Category: Humor

Anderson sends us a bit of C# code that does the simple job of removing multiple spaces, i.e. it converts “A    B” to “A B”. And, much to my surprise, I learned something about C# from reading this code.

private string RemoveDoubleSpaces(string strName)
{
    string newStrname = null;

    for (int i = 0; i < strName.Length; i++)
    {
        if (i > 0)
        {
            if ((strName[i] == Char.Parse(" ")) && (strName[i] == strName[i - 1]))
            {
                continue;
            }
            else
            {
                newStrname += strName[i].ToString();
            }
        }
        else
        {
            newStrname += strName[i].ToString();
        }
    }

    return newStrname;
}

There are some “interesting” choices here. Like using Char.Parse to convert the string " " into the character ' ', when they could have just used the character in the first place. Or the special case first step of the loop- a conditional that gets checked for every iteration when we know that it only executes the first time. We could easily move the initialization of newStrname outside of the loop and then just start the loop at 1, greatly simplifying the code.

But speaking of newStrname, this is where I learned something. At first glance, I assumed this code would just crash if it ever actually ran- newStrname is initialized to null, and then we call += on it- surely that doesn’t work on a null value? But it does.

And in retrospect, it makes sense: null + "some string" also works, and just does the sane behavior of returning "some string". In fact, the behavior is so obvious, that I now feel silly for thinking this worked any other way. Still, I was surprised that this code worked.

Speaking of code that works, Anderson threw all of this away and replaced it with the simpler return Regex.Replace(strName, @"s+", " ");, which isn’t doing exactly the same thing as the original code, but actually maps better to the requirement (the rule was that all whitespace should be replaced with a single space, not just space characters), so the code is simpler and a bug got fixed.

“In 1995, my husband and I eloped to Las Vegas to get married. Cirque du Soleil was just starting in Vegas at the time. Since we had a quick wedding and not many photos, we decided to get this epic wedding photo taken at our hotel. I do not regret a thing.”

(submitted by Amy) 

I don’t think anyone would argue that BASH provides a good scripting environment. It provides a commonly available scripting environment that even its successor shells attempt to emulate. But it’s idiosyncratic, at best, and leads to bug-prone scripts.

But there are certain tasks that it excels at- specifically, the kinds of tasks that you’d normally do from the shell but just want to wrap some light automation around. Want to scan a directory and then copy some subset of the files out based on user arguments? BASH is your friend! It’s just some basic conditionals and some cp commands, what could be easier?

Well, I’m not sure, but Radu‘s predecessors found a way to make it harder. Because they didn’t use the cp command anywhere. ANd why should they? I mean, look at the flags documented on the man page: cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-fi | -n] [-alpSsvXx]? Who wants to learn all of that? They certainly didn’t.

Whenever they needed to copy files in a script, they did this instead:

cat mySourceFile > myDestFile

cat, of course, is short for “this is actually concatenation, but everyone uses it to dump files to STDOUT”, which is how it’s being used here. And then they just redirect the output to the destination file. Which… works, ish. It’s certainly the worst imaginable way to copy, with a huge pile of overhead that avoids leveraging any filesystem level optimizations. And I’m sure that there are input files for which this will break.

Georgia rep Marjorie Taylor Greene: VP isn’t good enough, announces own run for the presidency.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R. GA) appears to have supplanted her role as a candidate for the vice presidential nomination in 2024 with aspirations for the presidency itself. Speaking to the press at a campaign event in Atlanta on Thursday about her planned run for the presidency, Greene told reporters that most of the other presidential contenders were “soft on Jews,” and that “the Hebes’” repeated interference in United States politics was concerning to her and her entourage of QAnon advisors.

Greene reprised her assertion that the Rothschild’s investment firm was responsible for the devastating California wildfires in 2018 and that “similar influences” had affected wildfires this year in Canada.

Brazen assertions by Greene are not new. She claimed several years ago that the mass shooting at Parkland, Florida was a false-flag operation. She also said that the Las Vegas shooting in 2018 was an effort by Democrat-led government officials to discredit the Second Amendment and thus restrict the availability of firearms in the U.S.

Greene also took exception to “Democrat cannibal pedophiles” and promised as president to close all Dominos, Pizza Hut, and Little Caesar’s pizza franchises in the U.S. “It’s the least we can do for our children,” said Greene, munching on a Big Mac.

Greene’s rather flamboyant assertions caused her to be stripped of her committee memberships in 2021 but with the recapture of the House majority by Republicans in 2022, MTG is sitting pretty, holding memberships on the prestigious Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the Committee on Homeland Security. According to Greene, Homeland Security is presently investigating suspicious activity stemming from Jewish lasers from space.

Asked if she’d heard from former president Trump after her announcement of her plans to seek the presidency herself, Greene said that Trump “congratulated me on my destitution. He said that I was a good little filly.”

Since the separation of Trump from his wife Melania, rumors have circulated that Greene figures prominently in Trump’s romantic plans. Greene, a one-time power-lifting champion, would say only that she had “bench-pressed the former president for fifteen minutes” at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida recently. “Everything came out alright,” she remarked with a smile.

Bill Tope is a retired (caseworker, cook, construction worker, nude model for art classes, and so on) who lives with his mean little cat Baby.

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