If you ever doubt your nerdery, head on over to Destroy All Software and watch the video of programmer Gary Bernhardt’s Wat talk. If you find yourself laughing, rest assured, you’re a nerd.
The talk comes from CodeMash 2012, where Bernhardt took a few moments to highlight a few WAT? (link NSFW) moments in some of the web’s favorite languages like Ruby and JavaScript.
Seriously JavaScript, what’s up with this:
> [] + {}
[object Object]
> {} + []
0
1997 called. Your CRT is ready.
The tech press is abuzz, debating the merits and failures of the new (new new?) Twitter web and mobile designs.
If you’re like most, you aren’t even seeing Twitter’s new website just yet, so if you’d like to contemplate something a bit more fun on a Friday morning, consider what Twitter might have looked like had it been around in 1997.
You might remember 1997, the heady early days of web design — 1-pixel spacer images, animated gifs, tables with gray borders and a magical new idea called “cascading stylesheets.”
How would Twitter have looked in that world? We’ll never know, but thanks to a new art project dubbed “Once Upon” you can see what Facebook, YouTube and Google+ might have looked like had they been around in 1997. Once Upon was created by artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, who describe the project as “three important contemporary web sites recreated with the technology and spirit of late 1997, according to our memories.”
That’s right, Facebook, YouTube and Google+ redesigned in the spirit and look of 1997. As an added bonus the demo site has been set up to limit bandwidth at a 1997-esque 8 kB/s so it loads just as painfully slow as it would have on dialup.
Naturally all three sites are “best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95″ (that resolution actually seems a bit large for 1997, but that’s okay). If you can’t find a Windows 95 machine in the closet fear not, the demo site will work in any web browser that supports frames.
[via Today and Tomorrow]
Just in case you missed it: A recently uncovered Easter Egg proves Google still has a sense of humor.
To see the hidden feature just head to Google.com and search for the phrase “do a barrel roll.” Provided your browser is up to the task — the latest versions of Chrome, Safari and Firefox should all work — the search results page will do a barrel roll.
It’s worth a chuckle at least, but gaming nerds will be even more impressed to learn that the search phrase “Z or R twice” does the same barrel roll.
Google is well known for its Easter Eggs and has even gone so far as to embed an entire flight simulator in Google Earth. These latest two were found by Jason Cross, senior editor at PCWorld. In the Google+ thread below Cross’ post users point out a few more Google search Easter Eggs, including “tilt“, “ascii art” (check out the Google logo) and our personal favorite, the quite subtle “recursion.”
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Really you should be designing for the content, a practice that pretty much precludes the use of placeholder text. That said, our new rule is, if you’re going to use placeholder text, use Slipsum — Samuel L. Ipsum (probably NSFW).
Sure it defeats the purpose of Lorem Ipsom entirely by being distractingly, hilariously readable, but sometimes when you’re slogging through a boring project you need a little humor.
Slipsum comes in two varieties, regular, NSFW Pulp Fiction quotes and Lite quotes without the swearing.
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Whether it’s browser improvements, new web standards or just design trends, we spend a fair amount of time talking about the future of the web here at Webmonkey.
Sometimes though it’s good to take a step back and remember that no one knows what the future of the web will really look like. In fact most predictions turn out to be utterly wrong.
In that spirit, here’s a 1995 piece from MTV on this crazy thing called the Internet.
What makes this bit of time capsule trivia worth more than a cheap laugh is a) the hacking, privacy, and freedom of speech issues raised are still far from settled even today and b) the amazing thing about the web isn’t how much it’s changed, but how much it remains basically the same.
Okay. Back to work.
[via the Awl]
Probably the funniest thing to come out of this year’s SXSWi conference, the second “Worst Website Ever” panel brings you Mike Locker’s Brother IntelliFax 2800 App Store, er, Fap Store. It’s got Netflix. It’s got Angry Birds. It’s even got “an at symbol flying out of a fireball with binary code behind it.” And of course it’s 2011, so the worst website should definitely not be a website, but an App Store.
The Worst Website Ever II panel consisted of Andy Baio of KickStarter, Gina Trapani of Lifehacker fame and Ze Frank of The Show, among others. If you’d like to hear the recording of the session (which contains a number of other hilarious mock pitches), head on over to the SXSW website. And remember, the web is dead.
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C++ takes top honors for number of swearing developers on GitHub
Developer Andrew Vos was looking for a weekend project when he decided to grab some one million commit messages from GitHub and scan them for swear words. He limited the swearing to George Carlin’s seven dirty words and then broke down the results according to programming language. To make sure that the popularity of one language over another didn’t skew the results, Vos grabbed an equal number of commit messages per language.
C++ takes top honors, but just barely. Ruby and JavaScript are neck and neck behind C++. After that it drops off considerably with C, Java and C# placing in the middle. Python and PHP developers are either very happy about using those languages, or perhaps just very mild-mannered developers. Of course just because they don’t swear in commits doesn’t mean they don’t swear. As one commenter on Vos’s post says, “I program in Python, but all my cussing is related to IE.”
It’s impossible to know how many developers are swearing at their screens while writing code, but if you’re looking for a less swear-word-inducing programming language, PHP and Python seem to be the way to go.
Even more interesting than the statistics by language are the actual commits, which you can check out on Vos’s GitHub account. Our personal favorite: “fuck it. let’s release.” Indeed.
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A few weeks ago, the Google Chrome team entertained us with a very slick video showing its browser undergoing some hi-tech speed tests. The video shows a trio of laboratory experiments pitting Chrome’s page rendering engine in speed races against a potato gun, sound waves and lightning. It’s all very sexy, and it features some of the best super-slow-mo photography and close-ups of splattering goo since Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.
Opera, not to be outdone at anything (except browser share), has loaded up the potato gun and fired back with this bit of Nordic-flavored brilliance:
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Web comic xkcd is sporting a fresh redesign Monday morning, paying tribute to the free web-hosting service GeoCities. Yahoo, which bought GeoCities in 1999 for $3.5 billion dollars, is shutting down the service today after ten years of stewardship.
GeoCities was a place anyone could start a website for free. The company sold cheap banner advertising against your content, but that didn’t matter — you finally had a place to post that Melissa Joan Hart fanpage or your fully-annotated Art Alexakis discography.
In the web’s early days, you actually had to know how to author a web page in order to publish anything on the internet. You had to have working knowledge of things like HTML, FTP, GIF and DNS. For people with these new-found skills, a GeoCities page was an essential first step into the web, a rite of passage. Next came the easy authoring tools like Dreamweaver and Blogger, then the social networks like Friendster and MySpace, which let anyone establish a web presence with a few clicks of the mouse. GeoCities, along with other free hosting communities like Angelfire, faded into obscurity.
Many of those early pages survived in all their gaudy, glitzy glory — complete with scrolling banners, animated Gifs and blink tags.
Until Monday, October 26, 2009. Rest in peace, GeoCities.
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There’s a particular badge of honor you earn in web culture when you gain a high-profile impostor — Fake Steve Jobs comes immediately to mind.
But Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and a bona fide hero within the free software community, is so beloved, he’s gained four pretenders.
For the last month, four Fake Linuses have emerged, each one posting 140-character bursts of humor and insight to Twitter and Indenti.ca, a free software alternative to Twitter that’s gained some traction among open source devotees.
All four pranksters are voiced by high-profile individuals within the Linux community, but their real identities have been kept secret by the Linux Foundation. The nonprofit advocacy group is running a contest between the four Fake Linuses. The one who does the best (and funniest) impersonation of Linus will be unmasked publicly and given an award at LinuxCon, which begins Sept. 21 in Portland, Oregon.
Webmonkey scored an exclusive interview with one of the Fake Linuses (FLT#2, we’re told). We communicated over e-mail to ensure the poser’s identity would be kept under wraps.
The real Torvalds, who has remained suspiciously mum about the whole thing, has a reputation for being both genial and bristly in his internet communications — he once famously compared OpenBSD developers to “a bunch of masturbating monkeys.”
Thankfully, we found his doppelganger to be just as audacious.
Webmonkey: You’ve been active on the web since its inception, but you’re new to Twitter. What’s more fulfilling, tweeting or posting to Usenet?
Fake Linus Torvalds #2: That’s hard to say. Usenet attracts a very specific group of people, so my flames hit their targets more directly. On the other hand, Twitter is a larger and more varied group, which means I get more flames from all sorts of folks.
Webmonkey: Have you ever asked for help with the Linux kernel on Twitter? If so, what was the response like?
FLT: Me? Need help with the Linux kernel?? Pfftt…
Webmonkey: As a web service, Twitter is notoriously flaky. Any ideas for improving its stability?
FLT: You mean, besides making it open source? Seriously, with so many people depending on Twitter to get up-to-the-second updates on what their friends are eating and which games they’re playing on company time, we need to get an open source development community involved to make it stable and, um, even geekier.
Webmonkey: What other social networks are you on?
FLT: Identi.ca, of course, because that’s where The True Believers hang out. But, I’m not all that “social,” if you haven’t noticed. I prefer to hang out on the kernel mailing list.
Webmonkey: Do you also only have those accounts because the Linux Foundation makes you?
FLT: Nobody makes me do anything. That’s what so great about this job. I spend many days simply trying to learn Napoleon Dynamite’s dance moves. If [Linux Foundation director] Jim Zemlin weren’t always bragging about his moves, I wouldn’t spend so much time on it.
Webmonkey: Which feels more sacrilegious, Twitter on Android or Identi.ca on the iPhone?
FLT: Hands down: Identi.ca on the iPhone is more sacrilegious. Look at it like this: If you’re using Identi.ca, then you’re open-source-minded and tech-savvy enough to know better. The only reason you bought that iPhone was to look cool.
Webmonkey: How difficult is it to compress a complex insult into a 140-character tweet and still assure yourself OpenBSD developers will be able to understand it?
FLT: The BSD crowd generally has trouble reading anything longer than 140 characters, so tweets work quite well for the purpose of insulting them.
Webmonkey: How do you feel about Richard Stallman’s campaign to have Twitter renamed GNU/Twitter?
FLT: Well, is it any surprise, really? He failed to get Linux renamed as GNU, so now he’s trying for Twitter. If that fails, he’ll go after Apple next. Just keep working his way down the food chain. Maybe someday he’ll realize no sane person wants to name their product after a wildebeest.
Webmonkey: What’s up with that guy who has @linus?
FLT: It’s rather charming. It got a little creepy, though, when I caught him going through the garbage cans behind my house. Funny thing is: A lot of people actually thought he WAS me on Twitter. So now I’m trying to be less predictable: I’ve even thrown a few bugs into Linux, just to keep things fast and loose. The bizarre thing is that Microsoft copied them! Those guys…
Webmonkey: On average, how many direct messages does @jzemlin send you each day?
FLT: These days, I have no idea. I had to block him once I started receiving pointless messages every 10 minutes. “So, whatcha thinking about?” “Just heard this song and I thought of you.” “How come you haven’t responded to my messages?” Yeah, pretty weird.
Webmonkey: What was the message that drove you to finally block him?
FLT: I think the tipping point came when he sent me this DM: “Did you know that ‘Linus’ means ‘love’ in Swahili?” It was then that I realized: this bromance had come to an end. I considered a restraining order, but then I remembered that he cuts my paycheck.
Webmonkey: Why can’t the KDE people just give it up, already?
FLT: I can’t venture to guess. But, legend has it that Matthias Ettrich started KDE because his girlfriend could not use the desktop applications of the time. Who’s he kidding? Matthias knows he’s never had a girlfriend.
Webmonkey: As the story goes, you met your wife over e-mail. Do you think there’s any opportunity for people to find love on Identi.ca or Twitter?
FLT: Thanks to the internet, and services like Identi.ca and Twitter, people can search for love 24/7, without ever leaving their parents’ basement.
Webmonkey: About a month ago, Novafora, the company that acquired Transmeta, ceased operations. As a former Transmeta employee, how do you feel about this — in 140 characters or less?
FLT: Sad to see Novafora and Transmeta disappear, but in Silicon Valley, such is life. Companies come and companies go. Only Linux is forever.
Webmonkey: How do you say “tweet” in Finnish?
FLT: Tyhjiöfluoresenssinäyttö. OK, not really. But all Finnish looks the same, doesn’t it?
Webmonkey: Do Fins tweet much?
FLT: Fins love to tweet! How else can they tell their friends about the 20-pound perch they caught ice fishing, without having to set down their beer or turn down the volume on the heavy metal?
Webmonkey: Does Tux tweet?
FLT: It’s hard to tweet when you have flippers instead of fingers.
Webmonkey: You’ve been gravely injured, and you only have the energy for one status update with which to cry for help. Twitter or Indenti.ca?
FLT: I’d cry for help on my Identi.ca account, which automatically feeds to Facebook and Twitter. Triple my chances for help! Microsoft, don’t get any ideas. You come after me, you’ve got to take the whole Linux community down, too. Ain’t gonna happen, baby!
Webmonkey: Can we have your #followfriday list?
FLT: @linuxfoundation, @linuxdotcom, @patricknorton, @donttrythis, @snackfight, @darthvader.
Disclaimer: Fake Linus Torvalds #2 is not the real Linus Torvalds, and these statements do not reflect the opinions of Linus Torvalds or the Linux Foundation. The identities of all four Fake Linus Torvalds will be revealed on Sep. 21 at LinuxCon. You can vote for your favorite FLT — the one with the most votes will receive the coveted Silver Penguin cocktail shaker at LinuxCon.
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