SDNET – all about .NET and computing

Chuck Norris jokes on .Net and computers:

• MVC actually stands for Model-View-ChuckNorris. Controller is just one of his nicknames.
• Chuck Norris was written in C# which itself was written in Chuck Norris
• You don’t follow Chuck Norris on Twitter. He follows you, finds you, and kills you
• The design of Silverlight DeepZoom was directly inspired by Chuck Norris’ powers of bionic vision.
• Chuck Norris doesn’t write code…oh no, he thinks about the finished product and the code appears.
• Chuck Norris has no need for virtual methods. Nothing can override Chuck Norris.
• A synchronize operation doesn’t protect against Chuck Norris, if he wants the object, he takes it.
• Chuck Norris invented recursion to see what would happen if he roundhouse kicked himself.
• Chuck Norris can multi-thread on a single processor by breaking it into pieces.
• Chuck Norris wrote a program that calculated the last digit of pi.
• Chuck Norris’ compiler is afraid of displaying warnings to him. It just fixes the code automatically.
• Chuck Norris uses Vista with UAC turned on. He has received no warnings. Ever.
• Chuck Norris monitor has no glare…no-one glares at Chuck Norris.
• The system works because Chuck Norris tells it to work
• Chuck Norris doesn’t need a test suite. The test suite needs Chuck Norris.
• CPUs run faster to get away from Chuck Norris
• Chuck Norris normalizes all schema just by inserting random data
• Packets travel faster than the speed of light for Chuck Norris, but he can still catch them
• Chuck Norris’s brain is his revision control, and it works better than git
• Chuck Norris can finish an infite loop in 1.3 seconds.
• Code written by Chuck Norris cannot be optimized.
• Chuck Norris never dies. He simply returns 0.
• Chuck Norris can break Moore’s Law
• Chuck Norris doesn’t need compilers nor editors. He roundhouse kicks the disk and the bytecode appears.
• Chuck Norris doesn’t use GOTO. Code comes to him.
• There is no theory of probability, just a list of events that Chuck Norris allows to occur.
• 90% of the worlds spam is handtyped by Chuck Norris. It takes him only 3 minutes.
• Chuck Norris can parse invalid XML
• Every time you don’t use “use strict” Chuck Norris kills a kitty.
• The best compression algorithm in existence are Chuck Norris fists.
• Chuck Norris can divide by 0.
• Chuck Norris can compile syntax errors
• The one true bracing style is the one Chuck Norris uses.
• Every program Chuck Norris has written can be run backwards. It will rollback whatever it did.
• No matter how you encrypt your traffic, Chuck Norris can read it by just looking at the cable. His ears can intercept wifi transmissions.
• Chuck Norris can enrich himself simply by hacking your bank account. He does not do this because there is no challenge in it.
• This blog does not contain a “Chuck Norris” category because Chuck Norris contains this blog.

No, I am not gonna talk about wages or market prices of your finished products. Instead I will talk a little about the fragility of our – read coders – situation.
We are basically on the top of the technological tree, using the most advanced tools to write top products for a technocratic society. We were inspired by movies about hackers, lured with wages above normal and compelled by the absolute control that we have on our creations. But we are so frail. We are dependent on the current state of technology. If any of the pillars would fall, we would face extinction.
Think about it. What do we need to do our jobs? We need electricity, high tech hardware and access to information. But these are the things that are more prone to disappear in case of calamities or war. Jeez, when you think that an earthquake can take out the whole powergrid; what do you do with your 800 watts hungry machine? Biking on a dynamo is out of the question. What will you do when an EMP strikes (ok, this might sound science fiction but so was a quad core cpu until a decade ago)? Will you write your 100 thousand software on a ENEAC card punching swallowing machine? What do we do when internet fails because of some foreign cybernetic assault?

We are maybe the most specialized field of work, and if we look into the history and evolution of the species, most highly specialized organisms were doomed to extinction at some point.
Can we survive a software development apocalypse? I don’t know and I ask myself sometimes “What do I do then”. Do I have any other skills? Can I build something with my bare hands? Can I sustain my family if I am not employed as a software developer?

Even worse, can I, or we, recreate the technological state of things if we need to restart anew? How, hard is it to create an integrated AND gate when you start from raw sand? And that is only if we can create reliable powersources and the surrounding ecosystems.

And then of course is the possibility of a science fiction future, where technology is king and AI is omnipresent but in a good way and all the above questions are for nothing … who knows, time will see but questions will still linger …

Today I worked on a strange issue where JQuery.Multifile was not working in other browsers than IE or FF. More exactly, it was not working on Opera 10.01, Google Chrome 3.0 and Safari. After googling and testing alot I was about to give up, especially when I saw this link: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-multifile-plugin/issues/detail?id=37

Still I was not ready to give up and dug deeper into the code until it hit me. The problem is related to the “name” property of the input tag. If you don’t specify it, in some browsers the files will not be sent along with the request.

Thus we have:
Bad way : <input type=”file” class=”multi” id=”fileControl”/> Works in IE and FF
Good way : <input type=”file” class=”multi” id=”fileControl” name=”fileControl”/> Works in IE, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari and probably others (if they are based on WebKIT)

Cheers