So, now that I've ranted about the stupidity of Lycos, I should admit, there is one good aspect to its wacky search results: you find things you weren't actually looking for. My search on my own name turned up a page about the grave of Richard Napoleon Bonaparte Batchelder. He is a very distant relative of mine, a fourth cousin four times removed (really: according to my Dad's researches in Peirce's Batchelder genealogy, my great-great-grandfather and he had the same great-great-great grandfather).

Perhaps because of his name, or in spite of it, he rose to become the Chief Quartermaster of the Army during the Civil War, received the Congressional Medal of Honor, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Pleased to meet you, Richard.

Everyone knows how fabulous Google is. We all use it. Does anyone still use any of the other search engines? Alta Vista, Lycos, HotBot, they are all still out there, still serving search results.

I hadn't tried them in a while, and it was revealing to go back and check on them. Lycos in particular was fooled by the simplest tricks. A search there for "Ned Batchelder" returned ten pages, none of which were my pages. The first included a link to me, and the second included a distant relation of mine in a drop-down list, but the third was really astonishing: What did the Centro Gestalt de México have to do with me? A peek at the source of the page revealed the answer: the page includes a list of 26,000 words, from Abram to Zurich, then aardvark to zygote, including both Ned and Batchelder along the way.

This is the cheapest and easiest of tricks to snag hits from search engines, and Lycos fell for it! These words aren't even on a page with actual content (it is a frameset page). Why does Lycos even bother anymore?

Actually, Lycos is running more than one search engine: HotBot is owned by Lycos (you get redirected to a lycos.com URL), and returns vastly different (and better) results than Lycos itself. So not only is the Lycos search engine bad, but they own a better one and don't use it as their primary branded engine. Duh.

Piet is a "programming language" where the programs are images whose pixels are traversed and interpreted. It isn't serious, of course, but is an intriguing hack nonetheless. It would be an interesting puzzle to construct a useful program in its twisted semantics.

Letterhead Fonts offers rich fonts with strong old-fashioned flair. All of their offerings are high-quality, with an air about them of being the genuine thing. If you're looking for type with nostalgia, check them out.

As they explain deep in their site, the name Letterhead doesn't refer to stationery: it's a term of affection for people devoted to creating signs.

The annual 5K Contest has announced its winners. The contest calls for web content totalling less than 5120 bytes, but still does something compelling. The tagline of the contest is "An award for excellence in web design and production", and I suppose it is that, but by imposing strict size constraints (as a way of challenging the entrant) it has also morphed into that time-honored coder's tradition: the obfuscated code contest.

The original (or at least longest-running) obfuscated code contest is the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It started because of the reputation C had for being unreadable in the first place, and because of the fun of trying to make it even more unreadable.

In 1993, in the same ironic spirit, one Obfuscated PostScript contest was held. I was lucky enough to win a second prize with my square-dance entry, an example of a parquet deformation (an Escher-like geometric construct, popularized by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Metamagical Themas):

Because the Obfuscated PostScript results don't have a nice home like the C contest, I've made them available here in one zip file.

The pioneering software giant Edsger W. Dijkstra died this week. His career focused primarily on the process of writing programs, and how to make the process (and the programs) better. He was the type of thinker who could set out on his own course and create an entire field of study in his wake.

He kept a running list of his works over his forty-year career, sequentially numbering everything he thought others might be interested in. Initially, these papers were photocopied and passed along. In a quaint historical touch, even his latest entries are handwritten (and his handwriting was classy enough and widely-enough distributed that it inspired a digital font).

His best-known work is quite short: Go-to Statement Considered Harmful. The impact of this letter was remarkable: in 1968, it wasn't possible to write programs without GOTOs. An ordinary coder who suggested that you try would have been thought crazy, and if someone had attempted it, it would have been a stunt: the coding equivalent of stuffing twenty college students into a phone booth.

But Dijkstra was right, and now no serious programmer can imagine it any other way. Giant software projects are constructed without a single GOTO. Many programming languages don't even have the concept. Even the title of his letter is a classic: "{something} Considered Harmful" is a meme unto itself, and has been often-used to evoke the ground-breaking insight of Dijkstra's work, even if sometimes in jest. (Actually, it turns out that he didn't write the title: ironically enough, Considered Harmful: The Weblog has the story.)

He wrote many other things over the years. The earliest English entry in his list of work (a review of the IBM 1620 computer) provided this insightful conclusion:

The next fact that we have to face is that this machine, despite of its poor qualities, has been produced, in this case even by a big firm with a long and considerable experience. The straightforward conclusion is, that nor the size nor the experience is a guarantee as far as the quality of the product is concerned. Well, we can think of various explanations for this apparent inconsistency, but the most obvious explanation predicts still more blunders in the more ambitious and more complicated products of the manufacturer in question.

errorwear makes t-shirts imprinted with various error messages on them. These are hip and clever in a straight-forward sort of way. We computer geeks live with these messages all day every day. Embracing them and printing them on t-shirts is a brilliant form of asserting our power over these thorns in our side.

I particularly like the broken image icon shirt, which is almost Magritte-like in its play on the entire concept of what it means to be a t-shirt with an image on it.

I don't usually find much redeeming in the "games" on commercial websites. They are usually tired rehashings of the same old games, but with the brand's cartoon characters dropped into it.

The games at Lego are different though. They seem to have put a great deal of thought and work into them. A particular favorite is Junkbot. It reminds me of Lode Runner, the classic timed puzzle game with hundreds of levels.

My son has played all of the Junkbot levels, and I can understand why: they are puzzles, they take place in a Lego-themed world, and it's all in good fun. You have to move Lego pieces around to get Junkbot to the garbage he devours, while avoiding pitfalls. The variety of pitfalls increases as the levels continue, so that by the end, there are blocks that destroy you, blocks that make you invincible, blocks that enable or disable other blocks, blocks that move you against your will, and so on and so on. Imaginative, challenging, creative, witty, fun. Play it.

This is one of those clever hacks that puts smiles on geeks faces, and makes the round for a few weeks, then disappears to be replaced by the next clever hack. But I am a geek, and it put a smile on my face, so I present it to you.

Taking advantage of Google Groups' color-highlighting of search results, "artistic" geeks have produced color ASCII art in plain-text newsgroup postings. Poke around in the thread to find more.

My favorite:

Jeff Darcy has written a quick synopsis of things to do right when designing servers to get them to perform well: High-Performance Server Architecture. It's a quick overview for experienced coders, and covers the important parts. Good reading.