[1494] in Humor
HUMOR: Jelly Donuts
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Sun Jun 23 14:01:59 1996
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 23 Jun 1996 13:58:58 EDT
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 09:05:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Forwarded-by: Peter Langston <psl@langston.com>
Forwarded-by: Daniel Steinberg <dss@opcode.com>
Forwarded-by: Mike Muskin <muskin@opcode.com>
Author unknown (who is Mike Kolesnik?).
Heaven's donuts are jelly donuts. The blend of texture, from the cool,
sweet ooze of the jelly, mined with tiny raspberry seeds, to the firm,
spongy cake, so lightly encrusted in a thin glaze of sugar, that cracks
and flakes as you gingerly tear off small pieces of delight, is certainly
the greatest experience a humble man can afford.
I was eating a jelly donut when He first appeared in my office, smelling
slightly of gunpowder. He was tall and gaunt, with deep-set eyes and
crooked teeth, long, delicate fingers, and sloped shoulders. He wore a
black Ozzy Osborne concert t-shirt, frayed black jeans, and dusty black
high-tops, unlaced. He smiled at me in an ugly way. I put down my donut
and glanced at my watch. 7:00 PM. "You're Mike Kolesnik."
I nodded.
"You're a programmer for CyberHackers."
I nodded again. Not only was I a programmer for CyberHackers -- I was
the best damn programmer this group had ever or would ever see. I suppose
I should introduce myself. I am Michael Kolesnik, master programmer.
I'm not just blowing smoke here either. I'm the best damn programmer to
come out of MIT since code was constructed one bit at a time. I can do
it all: C, LISP, assembly -- even the languages no self-respecting
programmer would deign to look at. I can do it all in no time flat, with
the most elegant of style. Code sprinkled with glistening semicolons and
flowing rivers of indentation. Lesser programmers avert their eyes when
I enter the room.
"They say you're the best, and I'm here to challenge you." I sized this
guy up again. He had the right shape. The pot-belly, the greasy hair,
parted with precision. The fingers. And the funny smell. I told him I
didn't have time.
"I'll make it worth your while," he said. "I have something you might be
interested in. Follow me."
I grabbed my box of donuts, and followed him down the hall and into the
elevator. He pressed a button and the elevator descended into the
basement. I'd never been in the basement before. For that matter, I
didn't even recall that the building had a basement. Nonetheless, the
elevator chimed, the doors opened, and we stepped out into a wide room
that was entirely featureless. That is, except for the fog on the floor
and two workstations that were set up, side by side. One of the
workstations was mine. The other was a workstation like none other that
I had seen before. It was magnificent.
It was matte black. More than an object, it looked like a hole in space.
The monitor it sported was the biggest I had ever seen, and the keyboard
was a flow of liquid lines, containing a field of keys of different sizes
and shapes, packed in like cobblestones. The mouse floated above the
table, and had no wire. Next to the computer was a box with a small chute
coming out of one side, and a large red button on the top. The monitor
was flanked by two gigantic speakers, and I could see a sub-woofer poking
up out of the fog. It hummed. It steamed. It was the most beautiful
computer I had ever seen.
"You approve," said the stranger.
I swallowed and said, "It is beyond description."
"It's a custom job. And it's yours. If," he said, "If you can beat me
in a coding contest."
I looked at him incredulously. "What's in it for you?"
"I will have defeated the greatest coder in the world, and thus, I can
claim that title. AND, I get to keep your immortal soul." He smiled the
ugly smile again.
Here was a dilemma. I was dealing with the Devil. There was no doubt
about that. And he was no doubt very good. I am somewhat attached to my
soul, but oh, the prizes. The glory. I can easily claim to be the best
coder in the company, in the Bay Area, probably on the whole planet, but
if I pulled this off, I will have shown myself to be the best coder in
this entire theology! Vanity got the better part of me.
"What's the contest?" I asked.
I won't bore you with the details, but it was seriously ugly. Ugly in a
way that makes the most arrogant of coders cringe and causes managers to
pad development schedules into the next century. It had to run in any
language, including the nasty chicken-scratch ones. It had to be backward
compatible, all the way to the ENIAC. And it had to run on Windows... I
cringed. But vanity won. I signed the forms, agreed on a deadline of
midnight, and we sat down at our machines and started to code.
My watch said 8:00 PM, and I started warming up. Class definitions flew
off my fingertips like throwing stars. Structures and declarations grew
like perfect crystals, and I didn't even break a sweat. True to the task,
I soon lost myself in an endless cycle of postulate, create, instantiate
and verify. Bits grew to bytes, to K, to Megs, and finally to Gigs. By
11:00 PM it had come to that crucial point. With an hour to go, I had to
put all the pieces together. It wasn't going to be easy. It was going to
take all the concentration I had.
Then I hit the first bug.
At first, I wasn't sure where it was coming from, but then I spotted it.
It wasn't mine. It was a bug in Windows. Even worse, it was a bug in
Windows that stemmed from a timing problem with the system clock itself.
I couldn't see a workaround. I was stymied. I genuflected and called
Microsoft support. "Hello, and welcome to the Microsoft help line.
Please enter your 64 digit user identification number, followed by your
32 digit password."
While I frantically typed number after number, trying to navigate through
layer upon layer of phone menu, I heard Him pick up his phone and call a
number.
"Hello, is Bill in? ... I don't care, wake him up ... Tell him it's Mr.
Black ... Hey Bill, what's shakin'? Listen, I needed to know a workaround
to one of your bugs ... Yes, I know what time it is... Yes, I know ...
Bill ... Bill! You remember our little deal?... That's right. Now be
a dear and give me that workaround ... Mm-hm ... Right ... Thank you,
Bill. I'll be seeing you."
I was shocked. It was obviously pointless continuing my desperate journey
through Microsoft's Help line. I needed immediate genius! I scarfed down
a grape jelly. Sugar shock engulfed me, and my vision tunneled. I
shuddered once, something clicked, and I determined the answer I needed
- -- I could use the clock on the sound chip to get my timings.
I dove back into the code, and was quickly integrating modules when I hit
bug number two. It was even uglier than the first. In fact, it was the
ugliest bug I had ever seen. It was a problem with C. With the language
itself. There's no way fix a broken hammer using the same hammer.
I wracked my brains. I clenched and grunted and sweated and thought and
Thought and THOUGHT, but to no avail. Over my shoulder, I could hear Him
chime in, "Bugger, isn't it? I remember putting that one in back when I
was working on the Unix kernal. Did you really think there was a Kernighan
and Ritchie? Rearrange the letters in their names and you'll discover an
interesting anagram."
I ignored him and continued thinking. My mind went deeper and deeper into
the problem at hand -- my senses dulled, my breathing grew shallow. My
eyes rolled back and sweat beaded on my forehead. Clumsily, blindly, my
hand pawed it's way to the box on my desk, containing my last jelly donut.
It raised slowly to my lips, and I bit.
Pounding waves of sugar induced euphoria washed through my mind. I felt
my brain hum and crackle. My hands trembled, my body shuddered, and I
began to type. I was a man possessed. Complex topographical math equations
formed on my screen. Klien bottles and hypercubes locked neatly into place
like pieces of a puzzle. Beyond my control, a complex mathematical world
formed in my computer, with additional dimensions unimaginable.
I felt a small pop, and I came to. I looked at my screen. I had worked
around the bug. My watch read 11:45. Frantically I continued putting all
the modules into place. Glancing for a moment at my rival, I could see I
had him worried. He was typing furiously. Smoke poured from his ears,
and flames licked around his collar.
Then I hit the third bug.
It was not so much a bug, it was a limit. I only had 4 Gigabytes of
memory, and I had used it all. There wasn't a bit left. I had compressed
data to a point so fine that it was in danger of collapsing into a black
hole. I was storing memory in every conceivable way, including keeping a
chain of sound waves running between the speaker and the microphone. There
was no memory left to be had.
Frantic, I reached into my box of donuts, and my heart sank into my
stomach when I realized that I had eaten the last one. I glanced at my
watch, but it was too late. I was sunk. I had done the best that I could,
and I had nothing more to give.
The Devil laughed, and grinning cruelly, he reached over to the box with
the chute and the button. Remember the box? Slowly, firmly, his hand
pressed the red button, and a jelly donut slid down the chute and onto
the table.
My jaw dropped. "What...is...that?" I asked.
He languorously chewed as he replied, "The Box of Eternal Donuts."
"The Box of Eternal Donuts!?"
"Yes," he said.
"It never runs out?"
"Never," he said.
"It's mine if I win?!?!"
"If you can win, it is entirely yours," he replied, grinning cockily.
My mind reeled. The Box of Eternal Donuts. The Box of Eternal Donuts!
My eyes darted everywhere, my jaw hung slack, and my throat emitted
strange animal-like noises. Anything. I would do anything to win! I just
needed the smallest amount of memory. But where could I get it from? I
glanced at my watch again, and a plan came into my mind. A beautiful,
devious plan.
I went quickly upstairs and retrieved the emergency toolkit that we keep
in the medicine cabinet. I ripped the case off my computer, and quickly
scanned for the right connections. I pulled two wires, and unscrewed the
back of my watch. The Devil's eyes widened and he desperately started
coding again, but it was too late. I got the last of the memory I needed
out of my watch, and pressed the ENTER key seconds before he did.
The watch burst into flames. Sparks flew from the disk drives and the
monitor glowed and throbbed, finally melting into a puddle of glass. The
computer exploded in a shower of sparks, and then there was absolute
silence.
There was a pause, and both of us turned as the printer started, slowly
emitting a single sheet that wafted gently into the out bin. I
nonchalantly strolled over, and held up to the Devil's scowling face, a
sheet imprinted with two words. "Hello World".
Nothing more needs to be told, other than, as I write this, I am sitting
in front of my new computer, munching on what is undoubtedly the best
jelly donut I have ever eaten...
