Josef “Jeff” Sipek

So, I was quietly coding, minding my own business, when this crazy guy send me a message:

Crazy Guy: awwww yeah
Crazy Guy: -rw-r–r– 1 sean somegroup 4476447 Apr 11 15:51 tags

Apparently he decided to run ctags on the GCC source code. I couldn’t help but answer:

Jeff: that’s nothing

I ran “make tags” on the 2.6.16 kernel tree, and quickly replied with:

Jeff: -rw-r–r– 1 jsipek somegroup 50423236 Apr 11 15:54 tags

That’s right, the kernel tags file is 11.26 times larger! Or approximately 50% of the size of the GCC source tree! Mwhahaha. He underestimated the power of the kernel. He then went on to say:

Crazy Guy: ctags is my God
Jeff: ok..
Crazy Guy: I’m serious
Crazy Guy: I’m going to set up a little exuberant shrine
Crazy Guy: with a holy ] key suspended from a golden chain
Crazy Guy: and I will sacrifice source files to it every day

If you google for lisp operating system the first result returned is the one and only: GNU Emacs.

I came across this image, which clearly illustrates the twisted nature of Emacs, and the "kick ass" aspect of Vi/Vim.

Another bit of information that proves that Vim is better than Emacs.

Main Entry: vim
Pronunciation: ’vim
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, accus. of vis strength; akin to Greek is strength, Sanskrit vaya meal, strength : robust energy and enthusiasm

So, today for a reason unknown to me, I decided to visit the US Department of Homeland Security. I was greeted by a spew of data. From the first two bytes I recognized the fileformat to be a bitmap image. I couldn’t help myself, but to extract the data and save it in a separate file. No matter what I did, I couldn’t extract more information from the file than this (I converted the bitmap to a PNG for easier viewing in web browsers):

I am not certain what happened, but regarless it just seems too enjoyable to not write about. :) So, just let your imagination loose and enjoy. (If they fixed their site already, here’s a link to a screenshot)

I have found an interesting bit of information…It would seem, that Intel owns the trademark BunnyPeople. When I learned that, I couldn’t help but do some searching to find out what or who BunnyPeople are. Here’s what I found:

BunnyPeople are these stuffed dolls (or are they action figures? hmm…) of the highly trained people that make processors. Apparently, these "toys" were part of Intel’s marketing capaign in 1997 promoting the Pentium II.

According to some random site (mirror), the dolls are approx. 8 in (203.2 mm) or 13 in (330.2 mm) tall.

Unfortunatelly, I can’t give you a link to the actual trademark page (since the system uses a cookie-based search sessions), so I have to resort to giving you a link to a screenshot of the page.

Just some interesting bug reports I have come across… ALSA #1671 Gentoo #74072 Gentoo #104437

Before you ask…the ALSA bugtracker has a rather prominent link “Guest login (view only) is also available.” - click on that; there’s no need to register.

If you ever thought that getting a patent was easy, think again! Take a look at Patent #6,175,625, which got approved on January 16, 2001. When was it filed? Good question. It was filed December 15. But which year? 2000? 1999? 1995? 1990? All wrong! It was 1944! Yes, 57 years after the NSA filed for this patent, the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) approved it.

I was looking at what’s new posts Alfred Thompson (see In The Lion’s Den) wrote on his numerous weblogs I happend to stumble onto a year old post by someone else at Microsoft wrote this (emphasis added by me):

Alfred Thompson, a Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist in New England, keeps a great blog going over on theSpoke. He’d especially interested in the Visual Gaming Invitational for Imagine Cup - check out his latest posts on it.

The thing that I find most amusing is the fact that Mr. Thompson himself tried to not be (at least I think he did) seen as an "evangelist" back in May when I met him - he certainly didn’t seem to be trying to convert others, he just had his reasons to use Windows.

And just for fun, here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, of "evangelist"

In the primitive Church, the designation given to a certain class of teachers, mentioned in Eph. iv. 11 after ‘apostles’ and ‘prophets’, and presumably having the function of preaching the gospel to the unconverted.

or the slightly newer (added in 1993):

A zealous advocate of a cause or promulgator of a doctrine.