March 09, 2005
Bloggification Proclamation
Posted by Matt in
Geek Humor
Well, I never really blog so along with my thoughts of renaming this site to www.jessAndWhereTheHellIsMatt.net, I would like to bring in a few thoughts. There are so many I don’t know where to begin. I guess I should start by explaining why the posts from me are as frequent as Haley's comet. It is not that I lack the ideas for blogs, on the contrary, I have had many ideas but they come to me late at night or while lying in bed. I know they are good because Jess and I can’t stop laughing about them or just being amazed at the epiphanies. Come sunrise, however, the effect is gone and so is some of the context.
So why the sudden change in my bloggification? Well, I guess I am still in a bit of a semi-vacation mode. Jess and I were in Orlando for the past few days for the American College of Cardiology convention (sorry Joe, Shirley and Julian for not getting in touch but we had no time). Not really a vacation for either of us but a nice get-away from the cold up here. For those who don’t know, I am the lead engineer on a software product called the Encompass Review Station (ERS). In simple terms, it is a piece of software that cardiologists can use to review and diagnose images of patients.
With that said, there are 2 things I would like to bring up. One is the ability for just about everyone to read the “jessAndWhereTheHellIsMatt” mentioned above. This was a topic that came up in Florida. Since most of us are programmers or have seen some sort of code, you can (hopefully) easily break it out into “Jess and where the hell is Matt”. ifNotPleaseSkipToTheNextParagraphAsThisOneIsOverYourHead. So the topic of conversation was “why is it that programmers don’t capitalize the first word?” The short and long of it (Get it??? that’s my bad programmer joke of the day people) is, in my opinion, is we got tired of pressing the shift key. Hell it is one more key press! It's funny to put it in perspective with ERS because doctors don’t use variable names but instead want the most direct route to reviewing a patient. This means to analyze and diagnose in the shortest amount of mouse clicks while interacting with our software. In efforts to accommodate this, we have provided a lot of automation for the doctors in our software. It sounds kind of silly that one more mouse click is the make it or break it of this type of software but I heard it a lot at the convention. Just like one more key press for us programmers. Of course there are the acronym or obscure variable names following the philosophy of “if the code was hard to write, it should be hard to read”. Any veteran programmer will tell you that adopting that mentality, though perfectly fine in the beginning, bites you in the butt 3 years later when you need to fix a bug in the code.
The real impetus for this blog however was an email I received when I sat down in my cubicle today. It was from Nigel Deed. No, I don’t expect you to know him, I don’t either. My finger was inches from the delete key when I realized, why should I waste my energy with an extra key stroke :-P Actually, I thought it was part of my regular inundation of spam in the morning until I saw first that it was properly formatted, addressed to me and had a link to www.mattandjess.net (or is that www.mattAndJess.net???) In it he pointed out a very interesting fact. Not to ruin the surprise, I instead request that you go to Google and search on “hamlet soliloquoy” without the quotes. (or just click this link and I will save you a few key strokes)
With that, I'm off. I blog ya in another year and a half, or less, check back to find out :-)
Jess here - clickTheExtendedEntryToSeeTheAnswer.
Jess here!
I figured out the answer, and I didn't realize how funny that was until Nigel was kind enough to point it out, and then Matt pointed it out to me.
Here's the screenshot:
We went into Google and typed in "Hamlet Soliloquoy" (without the quotes). The first result was my site. The excerpt from my site is text saying "You go to a search engine such as Google. In the search query box, you type in "Hamlet Soliloquoy" without the quotes. It's a home run!"
There's gotta be a rhetoric term for that somewhere... basically I just explained exactly what someone had to do to read what I wrote.
Anyway, back to the original topic, these are the epiphanies that Matt and I have on a nightly basis. Something interesting that makes us look at each other and crack up. When we finally stop laughing, we say "that is REALLY cool!"
Actually, here's what REALLY made us laugh. Yes, I spelled 'soliloquy' wrong, and that's what made my site number 1. (the Internet for Beginners links get a lot of hits). But please note the quick links at the top, most notably, "Dictionary" and "Google".
Sigh.
Bad spellers of the world, untie.
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Now, I'd'a' thunk that something a little more direct, on-topic and, well, scholarly would get the #1 there. What a wonderful web....
Seems to me there was some kind of convention to the camel-back stuff (and no, I don't mean the scourge of Hungarian notation). I mean, we can't just say "too lazy to hit SHIFT" in the textbooks, right? Sumpthin to do with the difference between variables and methods or some such. It was a really good, well-expounded explanation. I even think that Donald Knuth proved the rational mathematically at one point.
If there's one thing we're good at, it's developing reasons why we do the things we do and KEEPING THE REAL REASON WITHIN THE GUILD. Remember your oath, Matt -- may your belly become bloated and your head be plucked of all but three hairs....
Ahh yes, these are the things that keep us up laughing all night. Coming soon: "Joan of Arc. What the hell is a dauphin?!"
I went back in and added to the post... I included the answer. It's funny!
Okay, I've been doing some thinking about this lowercase letter thing, and I've got a theory. You'll have to hang with me for a second though, 'cause it'll take some 'splaining.
The uppercase letters A-Z are represented in ASCII by the codes 65 - 90, or in binary 1000001 - 1011010. The lowercase letters a-z are codes 97 - 122, or 1100001 - 1111010.
You'll notice that the only difference there in binary is the second bit on the left, which is "0" for the uppercase letters and "1" for the lowercase letters.
Now, a long time ago, when programmers were developing on computers that had the memory and processor power equivalent of a blender, they had to be very careful about how efficient and small their code was. The smaller, the better.
Well we all know that a "1" is a whole heck of a lot skinnier than a "0", which is a huge space saver. So it makes perfect sense that the early programmers would prefer lowercase letters over uppercase letters. I mean, look at all the space they were saving at the machine code level, using a "1" instead of a "0" for each letter they typed. It's friggin' brilliant.
That's my theory, anyway. I haven't really seen it published anywhere.
- Julian
Interesting. You are talking to a guy who loves binary so the 'splaining was a bit easier for me. Just for fun, I figured out how to represent 132 in binary on my fingers. The great part is you can give it the wrong way but it is never misrepresented. That might require a bit of 'splaining but I'm sure you will all understand once you do it :-)
Matt
HA! A picture is worth a thousand words. Or maybe 1111101000 words, for the sake of this discussion.
You should do a short video clip to demonstrate, for the slow side of the class. Maybe "Matt counts to 4 in binary on his fingers".
I don't care what they say, math is fun.
- Julian
