The Heinrich Show

Everyone who knows me knows that I am not a baseball fan.  I have nothing against baseball, it’s just not my cup of tea. I’ll still go to games (when I get free tickets) with my kids.

I go to lunch sometimes with John and Mike, and when they start discussing baseball, I check my e-mail on my iPhone and wonder when the Jet’s season starts (see countdown on the right).

George Carlin expressed the difference between football and baseball most elegantly…

The New York Times today reported on the death of comedic great George Carlin. The headline read, “George Carlin, Splenetic Comedian, Dies at 71.

Splenetic? Whoa…. what the hell does that mean?

UPDATE: It seems The New York Times Editors read my blog! They changed “splenetic” to “irreverent”

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: The New York Times abandoned “irreverent” and the article now reads, “George Carlin, Comic Who Chafed at Society and Its Constraints, Dies at 71″

We all know the war in Iraq costs a FORTUNE, but this YouTube Video puts the cost in a way most of us (even rednecks) can understand.

On Friday night, I took my daughter Monika to see the Cure.

Robert Smith may be 49 years old but that man rocked Madison Square Garden! The Show went on for THREE hours… they played three encores…they played a mix of the old and the new stuff. There were a lot of “old folks” like me there…some of whom had dressed and danced like they were 20 again.
We didn’t get home until 3 am…

Steve and I get along just fine. We worked side by side for almost 5 years.

What is really great is that our kids adore each other. Anya gets Michael to talk and Maya loves to pinch Luke.

There has been a lot of news about Guantanamo Bay Cuba and all the good times going on there…. I figured I would add two pieces of information for my informed readership (both of you).

1. “Guantanamo Bay” was featured in my favorite movie, A Few Good Men.
2. The Navy’s nickname for “Gitmo” was in fact, “GitNO“, because sailors who pulled into the port were NOT GOING TO BE MET by gorgeous women…. in fact, during the Cold War when I was in the Navy, women could not be stationed in Gitmo, because it was considered a “forward position”.

I love the show 30 Days. They took a good ol’ huntin’ and fishin’ man from North Carolina and had him spend 30 Days with PETA activitists in Los Angeles.

He was polite and although my man did not have a Harvard degree, and those PETA people used some purdy words… he done spoke da truth!

He said, “American’s don’t want to see animals suffer, but they want to see them on their plate!”

The other thing my man noticed (I had to agree with..) was that the PETA types all had the same lines and constantly (and outrageously) compared the killing of chickens to the Nazis killing Jews.

But George had a good time…. especially at the end… painting naked chicks for a PETA protest.

Developers always think about how to make coding easier, and by extension, always wonder, “Is another language easier to program in?”

Fortunately, a really cool website has “Hello World” in nearly every programming language you can think of… I had posted a few excepts here, with some comments on them.

BASIC

10 REM Hello World in BASIC
20 PRINT “Hello World!”

Everybody learns BASIC in High School. My favorite thing to do was to write a snippet that would take my name and make it move across the screen. That, and a lottery simulator (you pick six numbers and how many tries before you win) were my claims to fame in BASIC.

Fortran

C     Hello World in Fortran

PROGRAM HELLO
WRITE (*,100)
STOP
100 FORMAT (‘ Hello World! ‘ /)
END

I am old enough to have studied FORTRAN in school back when dinosaurs roamed the earth with their mighty TRS-80s. Interestingly, I saved my FORTRAN code onto a punch cards.

Pascal

{Hello World in Pascal}

program HelloWorld(output);
begin
WriteLn(’Hello World!’);
end.

Pascal was another language that I studied both in School and later on my own when I wanted to write for the Macintosh. When I was switching from OS 9 to OS X, Apple used to have all their documentation using Pascal code examples….

C++

// Hello World in C++ (pre-ISO)

#include <iostream.h>

main()
{
cout << “Hello World!” << endl;
return 0;
}

I learned C++ reading Dave Mark’s book on “C++ for the Macintosh”. It’s still a bread and butter language for many people. I haven’t written a line of C++ in years.

HyperTalk

– Hello World in HyperTalk

answer “Hello, world!”

HyperTalk was my FIRST real object oriented programming language. Oddly enough, I have come back to it as I am writing SenseTalk scripts for testing.

Java

// Hello World in Java

class HelloWorld {
static public void main( String args[] ) {
System.out.println( “Hello World!” );
}
}

Java never caught fire for me, because it seemed EVERYBODY was doing to Java, so I figured, “Why bother?”. I made some Java applets, embedded them in webpages, or made navigation applets, but you do all that stuff faster, smarter, cheaper with other programming languages.

PHP

<?php
// Hello World in PHP
echo ‘Hello World!’;
?>

PHP is a great language for writing FAST and SIMPLE website stuff. It’s easy to read, but I find that larger projects (Wordpress and Zenphoto) get very difficult to maintain.

Cocoa

// Hello World in Cocoa Obj-C (OS X)
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {
NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
NSLog(@”Hello, World!”);
[pool release];
return 0;
}

Cocoa, which is really Objective-C, is not a new language from Apple… it’s been around since the days of NeXT (which is why the classes are called NSClass). I was writing some Objective C when I was in college on a NeXT machine and later, I took Aaron Hillegasses great class on Cocoa. I wish I wrote more Cocoa code, but my life is all testing and process stuff now.

Ruby

# Hello World in Ruby
puts “Hello World!”

Ruby is my new love. Sweet and simple, she just seems to get the job done. Easy to maintain, when she goes bad, she clearly tells you what went wrong for easy debugging.

Some other computer languages I have never studied, and probably never will because Ruby does what they do quite nicely.

Perl

# Hello world in perl

print “Hello World!\n”;

Perl. Ok. I know squat about it. Looks simple enough tho…

Python

# Hello World in Python
print “Hello World”

Python. Some people at my job like Python. I can’t see the appeal of a language that will throw an error if you have a space in the wrong place, but I am just one guy.

I had a great Father’s Day with Anya and Maya. We went to Shea Stadium and sat in the Picnic Area. We had wrist bands, so we could sit in the special section and eat in the food tent FOR FREE! For added fun, the Pont Family joined us, and we just had a great time.

The costs of the day went like this:

• Tickets to Game: Free
• Food and Drink at Shea: Free
• Train Tickets: $22.50
• Having fun with the girls: Priceless

The Met’s lost, which bothered Steve (I could have cared less).

I had some people over Saturday night. I barbecued some steaks, but the star of the evening was HAND MADE SPÄTZLE from my friend Julietta (who is from Munich).

Hand making spätzle is a fine art… it was delicious!