bytex64.net/blog

For those of you who forgot what day Tuesday was, my last post was indeed an April Fool's Day post. It was hashed together at the last minute, definetly not my greatest work, but apparently it fooled at least one person (but only because he read it a day late and forgot to check the date). Erickson says "It reads very much like you were paid off," which means that it turned out better than I expected. :)

On the /prog/ board on 4chan, a poster proposed a challenge: To print out the chorus to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" using as few programming instructions as possible. For those of you not familiar with Rickrolling, it's a more family-friendly variant of sending someone hello.jpg or tubgirl. A link is posted to seemingly relevant content, but it's actually said music video. A number of sites used this prank on April Fool's Day, confirming to me that the joke is well on it's way to getting old.

Anyway, back to the task at hand, I think I have a pretty unbeatable programmed rickroll. It is, of course, in perl. I have wrapped the text so it doesn't break your browser, but the original has no newlines:

$,=' ';print+("\nNever gonna",qw/give you up let down run around and desert make cry
say goodbye tell a lie hurt/)[map{-65+ord}split//,'ABCDAECFAGHIJCAKCLAMNAOPQIRC'],"\n";

For those keeping score at home, the number to beat is 172 characters.

I also spent some time today revamping the code section of my site. I've automated a lot of the repetitive tasks involved with posting a project up there, which means things like links to source code will be more consistent, and I'll be able to post more projects with less work. I've also been spending some time with git, Linus Torvalds's distributed version control system, and I have to say that so far I'm a big fan of it's innate hacker nature. It does a very good job of maintaining control and structure without imposing limitations. More on git and new projects in /code/ in a future post.

Lastly, it seems that the spambots have finally found my blog, so expect some changes to the comment form in the near future. The weird thing is that they're not very smart spambots. They seem to be posting replies to entries that don't exist. Pages are created from those posts, but they're not linked to from anywhere. Furthermore, my robots.txt prohibits all search engines from crawling my blog, so any comment spam would be useless for link farming. I've been cleaning out the spam by hand, but it's been growing, and I expect it to get heavy soon. I'll probably be implementing my "Are you human?" filter from the VFS board, but this doesn't look like a bad idea, either. }:->

$/="Never gonna ";$:=" you ";$;=" and ";
print "$/give$:up\n$/let$:down\n$/run around$;desert$:\n$/make$:cry\n$/say goodbye\n$/tell a lie$;hurt$:\n";