Last spring, I posted
If Version Contol Systems Were Airlines, which I really enjoyed. Now, because I seem to have a desire to take a good joke way too far, it’s time for:
IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE CHRISTMAS CAROLS
I apologize in advance. (Feel free to add your own verses/carols in the comments.)
Away in a Pointer (C)
(to
Away in a Manger)
Away in a pointer, the bits in a row.
A little dereference to see where they go.
I look down upon thee, and what do I see?
A segfault and core dump, right there just for me.
I saw thy init there, a reaping away
My process, from its address space, so sorry to say.
I thought I had saved thee, from void pointers all,
But maybe I missed one, and doomed you to fall.
Be near me, debugger, I ask thee to stay
Close by my terminal, and help me, I pray;
To find all the bugs and the void pointers too,
And if my kernel oopses, help me reboot for you.
Joy to the Wall (Perl)
(to
Joy to the World)
Joy to the Wall, the Perl is come!
Let awk receive her King;
Let every grep prepare him room,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash, and bash, and sed shall sing.
Joy to the keyboard, we’ll use it all!
Let men, shift keys, employ;
Implicit variables, and globals never fall.
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat, repeat, the line noise now.
Perl rules the world with truth and ASCII,
And makes the doctors prove
The glories of carpal tunnel hands,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it, and we do it, more than one way.
Hark! The Herald Coders Sing (Haskell)
(to
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing)
Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive King;
Recursion and patterns wild,
Pure and IO — they’re reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye functions rise,
Join the typeclasses of the types,
With recursion, do proclaim,
“Laziness is born in this domain.”
Refrain
Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive king!”
Monads, by highest Heav’n adored;
Monads, their depths still unexplored;
Late in time, behold they’re good,
Never once were understood.
Veiled in functions, the Monads stay,
Used for IO, and more, each day,
With excitement, Monads say,
“Arrows are stranger, so with us stay.”
(Refrain)
Hail the glorious compiler of Glasgow!
Hail the threaded run-time system!
Join the beautiful Cabal of Hackage,
Upload there thy perfect package.
We know best, what we will Handle,
You’re safe with us: no pointers, no vandals.
Born to make your exceptions throw,
Unless you unsafePerformIO.
(Refrain)
Lispy the Paren
(to
Frosty the Snowman)
Lispy the paren was a jolly happy soul,
With a lot of cars and a little cons
And two ends made out of curves.
Lispy the paren is a fairy tale, they say,
He was just common, but the children know
how he came to life one day.
There must have been some magic in that
Old Symbolics they found.
For when they placed him on its disk,
It recursed around and ’round.
O, Lispy the paren,
Was recursive as can be.
And the coders say it would take a day
To put his parens away.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Look at Lispy go.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Consing on the car.
Lispy the snowman knew
The keyboard was hot the day,
So he said, “Let’s cons and we’ll have some fun
now before they Scheme away.”
Down to the function,
With a list there in his RAM,
Running here and there,
all around the LAN, saying
“cdr me if you can.”
He led them down the streets of disk
Right to the traffic bus.
And only paused a moment when
He heard them holler (quit).
Oh BASIC Night
(to
O Holy Night)
Oh BASIC night, the LEDs are brightly glinting;
It is the night of the dear GOSUB’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error printing,
Till you appeared and the RAM felt its worth.
Shiver of fear, line numbers do inspire,
For yonder breaks a mostly harmless GOTO.
Fall on your bits, O hear the Visual voices!
O BASIC divine, O BASIC where GOTO was born!
O BASIC, O Holy BASIC, O BASIC, you’re mine!
Some want to say, “GOTO is harmful always,”
But what of them, in their post-modern world.
We PRINT the truth, in the line-numbered goodness,
But Dijkstra appeared, and the faith, it was lost.
A thrill of hope, when .NET BASIC announces,
But Visual BASIC, what kind of thing are you?
Fall on your GUI, O see the old line numbers!
Behold BASICA, O BASIC when DOS was born!
O numbers, O lines, spaghetti divine!
Guido We Have Heard on High (Python)
(to
Angels We Have Heard on High)
Guido we have hard on high
Sweetly indenting o’re the code,
And the functions in reply
Their exceptions sweetly flowed.
Refrain
Indent….. in your whitespace careful!
Indent…… in your whitespace careful!
Spaces, why this jubilee?
Why semicolons have you so wronged?
What backslashes must we use
If we want our lines so long?
(Refrain)
Come to Guido here to see
“One Right Way” is good, of course.
There’s no need for Perl, you know,
We have to be more verbose.
(Refrain)
Now the PEP will show the way
To the future, we shall see.
Banish lambda and the rest
Of the things we liked the best.
(Refrain)
I prefer to host my own Internet services. Here is a quick summary of what I have found in the past two hours of my life:
I ve been doing some code lately, fixing things here and there, and over the last few days gave mt-daapd some attention.
First, I was reported a segfault of mt-daapd when reloading web pages too fast. Surprisingly, it turned out to be a stupid omission in a simple routine and it is hard to hit without disabling the cache in the browser.
Now, I just fixed something that s been bugging me for a while: mt-daapd did not handle Avahi daemon restarts, leading to mt-daapd becoming invisible to clients relying on mDNS until you restarted it.
And, wow, that went a bit further than expected. As I expected, the simple piece of code needed to handle that wasn t there. But still it did not work, as it turns out the event loop for the Avahi polling wasn t being run. Replace stupid code reinventing the wheel by the Avahi-provided wheel and there, it works. But not when run as a daemon (aka foreground only). Well yes, starting the thread before daemonizing isn t going to work well, so fix that. EPIC WIN \o/
As mt-daapd s upstream is not active anymore I m accumulating fixes for mt-daapd in the Debian package, to the point I m starting to consider setting up a git repository somewhere with those fixes and possibly some more code rework if I feel like it.
Have fun and check
the new release out right 
Previously I've posted a couple of running commentries describing how I've examined and gone about fixing a couple of bugs in Debian packages I use, enjoy, or have stumbled upon by accident.
Each of these commentries has resulted in a change or two to the affected software to make the bug vanish.
Fixing the bug is usually the hard part, but obviously it isn't the only thing that you need to do. While it is fun to have a locally fixed piece of software if you don't share it then the very next release will have the same bug again - and you'll spend your life doing nothing more than fixing the same bug again and again.
Generally the way that I report my fixes is by sending email to the Debian bug tracker - because I usually only try to fix bugs that I see reported already. Specificially I tend to only care about:
(Part 1 of an ongoing series: shiny things in telepathy-glib)
I’ve just set up a poll on my site asking: what topics do you want to read here?
Since this July, when 
... might be due to a bug in Sun Java 6. Try upgrading to
Two reasons:
Today I was busy porting reportbug-ng to QT4. One really cool thing I noticed is the new QWebView widget, which is the main widget of the QWebKit module. It works surprisingly easy compared to the good old QTextBrowser of QT3 — now you can just throw an URL at it and it will render the page nicely complete with CSS, images, etc.
Here’s the obligatory screenshot:
as you can see, the bugreport looks much better than in the old version of rng. WebKit does a really good job rendering the HTML, I think the fonts look even smoother than under firefox.
To ease the transition to from QT3 to QT4 I’ve extracted all the Debian BTS specific stuff to ![[Dish]](http://mjr.towers.org.uk/writing/reflections/attachments/satdish_sm.jpg "Dish")