sometimes twenty-eight, or twenty-nine on a four-year basis) days as a consequence.

From a client/user point of view, I think this use of Flash technology solves exactly the wrong problem. First of all, as you may have noticed, the URL of the strip is not obfuscated at all; ah, yes, it’s probably a little more difficult to find, but it’s there, in the HTML source, so it can be extracted anyway and republished everywhere. Second, I don’t think (but, at the end of this month, I hope to be happily proved wrong) that Flash comic strip players have anything to do with the availability of comic archives online.

Update: Dilbert has now an official daily strip feed. Hat tip: Marco Fabbri, via Skype.

Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I?

The shell meme. Via Bill de hÓra. Type the following in a terminal window:

history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n “,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head

My results, at work, on Mac OS X:

109  ls
109  cd
46  java
33  logout
27  ssh
24  emacs
18  cvs
15  javac
15  env
13  ./football2html.py

Oh, this is funny! I have used the Python script at the bottom to convert football data from Dave Thomas Kata Four in an HTML table, because I wanted to propose it as an exercise to code in JavaScript for students of a university course I have been tutoring.

And at home, on Ubuntu 7.10:

93  ls
55  cd
28  sudo
22  java
18  exit
17  less
15  emacs
13  mv
12  rm
10  gedit

No surprises here. Maybe I am doing too much Java…?

Happy St. Patrick Day!

A couple of pints of Guinness (as they pour it in Italy, that is, the flavor is not exactly resembling what you get in Ireland or other English-speaking countries), a stupid hat got by chance (”You’re a winner,” yay!), a glass of Montenegro and another one of Sambuca; funny people amongst which you can feel at ease; and a final “Are you on LinkedIn?”, “Yes I am“, quite completely unexpected.