I realized after I posted the last post that ha.ckers.org has finally reached the 900 blog post mark. I honestly didn’t think we’d make it. After how many hornets’ nests we’ve stirred up over the last 5 years that this version of this site has been online, it’s kind of amazing that the site is still going strong. So I decided to do a bit of a fun post. If you are lacking a sense of humor, please move on now. We’ll forgive you. Now, in reference to a recent Twitter post about yours truly:
@shawnmoyer What no @rsnake’s on a plane joke?
Speaking of RSnakes on a plane - I was taking a trans-Atlantic flight and I was bored - as an RSnake will tend to be after 2 solid hours of a classic but bad Meg Ryan movie. I realized that they had some games on the in-flight entertainment. Ahh, something to play, this should be amusing. Well, if the games were good, maybe I would have been more interested, but Blackjack sounded good enough for kicks. So I started playing. You start off with $100. Well, after me quickly losing a few hands, I decide that playing like a normal user is getting me nowhere. Let’s try some different tactics. How about betting $100 and then folding? Ah… I end up with a negative integer, somehow. Now what if I bet a huge negative number and fold again - like -200? Ah, I get an even bigger negative integer.
What happens if I keep doubling my bet? Hmmm… this negative integer thing is getting huge. Oops! Blackjack - huge positive payout: time and a half larger than my bet even! Alas, somewhere around 1,000,000 is when the in flight entertainment crashed on me - and it turns out that clicking the button thousands of times to change your increment of betting from -50,000 to +50,000 in $5 increments is a really crappy way to make a flight go faster. But before all that, here’s the picture I took:
Click here to enlarge
How many things were wrong here? Input validation errors, logic flaws, and negative integers used for currency… The worst part was I couldn’t even bet someone a free drink that I could get a higher score than them because they offered free drinks in-flight. Alas! Anyway, this story was in case, like Mortman, you were wondering what it’s like to fly with RSnakes on a plane… Moral of the story - stop showing old Meg Ryan movies on airplanes.
