Try as I might, I can’t work up the courage to put

all these sites were designed with industry standard buzzwords

in my CV. But really that’s what I mean.

I just applied for a job online but they didn’t even ask for my email address, which feels a bit wrong. The job was a ‘web officer’, too. The least they could do is pretend they’ll get in touch by email, even though they never do.

In the past I have been very scathing about the new Doctor Who on television, because I think it’s really bad scifi. But that didn’t mean I was unwilling to give Torchwood (a spin-off series which shares a character with DW) the benefit of the doubt. If I had BBC3 I probably would have seen it at the weekend but I had to wait for the analogue debut.

I’m very glad I tuned in. It was much more rewarding than the Doctor, which seemed to be a children’s television series that CBBC didn’t have the schedule space for. But this was something different: obviously a product of the same production team, but with the confidence to extend their reach for an adult audience. It wasn’t as sombre as (early) X Files or anything (there was still that Dr Who–style naive charm) but there was a sinister edge to it. It reminded me a bit of The Outer Limits a bit, although that might have been the alien whose sole reason for visiting earth was teh sex.

Which is another thing. They had lots of sex and a bit of swearing and some very brutal-looking instruments for dispatching people to their maker. And some poo-eating aliens in shiny blue boiler suits (honest!).

Not greatly high-brow or anything but I didn’t actually laugh at the premise within the first five minutes, unlike the first DW with Ecclestone in charge. (I mean, shop mannequins armed with laser beams? I ask you…) Of course, the important part of sciffy is: what does it reveal? Apart from the cool gadgets — which, as followers of James Bond will realise, quickly grow stale — why does this being science fiction place it apart? The answer, of course, is that it makes Cardiff seem sexy. (Although those accents were pretty foxy.)

Now you’re gonna tell me that Torchwood’s appearance on BBC2 was a freak, an advertisement for the real thing on digital, and that next time round I’m up yon alien-infested creek without a jump-suit. Sigh.

Why is it that we’re expected to believe that the very people who fail to keep track of our luggage when we fly around the world are somehow capable of organising a resilient and dynamic security system? Bear in mind that luggage doesn’t scheme, lie or dissemble and yet it still manages to fool the airlines.

Even more, if there’s any object which gets abused more by airlines than hold luggage I don’t know what it is. If suitcases ever becomes sentient they’ll definitely fight back.

Geek humour for the day comes to you courtesy of Raganwald and Uncyclopaedia:

• Pop on some Gil-Scott Heron and sing along to The Revolution will Not be on YouTube.
• When you’re finished with that you can get down to some extreme programming as we always imagined it would be — one-handed debugging while pulling off some nifty snowboarding moves. That’s the real ninja fu.

You know yo’ve been doing far too much C(++) when you see a menu that says

Choose a burger and a pint* for only £3.99

and all you can think about is “pointer to a pint”.

Two funny things to round off the day:

1. There was a column in the paper about a 104-year old lady who uses the internet from her nursing home. Go old people! She insisted on calling the mouse a rabbit though, which is terminology I think we should all adopt in solidarity.

2. The opening paragraph from this paper about knowing the limits of your own abilities:

   In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o’clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996).

Seen on LtU, in a discussion about closures in Java:

Also inner classes are the better and more 'java-way' to do closures

I can't see what makes them better, and if 'java-way' means anything then it must be a synonym with 'ugly' or 'verbose' or 'inconvenient'.

Miaow! Still, it's very true.

Java really is one of the ugliest languages around. I'm not sure what it is, but there's a singular lack of grace about nearly anything written in Java, and every way of doing things. Now, the world is full of ugly and inelegant code; Perl has made obfuscation-by-default into an art form and Visual Basic is never going to look like a real language no matter how much it grows up. But the inescapable fact of Java is that it seems to take the worst elements of syntax from all its influences.

Edit: In a fit of post-publishing research (the best kind, I'm sure you'll agree) I decided to check out Ada. I had a feeling that a language designed by and for the US military would not look pretty. And I was not disappointed. This "Hello, world" snippet is from the Wikipedia page:

with Ada.Text_IO; 

procedure Hello is
begin
   Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line("Hello, world!");
end Hello;

If Jesus died and was resurrected why are Christians still waiting for the Second Coming? Surely the next one is the Third Coming?

I’ve never really understood why the US date system works the way it does (month/day/year) but it’s just one of these things. It probably comes from some obscure fact of translation or ‘reform’ undertaken by an American printer or something.

Anyway, it reminds me a bit of the URL schema for http://thedailywtf.com. I know that it’s a bit of a cliché to talk about “real WTF being the forum software”, but my oh my, it is…

The URL for some topic is of the form

/forums/thread/NNNNN.aspx

where NNNNN is some arbitrary number to identify the conversation. The completely stupid thing is that if there’s a second page (or more) in the conversation, it can be accessed here:

/forums/P/NNNNN/ShowThread.aspx

where P represents the page number. (Note also that if P is 1 then it is equivalent to the URL given above. Eh?)

Forums, then page number, then thread — what? I can’t imagine what would happen if these people were made to design something that wasn’t as inherently flexible as software. How about a book of short stories where all the opening pages of each story appear at the beginning of the book, then all the page 2s after that, then all the page 3s. Like a self-assembly story.

OMFG, this is hilarious. The guy deserves some kind of medal for services to maths humour.