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Ask Slashdot: Dedicating Code?
First time accepted submitter The_Buse writes "This week I lost my grandmother and after returning to work (as a web developer) I find myself looking for some way to dedicate something to her memory. Unfortunately, I'm no author so I can't dedicate a book to her, and I can't carry a tune so penning a song in her honor is out of the question. What I can do is write one hell of a web app, and after nearly a year of development my (small) team and I are nearing the release date of our next product. My question is, have you ever dedicated a project/app/code in honor of someone? What's the best way to do it: comment blocks in the header, tongue-in-cheek file names, Easter eggs? Or is this a horrible idea all together?"
A simple "in loving memory of X" or "decicated to X" should do.
If you have an 'About...' item or a slash screen this seems like a good place to do it
You spent several manyears in coding an app, and just before release you consider implementing an Easter Egg?! How about the splash screen with the name of the app and "dedicated to my grandmother", that should do it.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
A web app that will be forgotten by everyone including you in 5 years.
Technology and software changes too fast to get any sort of meangful duration dedication out of it like that.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/dedication.html
It is. You can probably guess which question that's an answer to, but it saves you worrying about any of the others.
Sorry to seem harsh, but this is probably not the best idea. If it's fun little web app, then you could pull it off. Anything that will deployed in a professional environment should not have something like this present. I think the only time I've ever seen this in practice was in the "Help -> About" section of a proprietary DB app used in automotive shops. I think it was addressed to the office pet (a golden lab) for the small office of coders that wrote the app.
Why do you feel compelled to draw attention to the loss of your grandmother? My condolences for this loss, but there are probably more appropriate ways to commemorate her memory. Pay for a spot in the obituary in the local paper, so that the people in closest proximity (and are likely the largest demographic which may have been affected by her actions) would know. It's always a shock for people to learn years after the fact that a local pillar of the community or old friend has passed away. It might do some good to make sure all the people that knew her are aware of this.
I hope this helps.
Really, if you want to put it in, you can, but nobody reads them, or if they do, they forget about them.
Just think, when was the last time you read an author's dedication?
... www.gedenkseiten.de where you can make a profile for the late person, and visitors can light virtual candles.
YMMV if this is useful.
- Hubert
Whatever it is, it probably has an expected life span of a few years.
If you tie a tribute to your departed grandmother up in it, you're going to be even more bummed when your project's life ends.
My grandfather died slightly over a decade ago. Nothing I was working on then is still in use in any meaningful way. Both facts make me sad, but having them tied together would be worse.
Find the local park district and buy a little plaque on a park bench if you want something. Or a brick in the humane society sidewalk, or whatever people do wherever it is you are.
Or better yet, honor her memory by doing something with your life that would make her proud of you. You probably had a hard time explaining to her what you even do, why would you memorialize her with it?
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Either a comment block in HTML or a paragraph in humans.txt
Planting a tree is easy to do and provides many years of enjoyment.
How about adding her name in the 'credits' after the other developers' names, perhaps with a short compliment on her qualities as a person? Or associated more closely with your name to avoid the team feeling as if you've appropriated the entire project.
I'm sorry about your grandmother, but dedicating a web app to her memory is not really that permanent of a thing. You might want to consider something less fleeting, maybe endow a flower garden at her church, a bench in a public park, something that would be visible and public to the people who knew her.
First, I'm sorry for you loss.
While it's nice to dedicate work to someone, you might want to rethink the method. Certainly don't put in easter eggs or change file names. That not only gets in the way of functionality, but will also prevent most people from seeing what you have done. (Plus it'll depress the people who do see it.) If you are going to dedicate your coding work to someone I recommend doing so in the release notes or release announcement. I've done this before, dedicating a single release to a family member or friend or sick person who could use some kind thoughts. But note the difference, it's not something in the product, it's not hidden, it's a clear, up front dedication which people can see without affecting your development or functionality.
Another thought: After losing someone there can be a strong urge to _do something_, anything. You want to mark that person's life and their meaning to you and that is great, it is. However, it's usually a bad idea to mix business and your personal life. Consider writing a poem, or donate money to charity in their name. These approaches will not only maintain a healthy barrier between your personal life and work, but it will probably mean more to people in a wider audience.
Instead of being discouraging and borderline sociopathic, I'm sure you're grandmother would have been elated to know you plan on dedicating something in her honor. You're dedicating something you're good at doing and spent a bunch of time on. That being said, if it's going to be open sourced then throw it inside the header comments. If it's closed, throw a footer section in like websites have that contains the copyright stuff.
She'd be proud to have a grandchild that loves her to the extent of dedicating something to her, as will your family.
As usual with all other topics, check out what Debian has been doing for more than a decade.
Pretty much every release this century has some dedication to devs who died since the last release.
Sad, but true, that anytime you get a thousand or so people together in a group, even if they're mostly young and apparently healthy, you're gonna lose one every year or so.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Nothing in the actual app itself. If you have a credits page, put "In loving memory of..." at the very bottom of the page. No one reads the credits unless the know of the the developers anyway, and those folks will probably be pleased to see a note of dedication to a grandma at the bottom.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I'm honestly asking. You already remember your grandmother, so you don't need it.There's no heaven/hell/afterlife of any kind, so your grandma won't see it, and among everybody else, you'll find those that remember her, and those that don't even know your grandma. So what do you win by dedicating something to the memory of somebody? It's just make-believe. It's just something for yourself. It's done to make you feel noble/a better person.
So, my advice: Don't waste your time on petty superstitions.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I'm not trying to be harsh either, but seriously an app dedication? Was she a ground breaking coder? Did she sponsor your education? It just seems like a very inappropriate way to honour her.
If you want to dedicate something to her, tell your family and friends about the first time she taught you something, or the things you do that have been passed down from her. Hold onto her lessons and events, they're the most precious thing anyone can give you. And when you share them with others you will be honouring her life.
If you become a speaker of the dead for her then she won't be forgot in your lifetime.
Since you're a web developer, why not create a simple memorial website for your grandmother? Then her friends and family can use it to share photos and stories about her life.
Steve Jobs named one of his Apple computer versions after his daughter, Lisa.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Plant a tree,
Rescue an abandoned pet
Help kids,
Be a person your Grandmother would respect.
Here in Norway you can now add QR codes to your tombstone with a link to a dedication website. I think the idea is "popular" in the US as well, I don't know who came up with the idea.
Plant a tree in her honor. You can put a small plaque in front of it. Or as another poster suggested do something in the park like donate a bench. These tend to have an impact far beyond just the app itself, which is a pretty short timeframe.
What if you left the company or it got shut down? Or if you changed departments. If it's a larger project, someone else could take it over 5 years from now and decide to re-dedicate it to their grandmother...
However, the bench and the tree will still be standing.
My sister-in-law made me so angry one day that I told her every piece of code that I write will have "Missy is a jerk" somewhere in it.
Don't remember what it was that she did, but I've held true to that promise for 12 years.
I consider myself a cynic, but I teared up when I read about your plans to honor your grandmother. I think you should do it. It's a simple, harmless way to show your affection for her. It doesn't harm anyone or anything but it allows you to respect her memory.
Heck, that's slight less than average, and you're just talking about natural deaths and accidents. The sucide rates at Foxconn's factories are below average for their headcount and China, and that caused a great number of tabloid articles.
Putting a dedication in code seems pretty odd unless she was one of the developers. You could find a cause she would have liked and making a donation in her memory. [ Or make the donation to EFF.org since most of us on Slashdot would like it ]
Rewrite the compiler so that your binary is secretly an audio file with a message of your choosing.
Bonus points if your application can play itself.
This is what I did for my grandmother. It's not exactly what you were thinking maybe, but may give you some ideas.
http://enigmadream.com/maryann/
I dedicated my final year project to my housemate for providing moral support - he provided moral support by dropping out of college and spending £27,000 on crack cocaine and underage prostitutes.
Whenever I had trouble finding motivation, I thought of him. This was remarkably effective in motivating me to do a good job of it - I didn't want to wind up in the same boat.
Why not contribute to a humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) project? You can find various projects to volunteer with by contributing code at:
http://socialcoding4good.org
Unless the project is completely yours then it is not right to do something like that. What about the other people who worked on it? You are overshadowing them with your dedication. Additionally as Ritchie70 says you will probably be extra bummed when the life of the project comes to an end.... Additionally the code is for someone else anyway, so unless you get all the stakeholders to agree to that it is not right to do it....
Nobody gives a shit about your dead grandmother
This gets modded up? Is Slashdot really so anti-social? Dedications aren't for other people or the dead. They're for the grieving. If it makes him feel better then that's what it's for. I never understood why so many smart people can't figure this out. You don't have to feel the way other people feel, but if you think you're smart at all you should be able to at least recognize that most humans have emotions and a grieving process.
I like the ritual of burning a candle for 24 hours every year on the anniversary of the person's death.
I'm teaching at a university of applied sciences and one of my students is currently creating a website using PHP/HTML5 and WebM/Vorbis media to remember her recently deceased dad, using interviews of relatives and friends, video snippets, photos and stories about his life, all chronologically linked together, categorized and tagged. The site will be password-protected and every friend or relative will receive an account. Apparently the man had a whole lot of friends all around the world, easily justifying this amount of work.
Using repurposed military robotics and AI, create an unstoppable geriatric-mecha-juggernaut with the voice and personality of your deceased grandmother, who will then carve a swath of destruction through the city as it takes Grandpa on a trip to the beach. Or at least, that's what Anime tells me you should do. :)
Roujin Z: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102812/
What if your software is full of bugs? Or gets rooted? Is that how you want people to think of your grandmother?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I plan on donating my corpse to the local medical university. But before whats left of me ships out, I want to have some physical Easter Eggs planted in my body for the medical students to find. Like, USB memory sticks with medical fetish porn, secret Da Vinci coded treasure maps, extra Alien Borg technology organs, etc. That ought to lighten up anatomy class.
When planning to dedicate something, the best thing to do is ask the person what they really want, before they die.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
if the programming contractors did this one any of my projects, I'd have them fired and terminated immediately.
Fired AND terminated? I think you're a bit harsh of a boss if you think it is within your disciplinary power to take someone's life because of a disagreement with something in your software...
May I suggest an infinite loop?
---
Sorry, too soon?
P.S. My grandmother was the reason I even got into computers in the first place, back when I was probably 9 or 10y.o., she bought and sent me a book (we lived far away for 6 years), that was a children's story about computers and computer programming written from POV of a some kid that needed to solve a mystery of some sort and the only way to solve it for him was to get through various tasks, which dealt with computer organization, some algorithms, writing some code. Since I didn't have a computer at the time, I started writing code on paper.
My grandmother later had a stroke and spent 5 years in a partial coma (half awake) before dying, pretty sad. I am thinking maybe an infinite loop is in order.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Revision 4325, codename "Cold Granny"
Michael Mamaril
In a game that is the diametric opposite of class, a fan lost to cancer was memorialized in a way that is actually pretty touching. Working on the premise that this should be somebody the player is happy to see, unlike the majority of the cast, whenever he's around, he chats with you and gives you a really excellent gift.
The thing you're making probably doesn't have that kind of scope, but the basic idea is this: if you want to pay your respects in code, don't bury it or put it at the end of a credits list. Pick something about your program that aids ease of use or enjoyment, and put her there somehow. Make people happy your grandma is around.
If you want to do a subtle dedication, then use it for the next magic value you need to come up with. I have done that myself in code, which puts a dedication inside an IP address. That felt like an appropriate dedication for somebody who was a geek himself. Sadly he died many years too soon.
I lost two friends and my father this year. I dedicated this release of cerowrt ( http://cero2.bufferbloat.net/cerowrt/credits.html ) to them. Most of the machines we have are named after someone that has passed, for example our main build box is named after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huchra It helped a lot to channel them all as we struggled to get the releases out. And, surprisingly, making ice cream, with liquid nitrogen as the coolant, has got to be a healing ritual, around here.
This is sue-worthy? Really? Try being professional yourself.
If your work is art - bought for aesthetic pleasure, like paintings, sculptures, or books - you may dedicate it. Art is all about the artists' expression, their artistic personality; dedicating the work to a person they love is simply another part of that intimacy that an art viewer develops with the artists.
If you're writing a tool or a service, personal whims have little space, and more important than those are a more thoughtful design and a more professional feel.
This doesn't mean, however, that a web application cannot be art. Video games, for instance, are often considered art, web-based videos games included. So long as whoever sponsors the project agrees to it (assuming the role of an art patron - most likely you'll do it on your free time), the project can be made to feel like art, and in those cases there's place for personal touches such as dedication.
FreeBSD 9.0 was dedicated to Dennis Ritchie.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
I don't know what your project is but if there is an About or similar area simply list her among the info provided. You don't need to draw attention to the fact that it's your dead grandma (that will seem morbid I'm sure to some users). Just a name at the top or something. It will make you feel better if nothing else. Drawing attention to it in an app that makes no sense to do so wouldn't be the best idea. Just a simple reference to her name somewhere, somehow in a way that is feasible and non-intrusive and doesn't force the user to think about mortality.
...and would appreciate a well-turned web app, by all means dedicate that to her. Otherwise, may I suggest that you look for something that your Gran might appreciate a bit more, as a meaningful tribute to her memory.
.... should be positive ones. Inside jokes, cultural references, maybe a rewritten song lyric, or something else that lightens up the task of writing production-quality code.
(e.g. a class in our code base, for instance, has a function called YoDawg() whose responsibility is to recursively instantiate itself.)
Keeping your work life separate from your personal life is extremely important. You should not be bringing your grief into your professional work. We've all lost parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, friends, past lovers, former co-workers, and some of us even lose our spouses and children. It's really f-ing difficult to deal with, even years afterwards. If we all brought that grief into our professional lives, we'd all be professionally miserable. It's not healthy, and it's not fair to others who don't share your grief.
Something like <!-- love you, grams-->.
Splash screen + about gets my vote.
He's not a boss, he just sees himself as one despite all evidence to the contrary. Besides, it's hard to be a boss at 13.
Sue for what? Its not imposible to keep a dedication professional. Honestly, wtf is this?
Why was this downvoted? A memorial website seems a good idea to me.
Dilbert RSS feed
If you have an 'About...' item or a slash screen this seems like a good place to do it
A slash screen? Now I'm imagining a desktop application that starts up with a painstakingly-rendered airbrush-style image of Picard and Riker locked in a passionate kiss.
And now you probably are, too. I'm so sorry.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
She explained to me she wants you to get right on producing grand kids like she told you 1000 damn times already.
What about her friends's son's daughter Anna? She's a lovely girl and she's a dentist too. You won't do much better than her. She gave you her phone number - Why haven't you called her yet?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The site is supposed to be owned and operated by the funeral agency/chain. I think it was something like yourlovedone.com/#123456789.
Darren McCleet was remembered in an easter egg for OS/2 1.3 after he passed away. He worked for IBM in Boca Raton and wrote the inhouse language for the installation program.
However, it was a std. Win32 PE (portable executable) & I put that sentiment into the "resource strings" (what you see in the "details" tab, albeit, in a program's properties when you right-click on them in Windows)...
Looking back now though, on WHO I "dedicated" a particular freeware I did years ago?? I shouldn't have really, especially now "looking back in hindsight"...
I dedicated the program to a woman from my past, long ago, & it didn't work out after a decade on/off - BUT, she did put in "design input" into the interface, so, I felt it was the right thing to do!
(I built it with her feedback is why, as to how it looked & useability type stuff - Since she was the tester, and it functioned to play CD tracks, MP3's, WAV files, & more, on a "time basis" PLUS the system had a UPS (uninterruptiable power supply), an alarm clock really! I broke one dusting one day, & as we were heading out to buy a new one, I said to her "Listen, I will make our PC our alarm clock system here - It's got sound, so let's use it, and use this $20 to go out to a film, dinner, & out afterwards to celebrate it!).
* On a webpage though? Just put it near the top & be done with it...
(That way, you're done with it, and it shows ALL the time, unlike programmatic resource strings (not all do, I gave the example above, & you HAVE to "dig for it"...)
APK
P.S.=> Funniest part is, her cat ("stinkweed") ended up waking us up every day @ sunrise, even BEFORE the PC alarm I designed was set - he got 1/2 a can of food every a.m. for it, & he NEVER FAILED TO SHOW UP grabbing the screen near the front door that was my bedroom windows in my apartment in Atlanta Georgia back then, lol (she got angry with me, saying I made the cat FAT that way, well... he was well paid for his services is why - I mean, talk about a RELIABLE EMPLOYEE!).. apk
I often put a "Happy Birthday _____" comment in code I was writing, along with @author and @date.
In your case, I'd put a little one line dedication in HTML comments which won't impact the project's efficiency but will put the dedication onto all users' computers (where a PHP comment wouldn't get loaded in the browser, for example).
Also a note in the About page would be fine. I'd do both.
Oh, and condolences.
Do something useful in her name. Help someone overseas (or local - but someone not as lucky as you) get started with a cheap loan. http://www.kiva.org/start
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
I would drop it in the about section, towards the top of the output.
This signature intentionally left blank.
Psssh. After firing and terminating them, I'd can them, downsize them, and let them go.
Then, if they'd *really* pissed me off, I'd give them a pink slip. LIKE A BOSS!
I've used splash screens to dedicate things to fallen loved ones. If there isn't a splash screen, another good place is in the about box, and another is the release note.
I've put dedications in several places in honor of several lost friends and family. It may be easier to get away with such things in the FOSS world, I guess. Anyway, the response from users was always such that I never felt I'd gone too far with any of the dedications. As a meme in the world of code, I think dedicating your work to someone you've lost is reasonable, as long as you don't go nuts and make it too annoying.
Of course you can do that - it is not peoples business if they know the person or not. It means something to you. That matters.
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.9/
I think this is very sweet. It's not anything I would do but nothing I've ever worked on has ever been very artistic. If you feel your code is your art, I think it's very nice and appropriate. Maybe something in the About... dropdown. You say you're a Web developer. Here's the thing about the Web: Some stuff has a surprising lifespan, but a lot of stuff evaporates really quickly. Nothing I've ever done professionally on the Web still exists. That would be a short-lived dedication. However, as a Web developer, you can do something other people might have trouble with: You can put up a site about your grandmother. Even a single page. And make sure it stays up for a long time (I have personal pages that have been basically unchanged since 1994). It may not be a huge memorial, but when someone who knew your grandmother runs a Google search, they'll find something other than a blip of an obituary in some online copy of the local paper -- which may have succumbed to link rot years before. You can put photos, and if you're feeling ambitious -- and your grandmother was very popular -- a section for comments. Maybe family members would like to share memories. (That might be pushing it unless your family is a fixture in your local social scene.)
favorite cause in life? Go volunteer to make an app dedicated to her for one of the charities that work on a cure for the thing that caused her death, or, if that is not appropriate, contact a charity related to her life's passion/pursuit/etc. and create an app dedicated to her that is related to that passion/pursuit/etc..
Psssh. After firing and terminating them, I'd can them, downsize them, and let them go.
Then, if they'd *really* pissed me off, I'd give them a pink slip. LIKE A BOSS!
I'm Mitt Romney, and I approve of this message.
Nobody has said what your web app is, or who actually owns it.
1) First question: What does the app do?
Is it something that is appropriate for an in-memorium quote? It may well be; authors, artists, musicians have a long history of dedicating important works that they've poured their heart into
2) Second question: who owns the app?
Is this a startup venture? An open source opus? Maybe a work for hire?
If someone is paying you to build the app, is it really yours to put a dedication into? And how would your customer feel upon seeing it? I'm not saying don't do this if you don't own it; I'm just saying it is important to get the owner's consent so they're not surprised at their next industry conference by their biggest client asking, "So who is 'Grandma Smith' anyway?"
3) Third question: how do your co-developers feel about giving a nod to you grandmother?
Observation: if for whatever reason the web app you're mentioned isn't appropriate, consider letting this inspire to you create something that is.
If you started some open source project, or even a commercial project, you could name it after your grandmother and put it in the About section.
Or maybe there is a book idea you've been sitting on for a while now...
*shrug* It could be a very nice gesture, or possibly crude or inappropriate. Like so many things it depends on the details.
Okay, I'm sure I'm going to get modded somewhere between +5 and -240,343 for this, but what the heck...
Before I go on, let me say I'm really sorry for your loss. I hope you and your family are well.
So here's my question: Why do you want to do anything in particular for her memory? I don't mean this question with the assumption that you have no good answer. But I'm curious.
Well if the guy was writing a book on how to create web apps, then dedicating a book seems classic and tastefully done.
Doing what you are good at and moving on is the best way to honor the dead. What we have here is the classic human reaction of not wanting to "let go." Look this was is a BS catch phrase. you never let go, however you do learn to accept the situation. This person obviously affected this poster and will more than likely live on through them. Nothing is a horrible idea... just maybe for you. For this OP, maybe this is just the thing to give him the drive to keep doing what he does well.
My grandmother later had a stroke and spent 5 years in a partial coma (half awake) before dying, pretty sad. I am thinking maybe an infinite loop is in order.
You forgot to mention that your grandmother was murdered by the evil, evil, evil, Barack Obama, and could have been saved unquestionably by Ron Paul had he been president instead at the time. Because of course from reading your posts - both under this and your other names - we know that your lord and savior Ron Paul is alone able to prevent death, however as long as he is restricted from his destiny as leader of the universe, his powers are limited.
option B
There are precedents. For instance NetBSD has dedicated releases to its deceased developers a few times.
From NetBSD-5.1 releases notes
NetBSD 5.1 is dedicated to the memory of Martti Kuparinen, who was the victim of a traffic accident in June 2010. Martti's technical contributions are too many to list here in full. He created and maintained numerous packages in pkgsrc, updated two packet filter solutions distributed with NetBSD and improved several hardware drivers. Beyond that, he was always helpful and friendly. His example encouraged users to contribute to the project and share their work with the community. Some of these users later became NetBSD developers themselves thanks to Martti's efforts.
Depends very much on your employer; but mine has no problem with easter eggs as long as they're fully documented as a part of the spec in case of a security review at a customer who cares deeply about that sort of thing (which is next to none; but just in case).
Every app I write has a dedication - multiple to my daughter just after she was born and also a few to my mother just after she died. Usually in the form of "display a picture and some text when a particular sequence of events takes place that is ridiculously unlikely to happen by chance".
As an example, one app we sell is to set "screensavers" on MFP devices automatically (with possibility for automatic rotation through a list; etc etc). If you create a screensaver named exactly my daughter's full name, instead of your own content, it'll display a picture of her on the MFP display. Since there's no sensible reason to expect someone to type my daughter's full name as a screensaver, this is considered acceptable.
Another example is in a shared component that is now out at thousands of individual customer sites in different applications. I wrote a small FTP server DLL to re-use in multiple projects (with the primary purpose of receiving scan data via "Scan to FTP" from an MFP device). The FTP protocol states that responses to commands have a number and a text string. All my text strings are reasonably "silly" since it's never intended to be used by a human (however they ARE still human readable and understandable, make sense for what's happening, and there's no profanity or anything like that since I expect people will come across it if doing network traces or so on (example: "Data xfer started! Thundercats are go!")). But beyond that, I handle one "unknown command" differently to others - if you send my wife's name as a command (her name by the way does not conflict with any standard FTP commands and so should never be sent by a client except when done manually) the response text espouses her beauty (the code is of course still correct though).
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
My condolences to you.
In the splash screen or app, can you put a picture of her (at any age), or a picture or reference to something that she liked?
Or if your grandmother had a favorite saying, maybe in the documentation you can write, "As my grandmother used to say, ..."
and "Code"? I tought those two were mutually exclusive...
No, I'm sorry, I should have made it clear that the site in question was in fact under the national TLD. The FBI and the DMCA has no power here :)
I translated it to "yourlovedone.com" when it's in reality "minnesider.no" :)
When my brother died, I was emotionally hit very hard. I'm mostly over it, but if I saw reminders of him in my work, I would grieve a little bit each time I worked on the code.
Everyone is different. Maybe you'd feel comforted when you saw pictures or quotes of your grandmother in your work. I suggest that you imagine working on the code, or demoing it to co-workers or customers. Would you get emotional if you saw a dedication to your grandmother, or a picture of her?
If so, then I suggest you find a way outside of work to honor her.
I'm sorry for your loss, and hope you get over it soon.
Fired AND terminated? I think you're a bit harsh of a boss if you think it is within your disciplinary power to take someone's life because of a disagreement with something in your software...
Harsh and stupid. It'll just lead to another dedication in the next release.
http://www.wowhead.com/npc=30562#comments after all like Dr. Hiluluk said "When does a man die? When he is hit by a bullet? No. When he suffers a disease? No. When he eats a soup made out of a poisonous mushroom? No! A man dies when he is forgotten!"
Your idea is horrible and you should feel horrible.
I dedicated a small graveyard hidden in a highly improbable place to my sister and father, as a kind of Easter egg. In a level set I made for a game years back. And don't listen to those who say it's unprofessional, because it's not. You've seen dedications in blockbuster movies. It doesn't hurt to add her name as a dedication in the apps credits. Or even a hidden Easter egg, provided that the Easter egg does not add any functionality to the app. Even then i don't recall anyone complaining about the flight simulator hidden in Excel 97.
He's not a boss, he's a BAAAWS
When one of my cats died suddenly (I know, not quite the same thing) I snuck her name into part of a computer game I was working on. I had just put in a hospital (superheroes need healing, after all) so I called it the Elsie C. Attus (i.e., Elsie the cat) Memorial Hospital. Not sure if any of the players ever knew why it had that name, but even five years later I'm still glad when I see it. That's just for a pet - hope you get the same feeling with whatever you dedicate to your grandmother.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I could possibly see it being "not delivering a product as promised." Some places might also request that it be removed and they not be billed for the time it takes to add whatever dedication you do. Easter Eggs have always been a moral gray area. On one hand, you are billing your time and on the other you are "wasting" that billable time making something that has no productive value to the product. It would be even worse if the product was bug laden and the customer thought you could have spent more time testing and less time building in a secret message.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
You don't have to feel the way other people feel, but if you think you're smart at all you should be able to at least recognize that most humans have emotions and a grieving process.
That's fine, but if you are even remotely socialized you should realize that there is a time and a place for your grieving process. Just like you don't go over to someone's dinner party and announce that your grandmother just died and you'd like everybody to spend some time grieving for her, dragging your coworkers through your grieving process -- and god forbid, your customers -- is inappropriate.
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You better tell the local lawyers hired by the MPAA, because they don't have any rights under Norwegian law (privacy reigns). They can't even harass Norwegian filesharers like they want to. Oh, well, I'll go back to torrenting freely now.
I would say it completely depends on the circumstances. A popup splash screen would be inappropriate. Software that was specifically contracted for would be inappropriate. A product you create and want to dedicate to someone, perfectly fine by most people's standards, especially if there's already an acknowledgement's page. A comment in code, probably fine. Coworkers? Depends on how it's done and whether he's the boss. In any case, the comment I was replying to was simply uncouth. And I don't know anyone that cares that Spybot Search and Destroy was dedicated to the guy's girlfriend.
Well, sure, a brief dedication in a source code file that will never be seen by anybody is perfectly fine. It's probably even fine to put "Dedicated to so-and-so" in an "About this App" screen or something. But personally, if you and I were working on the same coding project and every time I opened one of your files I had to read some lengthy dedication to your dead grandmother talking about how much she meant to you, I would find that annoying. That's what I meant by "dragging your coworkers through it." I don't see any reason why I should constantly have to be reminded of your dead relatives and how much they meant to you when I'm in the workplace.
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