How do computer geeks have fun?
Warning: If you are not a geek, you better not read further for 2 good reasons:
- you will not find that funny at all!
- you will be scared about the psychic health of geeks and ask the police to arrest them.
While installing a software, I stumble on this small message:
If you are a hardcore computer nerd staring at this file through your favorite text editor, you are probably hunting [the build instructions!] Well it’s not here. […] Because all the build instructions are now in Apache’s cool web-site.[…]
Continue reading to learn more about the context.
I just wanted to quickly install Xerces-C, a C++ XML parser. So I wanted to do the traditional UNIX steps: download the source, untar, read the manual, compile and install.
At the third step, while trying to find the installation instruction, I looked for an INSTALL or README file, there was just a Readme.html. Crap! As I was on the command line, launching the web browser to read it is too slow! So I just fired my favourite command line text reader, HTML is just text anyway! And this is what I found:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>XML4C2 Readme</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" LINK="#000000" VLINK="#000000" ALINK="#000000" onLoad="javascript:docu
ment.location='doc/html/index.html';return;">
<CENTER><A HREF="doc/html/index.html">Click here to read the Xerces-C documentation</A></CENTER>
<!--
If you are a hardcore computer nerd staring at this file through your favorite text
editor, you are probably hunting for something. Let me guess, are you trying to find
build instructions? Yes! Well it's not here. Why not?
Because all the build instructions are now in Apache's cool web-site. Here is where
you'll find everything related to Xerces builds.
http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/build.html
Just remember, don't jump into the builds without reading the build instructions
COMPLETELY. It will save you lot of sleepless nights.
So now, get out of your editor, use your browser and get going.
--->
</BODY>
</HTML>
The file is pretty simple, there is a link to the documentation and otherwise there is a nice piece of text that is commented, so it would not be visible inside the web browser. It’s just for us, geeks, and it makes kind of fun of us.
This made me smilled and was a good start for a work day!