A metasyntactic variable is either a placeholder name (a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion), or a random member of a class of things under discussion. The term originates from computer programming and other technical contexts, and is commonly used in examples by hackers and programmers. The use of a metasyntactic variable is helpful in freeing a programmer from creating a logically named variable, although the invented term may also become sufficiently popular and enter the language as a neologism. The word foo is the canonical example.
My coworker was asking me what this foo I keep using in discussion is. So I turned to Wikipedia to give me a clear definition and background. It was listed in the Examples section of the metasyntactic variable entry under Nonesense Words.
Foo is the first metasyntactic variable, commonly used to represent an as-yet-unspecified term, value, process, function, destination or event but seldom a person.
Bar, the canonical second metasyntactic variable, typically follows foo.
Baz, the canonical third metasyntactic variable, is commonly used after foo and bar.
The article also has examples via english words, people, and places. Its an entertaining read.
Andrew Ho is today’s Real Man of Genius for his blog comment follow-up smackdown titled Real Woman of Genius. Which appeared on this blog attached to this post.
I really hate when e-mail is sent where a reply is clearly required, but then they tack on “Please advise.” I’m so sick of that phrase, and I can’t exactly put my finger on why. I’m seeing it quite often in e-mails at work, and maybe its the industry I work for, but I see it at least once a day. Well, just as often I see “Please advice” and I get a slight laugh out of that.
In any case, I think I’m finding the phrase rude, but I’m not sure if that’s why it fully bugs me.
This has to be one of the dumbest redundant phrases I’ve heard in awhile. There has to be a better way to communicate what people are trying to communicate when they use this phrase. Its sounds like something a 3rd grader would say.
Out on Michigan Ave I finally ran into Rachelle of rachelleb.com and chicagoist fame while she was covering an event for chicagoist (and maybe for her own blog as well.) Her camera is what convinced me it was her.
I introduced myself and said what a fan I was. She remembered me from some comments from the two blogs. Hopefully, I didn’t come off as too much of a dork.
My Pet Peeve of the day is people who take the elevator at work to travel a single floor. On my way up to the 6th floor where my office is, I had 3 people jump on and go just one floor.
My firefox extention of the week is Scrapbook. It allows you to make local copies of web pages, sections of web pages, and keep them locally. This is nice for fast access when you aren’t online. The other neat feature is you can annotate those local copies with notes to yourself. It has a few other features, but those are the two I’ve used the most.
James Coates wrote about Scrapbook in his column last weekend. Its the only useful bit of information I’ve ever gotten from the column. As my friend said when I brought this up to him, “Coates’ column is like a car wreck, you can’t help but stare at it even though you don’t really want to.”
Generally, I really love working with computers. I can’t imagine what else I’d do as a profession if I wasn’t doing what I do. However, there are some bugs on some days that just piss me off so much I need a place to vent. Good thing I have a blog.
Anyway, it looks like if you’re trying to compile things on Windows XP SP2 using Visual C++ with pre-compiled headers turned on and your code is hosted on a network drive hosted by samba, you’ll cause:
This is probably one of those bugs that is half samba’s fault and half VC++’s fault. That being said, I also found a report that looked similar, but with win2k and offline files.
I really like the concept of the Bud Light ad campaign of Real Men of Genius. Not enough that I’ll buy that craptacular beer, but enough that I will blatantly steal it.
Today’s Real Man of Genius is the guy who figured out how to make frozen microwavable White Castle sliders (with cheese) and sell that at my local grocer. Its a great dinner when its just me and Dinah at home and she only allows me enough time to nuke something.
