Offensive Squid

Spent too much time beanplating generating random alphanumeric strings for member ids wondering whether I should try to control for any rude language. Which would make me laugh if I had a member id, but not everyone.

Someone told me that it is highly unlikely one would show up, so I think I'm just going to take it off my mind and get on with the code.

btw, this apache commons lang method signature is really silly.

random(int count, int start, int end, boolean letters, boolean numbers, char[] chars, Random random)

oh look, it is already almost 1pm.

You might want to skip to part 3

Part ! of this saga

I got distracted from real work wondering if the member codes being randomly generated would have any curse words in them. Probably a good idea to avoid the automated curse generator unless users have a sense of humor.

for member code think if you had a frequent flyer code of 12FUCK3. This would be awesome, right? If you are not you, wrong!

so then you might think, huh, how do I avoid that. man, it would be really stupid if I had to write some stupid filter to filter out likely curse words that I never thought of (I'm not a particularly good curser, woe betide me if I have a stroke). maybe disemvowel? but then I wonder how many curse words there are without vowels in languages that don't have vowels when you romanisize the letters. also, FVCK YOU!

then someone tells me, you know, I've never seen a curse word generated for our locator codes in all the time I've been here.

Part the 2

also, I am a lazy programmer and already have apache lang commons available to me, and who wants to re-invent the wheel. you'd imagine someone already has created a library to generated random strings. google. indeed, there is RandomStringUtil.

happy programmer goes to read the docs. sad programmer sees that the method signature is stupid. why?

Let's say you come along and read, random(10, 0, 10, false, false, alphanumSomething, myLittleRandom)

What do the 10s mean? what is that 0? what am I setting with those falses? alphanumSomething is probably the set of characters that get used in the random string I generate. that random thing is probably a random number generator.

It's an anti-pattern. One should try to avoid creating a method like that that doesn't just read in a way that is obvious for what it is doing. I hate it when I end up doing something like that. I'm glad I didn't make this method. Let's say I did. Maybe I would have remembered what exactly all those things do for a while, but a year later I am not and I'll have to refer to the docs, or to some comments somewhere. That is bogus. comments lie. looking up comments that lie is bogus. looking up docs is bogus. they just made me context switch. also, if you go read the docs for that, one of the numbers up there is seriously non-idiomatic for a programming thing, so that is another hit to one's cognitive load.

I don't want to be thinking all that crap, I want to be thinking about real stuff.

Part 3 wherein I edit part 1 and part 2 but those were the translation to english and would have made for an entertaining watch the nerd conversation, but maybe you didn't ask for that

It's a bad idea to generate member codes, e.g. frequent flyer numbers, that inadvertently contain offensive language. Most of the solutions to avoid this are going to be stupid. … and the likelihood of it happening in my case is vanishingly small, so I should stop over-thinking it. (slang for over-thinking something is called beanplating)

Now on to the part where one wants to write source code for generating random alphanumeric strings to be member codes. Usually when you want to do something obvious like that, you can bet that someone has already done it. So you go look for it. In a library that we have already included in our app for other things, there is a handy method that will do what I want. But the way in which you call the method is silly, because it is not mnemonic and will interrupt your thought flow when you come upon it later.

Part 4

man, part 3 is still too long. I'm sure I could do a better job than that but I apologize because I don't want to.

Part 5

did you know that I love haikus? I specially love writing them. One would not think that.

also, that post was like "WHAT ARE you READING this instant! expect with work and thinking" but next time I might try to contain it in 17 syllables or less.

Thanks for posting about that short story. I skimmed a little in google translate.

It reminded me of the library of Borges, so I looked up the wikipedia article thinking for certain it would be mentioned. The Library of Babel which does give a tip of the pen to the author. And this sources the idea to Gustav Fechner, who was an experimental psychologist. He did interesting work for the time, though, so read his wiki page if you have a mind to. I studied about him in a lab course in the senses and perception, and also in a history course on psychology.

and I seem to have this very vague memory of being very depressed a long time ago, with someone emailing me that Gustav Fechner had been depressed until he had some insight about plants, and wrote a little book called the soul life of plants which I should read. :) I probably don't even remember that conversation right, but anytime I see a page about Fechner, I check his bibliography for the mythical book.

Andrea_A said:

[...]
Goedel numbers: sorry, this goes over my mind … Sometimes I have to use TeX at work, but this doesn't mean that I understand the formulas.

Laßwitz (who had also edited Fechner's work) wrote two novels using his ideas: "Aspira", about intelligent clouds, and "Sternentau. Die Pflanze vom Neptunsmond", in which a plant called Star Dew comes from outer space (Neptune's moon). Didn't read them until now, but the books are waiting on my cellphone …

If I understood the concepts well enough I could explain them. It would not go over your mind with a good teacher. I had a friend who was a grad student of Douglas Hofstadter and I could have conversations with my friend about these things. He likes to translate poetry, and somehow we got in to a conversation about language translation, Goedel numbers, and telephone numbers. If I remember correctly, he was using the telephone numbers as an analogy to approach explaining Goedel numbers.

I like ideas from Douglas Hofstadter's books but I could not finish GEB because he often got on my nerves with his writing style. Instead I had some text books and classes on the material to entertain me. But there is one on language translation that I am not sure which books to read instead of, so I might read that at some point.

Anyway, I will try to review the material, reteach myself, teach myself, and maybe come up with a good enough explanation to make things clear because the ideas are fun enough that I want to share.

On to the book topic, I did a search and it looks like the only one of his work that was translated is The Two Planets, but if you know of translations for the ones you mentioned, please tell me. I'd like to read htem.