Microsoft liked The Office so much that they decided to hire its creators to do a Microsoft skit and here they are. Have a laugh this Friday!

A must-browse. These 20 websites are in need of an overhaul, are notoriously slow to load, are discriminatory, and are just plain annoying.

Google publicised its new browser Chrome with a 38-page comic book. It's a gift to satirists, and already, our inboxes are buzzing with slightly less saintly interpretations. Here's a selection. Naturally, the altruistic nature of the operation gets a bit of a bashing

I’ve been observing an unusual programmer friend of mine for some time now. (Yeah… a “friend”, that’s it….) He has such a strange combination of potential and incompetence that its hard to tell if he is just lazy or if he has a “light” form of autism or some other disorder. I try to avoid “easy” pop-psychology terms when discussing him, but try to be as specific as possible when listing his qualities:

Far from me to start yet another religious war, but on the blog a friend from the Italian User Group I found a very amusing cartoon about .NET and PHP in the enterprise (made by David Betz in February 2008), so I thought it would have been funny to repost it here

Posted under humor: True geek humor videos. No your girlfriend will not be able to comprehend! Four fun and educative video's about SOA, enterprise service busses, ROI and all the other bells and whistles of SOA. Not safe for the office, they are too fun!.

Why do you program? Have you ever thought twice about it? What excites you about the job?

A project manager, a computer programmer and a computer operator are driving down the road when the car they are in gets a flat tire. The three men try to solve the problem. The project manager said: "Let's catch a cab and in ten minutes we'll reach our destination." The computer programmer said: "We have here the driver's guide. I can easily replace the flat tire and continue our drive

I don't know why it happens, but it happens with disturbing frequency. A customer wants to report a problem, and then illustrate it with a screenshot or two, but instead of attaching the screenshots, they paste the screenshots inside a Word document (and for some reason it's always Word) and then attach the Word document.

This programmer discovered the importance of testing the hard way

A list of programming and software development quotes by the likes of Larry Wall, Bill Gates, Edsger Dijkstra and Anonymous Code Monkey.

What do you mean we built the datacentre wrong?

Last August I mentioned some developer jokes. Here are some more that I've heard from various places (I'm retelling these from memory):

How closely do you identify with your code..?

The software industry might be the world’s greatest breeding ground for new systems of management. From Agile, to Extreme Programming , to Test Driven Development (TDD), the acronyms and frameworks keep piling up. Why? Some say it’s immaturity: that software is still a young industry and all the change is the path to some true fundamentals. Others say it’s because software people like making things up and can’t help themselves. Well I say this: if we’re going to have dozens of models we may as well have some that are honest, however cynical, to what’s really going on much of the time.

The Obfuscated C contest has always annoyed me. If programs are for communicating with other programmers, why do we have a contest that encourages such complete perversions of best practises? (Ok, that's really a rhetorical question - I know perfectly well how much fun it can be to put hours of work into one devious, unreadable block of line-noise.)

7) "Somebody must have changed my code."

Another linux zealot at my old job gave me the heads up on this, it’s directly from gnome-cups-manager, and I thought you would all enjoy it. If you’re not aware, the readme file is for a Gnome graphical front-end for a tool used to manage print queues and adding printers/etc. The only question is what illicit substances were not consumed during the writing of this file.

It’s somewhat of an oldie, but still funny… And while not a perfect Scrum metaphor, it’s pretty close.

As any good software developer will tell you, programming is more than a job. It's a way of life. Top coders practically speak their own language; the trivia floating in their heads would stupefy mere mortals. But then there are the others -- people who claim to make the cut but don't know squat. Sometimes it seems like there's one assigned to every project. Think you can tell who's who? Infoworld compiled 20 questions to separate the script kiddies from the seasoned pros. Answer them if you dare.

Parents: Talk to your kids about Linux... Before somebody else does...

Girl Developer notices a recent trend of personal negativity....

Thanks to Mippin for the following image which is hosted on their site where it's titled "Modern Life"

Try to guess what this WHERE clause is supposed to do.

Seriously silly stuff, had to laugh nonetheless. ;)