Tag Archives: computer

DefCon Run

Nationality: American
Occupation: Computer Security
Language: English

“What we used to do is we would run one run- okay when the convention was on the strip, in the middle of the strip, like at Bally’s or Flamingo or that area, there would be a 5k run one day to the north, one day to the west, one day to the east, and one day to the south. The problem is over time it got too large and we couldn’t run as one large group, and the location of the convention went to the convention center, so we’re no longer on the strip. But we still meet in the morning Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday outside the convention center. And then we just get into groups and do different runs. Mainly based on how far you want to run and how fast you are, so if you want to just run back to your hotel you can.  It has grown beyond that, so we try to get together one night at a restaurant and just mingle. So its grown beyond the running in the last few years, I guess. I bump into some of the runners at the conference and we say hi.And we’ve been getting more and more swag over the years, one year they had bandanas, now we have official runners’ bibs- one year they did prime numbers but I don’t think there’s any pattern now. We’ve also had unofficial renewals of wedding vows because the guy organizing it is the guy running some online church that he got a certificate for.”

    Context: “The DefCon run is not officially sanctioned by DefCon. It started where a few people that were involved with Defcon wanted to have a run in the morning and run with people. It was pretty unstructured but it actually grew over time. We tried getting it as a sanctioned event but they were concerned about liability and that Defcon can’t support it. So we’re doing it unofficially without Defcon knowing. We even have a giant flag with a rabbit with Defcon inside of the rabbit. So even though we aren’t official, we try to sneak in Defcon. In the early days, we started with maybe 30. When it got to 100, that’s when we tried to get official status. It’s probably more than 140 now.”

    Analysis: This run, unofficially affiliated with the hacking conference known as Defcon, held in Las Vegas annually in August, is a renewal and formation of social bonds to the informant. He is able to meet new people and run with many of the same people who were participants years ago, when the run was smaller. These acquaintances last into the conference, where they are more likely to be familiar with people in different talks and speaker events. Because the run is several days, as is the conference, the bond is able to be deepened over the course of the four runs, as is explored by the informant’s mention of dinner becoming a part of the celebration. 

    In addition, the structure of the run itself is interesting. Four runs in the four cardinal directions may speak to the natural and athletic search runners are on, especially in a metropolitan area such as Las Vegas. It allows the runners to explore the area and ground themselves within the context of the city as a geographical location, especially considering the rest of the day will be spent inside a conference center and isolated from the outside. The growth of this run speaks to the larger desire to both seek community during the conference and maintain a larger community that they can reliably expect to rejoin year after year, running the same paths and using this tradition as the start to their day.

    99 little bugs in the code

    Nationality: American
    Age: 21
    Occupation: Student
    Residence: Los Angeles
    Performance Date: February 2023
    Primary Language: English

    “99 little bugs in the code, 

    99 little bugs… 

    Take one down, 

    patch it around, 127 bugs in the code!”

    Genre: joke/song

    Source: 20 year old USC student majoring in computer science

    Context: The student doesn’t remember exactly when she learned this tune, but says it is the coders’ take on the classic “99 bottles of beer” song. 

    Analysis: In this adapted version, the number of bugs increases many instead of going down by one classically. The student explains this is the focus of the joke, because the patching of an error frequently leads to the creation of more “bugs” in the code. Where the traditional version of this song is normally heard during monotonous tasks, or when killing excess time. In this 21st century rendition, the song achieves the same purposes, as fixing code is often a seemingly endless and time intensive process. 

    “Ping” as Computer Science lingo

    Nationality: Jewish
    Age: 20
    Occupation: Student/Computer Scientist
    Residence: Los Angeles
    Performance Date: 4/21/2020
    Primary Language: English

    Main Piece

    Interviewer: What does ping mean?

    Informant: To check nn on someone, or following up with someone. If I were waiting for someone to send me a new version of their code, I would say “I am going to ping them” which basically means the same thing as “I am going to follow up with them.” 

    Interviewer:Where did you learn it?

    Informant:I learned it from the coding community, very much so. 

    Interviewer: Do you use it frequently?

    Informant: Uhhh…yeah actually I just used it in an email. I guess I use it so frequently I forgot that I use it in the first place if that makes any sense, haha.

    Background

    The informant is a good friend and housemate of mine, and is a junior at USC studying Computer Science and Computer Engineering. He is originally from Manhattan Beach, CA and has been coding ever since highschool. He has had several internships with different computer science companies such as Microsoft and is very involved with different coding clubs on campus. 

    Context

    One day while we were at home my informant used the word “ping” in front of me and I had no idea what he meant. During the interview I asked for more context on this word and when it would be used and where he learned it from. 

    Analysis

    I think that much of the folk speech used between computer scientists is heavily dependent on the different technology that they use. Always focusing on efficiency and collaboration with larger coding projects, students and computer scientists alike use words and folk speech in order to communicate with more ease and to form a sense of community within the coding community.

    Bugs

    Nationality: American
    Age: 20
    Occupation: Student
    Residence: Oklahoma
    Performance Date: 4/21/12
    Primary Language: English

    In programming, a bug is unintentional/unwanted behavior of a program or algorithm.

    The story goes that back when computers were being developed in the 1940’s, computers occupied huge, refrigerated rooms. One day while one of these computers was running, it began to behave sporadically. Perplexed, the engineers began going through all of the hardware to see if they could find a problem. They searched for hours until eventually, they found a bug had been stuck in one of the cable jacks. After removing the bug the computer behaved normally. Ever since, these sporadic errors have been called bugs, and the process of removing them has been called debugging.

     

    Its interesting to note that this process has transferred from its supposed origins as a piece of hardware terminology and is now used primarily for problems with software. My informant also told me that there is some controversy over the origin of this story, however despite this he still strongly believes that this is the true version of the tale. He does not recall where he first heard this story, but I have also been told this exact narrative by my father when I first started studying computer science.

    Occupational FOAF Stories

    Nationality: Mexican-American
    Age: 33
    Occupation: IT Manager
    Residence: Westlake, Los Angeles, CA
    Performance Date: April 19, 2011
    Primary Language: English
    Language: Conversational French

    When the informant worked in a tech support job at the University of Southern California, she heard the two following occupational FOAF stories about ridiculous problems customers had called in to friends of her fellow workers:

    The most common story the informant heard was that of the worker who complains, “I broke my cup holder,” not knowing that the so-called “cup holder” is in fact the CD drive on his CPU. The other oft-retold IT question she heard was, “Where’s the ‘any’ key.” This question relates to a common program prompt: “When a program says, ‘Press any key to continue, uh, some individuals—they may not have a full grasp of the English language or of a computer—are looking for an actual key on the keyboard that says, ‘Any key,’ as opposed to just pressing any key on the keyboard.”

    The informant considered these two stories to be pure invention until she later encountered them herself as an IT manager: “At first I thought that it was, you know, just kind of a joking thing—ha, that’s funny, who, who would ever actually ask that?—but I did encounter it twice . . . somebody put a cup in the CD drive and the CD drive is not built to hold cups with liquid in it. And it broke.” She recalls her response to the first time she got the “cup holder” question: “I tried to be very—I’m sure I was—maybe chuckled a little bit? But I try to be very professional in my response, saying that’s not a cup holder and that the person had broken their computer and would need to get it repaired.” As for the “any key” question, she now calls it “something that is commonly encountered . . . I’m not kidding.”

    Like her former co-workers, the informant now brings out these stories to share with other tech support workers: “I would tell it—I’m sure I would do it in a way if we were doing, uh, pretty much like battle stories from a war . . . but from the front lines of tech support.”

    Since the computer problems in these stories actually happen, it is likely that the stories themselves have a polygenetic source—multiple users who have probably never seen anyone else use the CD drive as a cup holder do so of their own accord. Folklore about the personal computer, of course, has a terminus post quem of its invention; tech support for personal computers is a relatively new concept and thus the occupational folklore associated with its practitioners must of necessity also be rather new. However, these two stories do seem to be widespread, appearing in user manuals, technical textbooks, and even fiction books, as a passage from a short story by Carson W. Bryan demonstrates (71).

    Source: Bryan, Carson W. Let’s Find Out. New York: Xulon Press, 2010.