So I have some custom log analysis scripts I wrote. Generally they work pretty well, but there are some bugs. One of the output pages that usually tells me the page hits and unique hosts screwed up somehow and I saw this line:
TODAY -- page hits / unique hosts at a cigarette on
And I’m thinking to myself, “A cigarette? The hell? Where did that come from?” I even briefly considered that my server might have been compromised in some way, just because it seemed so random.
So I looked at the code, which I wrote years ago, and saw this in the section where I initialize a bunch of variables:
my $today_date = ''; my $today_hits = ''; my $today_uniques = ''; my $last_request = 'a cigarette';
If I were a better programmer, there would probably be a lesson I could learn from this.
11:13 pm, August 4, 2007 -- 4 comments
Ha! You had to be clever, even with the cold, unfeeling computer, didn’t you?
I’m laughing so hard right now. That is so awesome.
If I ever have to initialize the variable “last_request” in the future I’m fairly certain I’ll do the same thing.
For years and years I had a line in my .profile on my work UNIX account that said
set BUGS=off
One of my coworkers modified (we shared a global account broken up by individual user sections) and he added:
set bad_karma=ON
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