Don't ask

Turns out, SPITBOL programs actually look a little bit like Perl scripts. Not enough to be really useful, but enough that I can recognize some of the bits.

Don't ask me why we're using SPITBOL.  I won't like the answer.

Bacon scripting

Two small things today.

First-- today I learned that the line "s%%%g;"* in a Perlscript, which should do nothing, will actually cause otherwise inexplicable problems.  Learning this took me about an hour, which is sad, but at least the script works now, which is a good thing.

Second, I verified that Bacon numbers are calculated using film roles only, which is sad, because I also learned that if they included stage performances as well, I would have a Bacon number of 4.

*Basically, the line means s(earch) for the character string between the first two percent signs, replace it with the character string between the second and third percent sign, and do it g(lobally) throughout the document.  So it should have replaced nothing with nothing, and therefore done nothing (it had been left in by accident anyway).  Instead, it caused random bits of file to disappear.

Country Internet Codes

Ok, .ch is NOT China, it is Switzerland.  I'm not sure why, there's doesn't seem to be a .sw in use, but the IANA database doesn't seem to come with explanations.

(EDIT: Thanks to eBryan, I now know that CH stands for "Confoederatio Helvetica" (Swiss Confederation), the name of the alliance of cantons formed in 1291 in opposition to Hapsburg rule.  That actually makes a lot more sense-- thanks, eBryan.)

China is actually .cn, which looks like it should be Canada, but Canada is .ca.  Which should be easy to remember, except for all of the other freaking countries that start with C-A-.

There's also .cat, which is apparently "Reserved for the Catalan linguistic and cultural community."  That's kind of cool, although I don't have any idea how much use it actually gets.  And there doesn't appear to be a domain reserved for the Basque, which seems kind of unfair.  There is one for Gibraltar (.gi), which I don't think I even knew was a territory (Spain keeps trying to claim their land, but it technically belongs to the UK).  And of course, there's always .இலங்கை, reserved for Sri Lanka (they have .lk too).  I don't even know what script that is.  Tamil?  Maybe?

Computery stuff

Today at work, I learned that if you want to run a SNOBOL program in a DOS shell on a Windows 7 machine, you can't just preface your command with "snobol;" instead, you have to provide it with the whole path, to wit: C:\SNOBOL\snobol.exe etc etc.

Yes, I realize that nobody actually cares, but I spent the better part of an hour wrestling with this stupid issue, and by Deity I learned this.

It's just a jump to the left

Today I learned, completely inadvertently, that if you are using Windows 7 and have one of those landscape monitors, pressing the Windows button and an arrow key together will narrow the active window and make it line up against the indicated side of the screen.

This is not the most earthshakingly important thing in the world, but there are actually circumstances at work for me where this would be a useful shortcut.  So I'm... well, "excited" would be rather an overstatement, but I am at least moderately pleased.