Tag: holidays

Happy Programmer Day!

Today is the 256th day of the year, which means it’s Programmer Day once again.  I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate all my colleagues around the world and wish them all quieter rooms, better tools, larger salaries, faster computers, and fewer bugs.  Let the source be with you! If you write code and 256 has a special meaning to you, I tip my hat to you and hope you’ll enjoy this little comic strip from Geek And Poke.

For those of you who are not programmers, but curious about a special meaning of 256, the explanation is really simple.  Bit a smallest unit of information, which can only take values of 0 or 1 in binary notation.  Bits are organized into bytes.  There are 8 bits in a byte.  Which means there are 2 to the power of 8 combinations of ones and zeros in a byte.  2 to the power of 8 is 256.  There are a few more meanings to the number, if you are still interested.

Happy Programmer’s Day!

Yes, you’ve heard that right – it’s Programmer’s Day today.  At least in Russia, this is an official and recognized holiday.  Not a public day off, though.  Programmer’s Day is celebrated on the 256th day of the year, which falls on September 13th, except for leap years, when it’s on September 12th.

Congratulations to all programmers all over the world and kudos for your hard and often boring work.  Keep it up and enjoy the day.  I wish you fewer bugs, faster compilers, and flexible libraries.

And while I don’t dare to call myself a programmer, I’ve wrote enough to code to join the celebrations today.  Beers, vodkas and tequilas are waiting for the evening!

P.S.: And if you are an outsider and have no idea how a typical programmer spends his day, here is a chart.

Appreciate your sysadmin. At least today.

Today is the System Administrator Appreciation Day.  I wish a happy sysadmin day to everyone who ever took their time to answer a stupid question for a billionth time without resolving to violence, to everyone who ever spent a night or a weekend in the office fixing a problem that he didn’t create, to everyone who makes IT infrastructure invisible until there is a problem, to everyone who spent their own free time to make things better for the rest of the world, to everyone who despite working hard and taking a lot of initiative is often the first person to blame, to everyone who spent hours in the freezing datacenters or on pan-frying roofs or in dark and stinky basements, to everyone who’s mobile phone receives dozens of SMS messages every hour 24×7, to everyone who’s mobile number is posted on all office white-boards with the caption “Emergency”, to everyone … you got the idea.

If you know a sysadmin, take a minute of your time, go and say “Thank you”.  If you have some change in your pocket, buy your sysadmin a pint of beer.  If you are a hot girl, go give him a kiss and a hug.  Or her.  If you are not a sysadmin, you don’t have and probably won’t ever have an idea of how hard these people work to make your life easier.  It’s their day today.

If you still don’t understand what sysadmins do, have a look here.

Christmas season and blog stats

I don’t know exactly how all those online shops do during the Christmas seasons (probably they are blooming), but I can show you what two weeks or so of Christmas and New Year’s holidays can do to one’s blog statistics.  Here is a screenshot of weekly stats for my blog:

Weekly stats - Christmas edition

X-axis shows a few last weeks of 2007 as well as a couple of weeks of 2008.  Y-axis shows the number of visits this blog had for each of those weeks.  A home-made red marker with a word “here” tries to bring your attention to the celebration of Christmas and New Year represented on this graph.

As much as it was expected, that was quite a dive I must say.  Reasons?  I’d say there are only two:

  1. Many people are busy with shopping, celebrations, travels, and other holiday matters.  Mostly off-line.
  2. Many companies closed their offices and that minimized many employees’ access to the Web.

Gladly, things are rushing back to normal.