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LOLCODE, the LOLCat Programming Language

Cat at computer: “I can has programming language?”

The moment Anil Dash published his now-famous blog entry on the grammar used by lolcats, Cats Can Has Grammar, the door to studies that were equal parts silly and serious was opened. Not to be content with mere lexical and semiotic analysis of lolcats, some folks have taken it to the next level: the LOLCODE programming language.

LOLCODE is your standard Algol-style programming language (Algol is the grandfather of just about every popular current programming language) married to the lolcat captioning style — that is, ALL CAPS and I CAN HAS SILLY CAT GRAMMER AND SPELING KTHXBYE.

Here’s HAI WORLD, the LOLCODE version of “Hello, World!”:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Here’s something that outputs the numbers 1 through 10, a classic beginner’s exercise:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
	UP VAR!!1
	VISIBLE VAR
	IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

And finally, here’s a program to print the contents of a specified file:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
	AWSUM THX
		VISIBLE FILE
	O NOES
		INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

If someone’s working on an IDE for this language, I have very important stylistic advice: it should make heavy use of the Impact font, just like all those lolcat captions. Bonus points if it’s Impact with a white fill and black stroke!

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A Million Fools and Their Money Have Been Parted

Somehow — Mind control? Bribes? “Buy this Zune or we’ll kill this puppy”? — a million Zunes will have been sold by the end of June, according to Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices Division of Microsoft.

As good as this news is for Microsoft, this is even better news for you if you’re about to do some dog-and-pony shows for investors. You can simply pull out this story and say “This is why we’ll be able to find customers: somewhere, out there, are at least a million people who’ll buy anything.”

1 Million Zune Fans Can Be Wrong
My apologies to the King for riffing on his album design.

Over at CrunchGear, Vince Veneziani put these numbers in context:

I can understand maybe a smaller company getting excited over selling a million devices, but Apple in Q4 of last year alone sold 14 million iPods. Yeah, 14 million people bought iPods. Now those Zunes seem pretty dinky in comparison, eh?

Other esteemed colleagues in the tech blogosphere are equally unimpressed. Engadget says:

While Bach sees that as a “good start” he admits that the Zune hasn’t quite gotten as social as the company would like, saying that “when your installed base is a million, the benefits of sharing, frankly, aren’t as wide as we hope to see in the future.” Unfortunately, Bach didn’t get very specific about any future Zune plans, choosing instead to talk up the pink and watermelon-colored Zunes, which’ll surely make all the difference.

Dan at UNEASYSilence:

This weekend I made a conscious decision to give my iPod a week off and go Zune only. Come on, the thought of access to unlimited subscription music, and FM radio (not a fan of the brown, but whatever). So, I kicked my second laptop into BootCamp, made the Vista plunge and installed the Zune software.

Long story short; the software installation process was quite possibly the worst experience ever, but that was quickly eclipsed by the HORRIFIC ass backwards annoying Zune software/syncing experience. After HOURS of coaxing I think I have the damn thing working. I’ll report back at the end of the week on how the rest of the experience was, but I am left puzzled HOW Microsoft sold a million of these to suckers customers?

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Zombies Less Annoying Than MySpace Users

Zombie biting iMac at the San Francisco Apple Store.
“Hey, buddy! You bite it, you bought it!”

I’ve always suspected it, but now I have proof. Consider what happened when a flash mob-like gathering of zombies in San Francisco passed by the downtown Apple Store:

It may be worth noting that the Westfield Mall and Disney security tried to bar the zombies from entering, but Apple store security did not. In fact, salespeople were jostling one another for a position where they could take the best photo of the zombies (or themselves with the zombies, or their brains being eaten by the zombies).

MySpace mom and daughter.
Note the blank, soulless eyes, the mindless expressions, and the hunger for destruction and human brains. These are MySpace users.

Contrast that with why Apple Stores have made it so you can’t access MySpace pages on their display machines:

An Apple Store employee (who does not work in the Fifth Avenue store), confirmed to CNET News.com that this has been an ongoing problem. “MySpace is a big issue for the Apple stores because people come in, Photobooth themselves (using Macs’ built-in webcams), then stick their picture up on their MySpace account and loiter at machines for hours,” the source said in an e-mail. “It is especially troublesome at the flagships and high-volume stores, and for a while there was no official word on how to deal with it.”

Based on these two stories from this week, I must conclude: the shambling, bloody and moaning legions of the undead are far more easy to put up with and less disruptive to business than the shambling, moody and whining legions of MySpace users. And now we have proof.

Excerpt from Wondermark! #223.
Excerpt from a Wondermark! comic. Click the image to see the full comic.

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Sony’s Very Special Screws

This screw had better double as a PlayStation 3 controller, because Sony wants 61 Euro and change (US$83.46 as of this writing, according to xe.com) for it:

Sony’s very expensive replacement screw

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Advertising: Best Left to the Professionals?

Scene from Dan Burke’s Heinz Ketchup ad, in which he uses ketchup as toothpaste.

The New York Times article The High Price of Creating Free Ads covers Heinz’s contest in which its customers are challenged to create their own television advertisement for Heinz Ketchup. The subtext of the article seems to be this: Leave this kind of work to the professionals.

Note that while advertising execs and a couple of contest entrants are interviewed in the article, there isn’t a single quote from “the audience”. Perhaps the constraints of a press deadline would’ve made it too hard to gather some “average person” reviews of some submitted ads, but it would’ve been informative. Remember that the original ads for HeadOn (“HeadOn! Apply directly to the forehead!”) were created by professionals and apparently passed focus group muster.

In my opinion, at least one of the customer-submitted ads is quite good. I laughed out loud when it hit the punchline, and I thought it would work perfectly in “edgy” time slots, such as Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim (or in Canada, Teletoon’s The Detour):

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Lara Croft, Then and Now

Courtesy of my friend Miss Fipi Lele: click on the image below to see how Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft has evolved from game to game:

Preview image showing the evolution of Lara Croft.
Click to see the full image.

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Why PR Doesn’t Work for High Tech (or: Guy Kawasaki is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!)

Cover of the book “Toxic Sludge is Good for You!”

Back during those heady dot-com days, George and I worked for OpenCola, a start-up that was spending US$40,000 a month on the services of a PR firm that shall remain unnamed. I got the feeling that OpenCola was getting more PR bang for the buck from me and OpenCola founder/Chief Evangelist Cory Doctorow. We were based in the San Francisco office, pressing the flesh with as many geeks and tech press as we possibly could, and we had a much better idea of what OpenCola could do than the people to whom we were shoveling 40 grand a month.

I suggested that we could cut our PR budget by having me and Cory holding a monthly “chicken run” a la Rebel Without a Cause. We could jump into a cheap used car with the OpenCola logo plastered all over it, and drive it towards a cliff, bailing out at the last second. Spectacular, far cheaper than the PR farm, and by the standards of those days, a not-too-harebrained publicity stunt. Like any good idea in those days, it was ignored.

My dot-com era experiences have caused me to generally have a dim view of PR firms and the people who work for them — my feelings run the gamut from “necessary evil” to “waste of space” to “waste of ammo” (and sometimes “waste of skin”). The book Toxic Sludge is Good for You has only served to reinforce this opinion.

Hence I cannot help reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog entry, The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn’t Work with a jaundiced eye. Guy could’ve saved me valuable seconds by boiling his list down to the single opinion from which it stems: It’s the client’s fault.

Guy, I’ll see your list of 10 items and counter you with a simple two-item list as to why PR doesn’t work:

  1. PR companies suck.
  2. PR companies are stupid.

Much better, and far truer.

(This pains me. Guy’s one of my role models.)

I far prefer the items in the list provided in the article Top 5 (or 6) reasons PR doesn’t work. if you’re a geek., an article written in response to Guy’s:

  1. The PR firm doesn’t understand the product or technology.
  2. The PR firm is seen as a spinner, blocker, or gatekeeper to access the CEO/CTO/braintrust.
  3. The PR firm hasn’t been properly trained on how to communicate with bloggers or social media.
  4. The PR firm prefers doing a few big traditional media over lots of smaller online media & online channels.
  5. The PR firm doesn’t understand SEO, SEM, widgets, blogs, tags, social networks, pictures, video, or other online & viral methods, aka “all that Web 2.0 stuff”.
  6. Most PR folks have no clue what the hell TechMeme is.