Baboon Logic

I was messing around in the GNU humour section when I came across the Unix Error Messages page, which is an inventive collection of funny error messages you can get in a Unix shell. A lot of them don’t work any more, but some do, and some do it in unexpected ways.

% ar m God
ar: God does not exist

That is what the page says I should get in a C shell. Here is what I got -

$ csh
% ar m God
ar: creating God

Now That was funny.

The Unix Millennium Bug started getting noticed (in 2006), exactly a billion seconds before its sceduled execution, after there were some mysterious crashes which were finally traced to the definition of time_t in unix-like operating systems (and more generally, in the ubiquitous C (the programming language)). From a thread in PIClist, I also found this webpage which claims to have been written in 2003 (in case the opening paragraph looks familiar to you, yes, the whole page is a mostly plagarised version of the programming challenge in the introduction to the excellent book Expert C Programming by Peter Van Der Linden, a book I would recommend to anyone).

Read the rest »