razvan jigorea & friends: the blog

that I have really enjoyed reading when I was younger, courtesy of Gutenberg Project - O Henry.
And there’s more. Lots more.

A brief bibliography: (thanks, fantasticfiction.co.uk)
Born William Sidney Porter in 1862, O. Henry first lived a checkered life as a cowhand, bank teller, reporter, embezzler, and convict. Then, in a last-minute reversal worthy of one of his own stories, he turned to fiction, and became a celebrated author of ironic miniatures.

Kodak, dupa cite se pare, nu va mai produce hirtie foto alb/negru. Traiasca AzoMures (sau invie, dupa caz)!

There’s finally a replacement for the commonly used programming language, C++ — yes, it’s C+- (pronounced “C More or Less”).
Unlike C++, C+- is a subject-oriented language. Each C+- class instance, known as a subject, holds hidden members, known as prejudices or undeclared preferences, which are impervious to outside messages, as well as public members known as boasts or claims. The following C operators are overridden as shown:

> better than
< worse than
>> way better than
<< forget it
! not on your life
== comparable, other things being equal

C+- is a strongly typed language based on stereotyping and self-righteous logic. The Boolean variables TRUE and FALSE (known as constants in less realistic languages) are supplemented with CREDIBLE and DUBIOUS, which are fuzzier than Zadeh’s traditional fuzzy categories. All Booleans can be declared with the modifiers strong and weak. Weak implication is said to “preserve deniability” and was added at the request of the Department of Defense to ensure compatibility with future versions of ADA. Well-formed falsehoods (WFFs) are assignment-compatible with all booleans. What-if and why-not interactions are aided by the special conditional evenifnot X then Y.

C+- supports information hiding and, among friend classes only, rumor sharing. Borrowing from the Eiffel lexicon, non-friend classes can be killed by arranging contracts. Note that friendships are intransitive, volatile, and non-Abelian.

Operator precedence rules can be suspended with the directive #pragma dwim, known as the “Do what I mean” pragma.

ANSIfication will be firmly resisted. C+-’s slogan is “Be Your Own Standard.”

Lost in Translation (2003), by Sofia Coppola. My rating: 8.5/10. Reviews by Ebert & Berardinelli.

As Adinutzah pointed out, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” (Robert Frost).

… will work for a wife

Only for IT geeks, it appears there are some new discoveries regarding HTML in the real world.

Apel catre un prieten dobitoc, de Doru Buscu

Nice gadget to test your Internet connection speed.

The crazy frog gets fired. Out of a cannon. (Thanks, Leela.)
Take your revenge on the crazy frog!

It had to happen eventually
If you try to label blogs with words in Chinese such as ‘democracy’ you will get an error message from the site which kindly tells you that ‘This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item.’