technology, languages, and y3k

the past 2 days at work, i’ve had some interesting happenings… yesterday, i met my egyptian friend and coworker who works here with me too, and, when he asked how i was doing, i said, “el7asharat wel saraseer metala3een 3aynee” (which roughly means, ‘insects and roaches are giving me a hard time’) – he said, “oh, you’re one of those guys! just like these other guys who are like, ‘senna zar2a’ for bluetooth” :p i practiced it on some germans in broken german too, ‘hast du blau tzan on dein komputer?’ – hehe.

i guess what’s interesting though is that in pretty much all languages, all the technical terms are in english. it sounds really funny to say ‘senna zar2a’ or ‘blau tzan’ for bluetooth and ‘saraseer’ or ‘7asharat’ for bugs… why though? hehe i guess in arabic, some people call the internet, ‘alshabaka,’ which literally means ’the net’ (like a fishing net) – (by the way, why don’t they say ‘3esh el3enkaboot’ or something? (spider web)). but yeah, most people call it, “el net” – ’el’ being the.

as for y3k… so today, i introduced a y3k in the source code to our application. i asked my project lead and such if it was okay, and they said, “no one will be using our software until then.” – basically, i had a list of files, *strTIMESTAMP.ext – and i wanted to delete them all, but i don’t want to delete *str.ext itself – just the ones with a timestamp. so because the delete method doesn’t take in a regex (so i can’t pass in *str+.ext), i had to find another solution.

the easy way (which i didn’t want to do because i am lazy) is just copy *str.ext if it exists to something else, do the delete, and copy it back. but instead, i opted to do delete str2, which means in the year 3000, our software will stop deleting its temporary files… i might go back and fix it later after fixing the other important bugs…

update: i found a much easier fix – use str?.* instead since ‘?’ is supported :)