[Note: I should mention the joke here is on me. The strings were in fact in little endian format. I just don’t know how to read a debugger.]
Its time for my geek humor corner. Technically this entire blog could be considered geek humor (sans the humor), but bear with me now. This is quite amusing, I assure you. Assuming, of course, you have a CS or EE degree and you are easily amused. I know for one that I fall into that catagory.
If you don’t, I’m sure its ok. God probably still loves you anyway.
Anyway, I’m working on porting a Mac/PowerPC application to Mac/Intel. As any geek worth his weight in Cheetos knows, that means dealing with big endian vs little endian issues. The problem I was looking at had to deal with strings of text. I’m looking at the string in the debugger, and everything looks fine. So I decide to actually to view the string as raw memory.
Well now. That’s funny. In a “that’s going to ruin my entire day” sort of way.
Silly me, here I was on a little-endian machine thinking I’d see little-endian string. But that’s where I’d be wrong. I was now staring at a big-endian string (a string literal built by the compiler, no less).
BUHAHAHAHAHHAHA!
I guess you had to be there.
My business partners and I were reviewing an NDA for a potential contract today. We were marveling at the dense prose used in it. I mean, the lawyers really earned their keep on this one. No one with a soul was going to understand it.
Anyway, that got us to thinking about NDA’s in general. I suggested that NDA’s should be written in a lighthearted poem format. My suggestion was:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Please work for us
But don’t tell anyone you knew
Its a good thing I’m an engineer.
The other guys tried, but they were even less successful than I was. I mean theirs didn’t even rhyme. psh. Whoever heard of a poem that didn’t rhyme?
After coming to the realization that we weren’t poets, we started talking about how much we should charge this sucker. I mean mark. I mean customer. Customer. Whatever.
Its always a delicate balance. If you charge too much, they assume you’re trying to rob them outright. But you charge too little, they assume you’re going to steal something on the way out. So you have aim for the price range that says “I’m probably not a thief.”
Regardless, I’m pretty excited about this. Its always good to have new suckers come in. I mean customers.
I got an IM from an acquaintance today. He works for Apple these days and was asking me if I was interested in a job. It would involve me moving back to California, but I would get to work for the Mothership.
I told him no, there’s only one reason why I’d move back to California at this point.
Although I wasn’t interested in the offer, its always nice to hear things like this. Its good to know someone’s keeping you in mind, and it definitely helps the ‘ol ego.
