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Inside the OpenSolaris Source Code
An anonymous reader writes "Ten million lines of code and not a single profanity? Is that really possible? Apparently, yes, says OpenSolaris community manager Jim Grisanzio. He said even before Sun filtered the code, it was relatively free of profanity. 'They went through the code for a great many things,' he said, 'and I'm sure they cleaned a word or two. Or three.' But a careful look through the code will reveal some programmers' frustration." From the article: "The most embarassing comment came from a developer of the GRUB project who went only by the name of 'Gord'. 'This function is truly horrid,' he wrote. 'We try opening the device, then severely abuse the GEOMETRY->flags field to pass a file descriptor to biosdisk. Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.'"
The code might be compiled and run on some unsuspecting souls computer. Once the computer learns that kind of language, the next thing you know it will be downloading porn!
I should know, that how it got on my computer!
My other car is a Popemobile
I like the guy's humour. Either that or he is not smart for putting a reputation-ruining 'bomb' in the source code :-) But anyway... good programmers are supposed to be very critical of their code so even functionally correct code can be commented as though it were horrible.
see a Text Widget
yep, no profanity at all
Grub is an official GNU project and thus, GPL. Gords comment was intended to be humourous. I'm not surprised the ZDNet hack missed it though. After all, understanding what GRUB is might require that they're are familiar with their subject, and that's just too much to ask these days..
something really interesting in the code, now that Solaris is open? People has been saying "Sun will never open Solaris" for month, now that it is open all that they do is to grep "fuck" or "shit", or look for frustrated comments?
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
My favorite is I had to write about 50 different modules for a program. So I put a George Carlin quote at the begining of each module from brain droppings. No one except the small group of developers I work with would ever see it right. Unfortunately all of our code got subpoena. They obviously had no idea what the code was doing because out of 10 boxes of printed code, what do you think they had questions about? You guessed it the Carlin Quotes. There were a few sections with things like "Fear ye who enter here!" at the beginning of some really ugly subroutines. Ever since then I have had very innocuous comments in my code. Ok, I at least make them look innocuous to the casual observer.
I remember once when I was was trying to track down a bug I wrote some debugging code which I then commneted out with: #ifdef _SEX_WITH_FARM_ANIMALS_ ...Debugging code... #endif Later, someone wanted to integrate with my code so I saved it off to the interim repository and a few minutes later I got a visit from my co-worker.
Boy he had some fun at my expense...
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
!seineew era sreenigne epacsten!
Translates to (when read backwards): Netscape engineers are weenies!
Here is the explanation taken from this article:
Don Rickles apparently writing code at Microsoft:: In the aftermath of Microsoft's admission Friday that its engineers had included a secret password in some of the Web site authoring software shipped with Microsoft's Windows NT operating system -- which The Wall Street Journal claimed could be used to gain unauthorized access to Web sites -- the editor of the Microsoft-software security site NTBugTraq came forward to offer some clarification on the matter. In a message posted to the NTBugTraq mailing list Cooper wrote, "This is a hole that could allow information to be manipulated by others. However, it's limited to 'others' who already have Web authoring permissions on the same box." Cooper added that the secret password in question--"!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" IE: "Netscape engineers are weenies!" -- wasn't a password at all, but a cypher key which only allows access to the security breach, not the security breach itself. However, over the weekend, two programmers revealed that they were able to disrupt Web servers by exploiting a different vulnerability in the same file. Microsoft confirmed that assertion, indicating that the pair had discovered "a new, separate vulnerability that significantly increases the threat to users of these products" and that "could be used to cause an affected server to crash." (Wall Street Journal story; paid registration required). In any event, when Microsoft issues a patch for this, as it inevitably will, you'll find it here.