You laugh at me behind my back because I sometimes use an eWorld e-mail address. Oh, I know you do. What you don't know is that I do have a real Internet address, only I'm not telling you what it is. That's right: I use an eWorld e-mail address to hide my real net address. I understand that other people sometimes do just the reverse: They use a prestige e-mail address to mask their real one.
Makes you wonder: Are there vanity e-mail addresses, like vanity license plates? If you think of any, send them along and I'll print the best. In this case phony is better than real, because (I hasten to add) I don't want to publish real people's real Internet addresses here. Another challenge: What's the shortest Internet address you've seen? I have a friend in Germany whose address is eight characters long, including the @ sign and the period. Surely that's not the shortest. Send me your candidate for briefest actual e-mail address. I won't publish them, but I'll verify them and award the customary no-prize to any response that I arbitrarily decide to favor.
By the way, in case you don't realize how important winning these no-prizes is, a past winner, Mike Morton, recently was a runner-up on NPR's Sunday morning puzzle contest. That contest is designed by Will Shortz, and Shortz is the puzzle expert who supplied all the riddles for the Riddler in Batman Forever. And that movie is expected to gross eight trillion dollars this year, so I think you can see that these no-prizes are pretty significant.
And now for something completely different: From Danyll, a technology writer for the South China Morning Post and an old pal of Penn & Teller's Teller, come thanks for reminding him about that fine British weekly, New Scientist. Also, the following bulletin:
The programming language C++ is called C purasu purasu in Japanese and C ga ga in Cantonese. Ga ga, in Cantonese, is simply the Chinese character for "+" twice. The Cantonese know more about programming perhaps than one would have thought.
Brandon J. Rickman recently posted a guide to MRML on the World Wide Web. MRML, for those who have been living in a cave the past three months, is the breakthrough Mind Reading Markup Language, a proprietary extension of the HyperText Markup Language of the World Wide Web. You might want to stop reading at this point if that proprietary business bothers you, because Brandon claims rights to "any ideas you come up with while reading this information."
MRML includes such tags as <BRAINSCAN> and <THOUGHTSUCK>, which are of self-evident usefulness.
Here are Brandon's descriptions of the handy tags BELIEVE and FORGET:
<BELIEVE>text</BELIEVE>
Explicit thoughts to be planted in the client's mind. Beware of contradictory programming! Try to remove previous conceptions before reprogramming. To reprogram someone that thinks that Pepsi is better than Coke:
<FORGET>text</FORGET>
Things you want the client to forget. It may be desirable to have the client forget the URL of your MRML documents.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
MikeSwaine@eworld.com
Copyright © 1995, Dr. Dobb's Journal