I could code that, well maybe not

Posted by Jeremy Miller on July 31, 2006

After getting my toddler to bed, I’ve been sitting on the living room couch writing a real blog post and watching a Tivo’ed episode of Stargate SG-1.  The brilliant scientist types are concocting a scheme to write a computer virus to disable the Stargate system for the bad guys, or something like that.  I happened to look up and notice the two characters on the show were writing snippets of code on a whiteboard to open a FileStream object in what looks like C#. 


I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could write a C# program in 24 hours to reprogram an advanced alien technology.  Heck, I spent a good chunk of the day last Thursday just trying to get a web service proxy and web service to work with X509 certificate security.  I feel inadequate.


Of course, if we could just make the right abstracted DSL for the Stargate protocol…


 


Ok, I’m fine with the Stargate shows and Battlestar Galactica, but explain to me again why Firefly was a commercial flop and these shows are going strong?


 


 


 


 

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://blechie.com/wtilton Willie

    Most people think that Sci-Fi is only for nerds.

    Nerds don’t watch Fox.

    Firefly was aired on Fox.

    BSG is very little Sci-Fi and heavy on humanity stuff n junk.

  • http://www.mgroves.com boohiss

    My guess is because the budget/ratings dynamic is so much different on SciFi than it is on Fox.

  • Dave

    ulab, it’s definately Sam Carter.

  • ulab

    So so many of us see StarGate. Is it for Sam Carter or Jack !!!.

  • http://blogs.solidhouse.com/david.woods Kudos

    I remember when the ancients installed the .NET framework on all the stargates a million or so years ago. I think MS found a stargate and reverse engineered it to give us .NET as we now know it :)

  • Greg

    Wow didn’t you see the episode where the asgard gave them a stargate JIT compiler/runtime and ported the BCL? I hear it was going to be added to the mono project but that it got turned down because “it did not have enough end users to warrant the changes required to the mono runtime”.

  • Jose

    >Ok, I’m fine with the Stargate shows and Battlestar Galactica, but explain to me again why Firefly was a commercial flop and these shows are going strong?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_%28TV_series%29#Broadcast_history

    Can’t be a commercial success if you’re not going to actually broadcast it…

  • eyal

    Maybe the Asgard have a pocket dimension where they have a colony of chimps typing random characters, which eventually results in the right program code.
    Since the pocket dimension’s time flows much faster then ours, the final code is a matter of seconds

  • http://www.JustinAngel.Net Justin-Josef Angel [MVP]

    Here’s the exact code shown on the board:

    FileStream fout = new FileStream(outfile, FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write);
    fout.SetLength(0);
    byte[] bin = new byte[40];
    long totlen = fin.Length;

    (courtsy of Mark’s weblog – mark.farragher.com)

  • http://winsmarts.com sahilmalik

    Don’t worry Jeremy, I have this tiny penny, which is really a 2 terabyte hard disk that can copy everything wirelessly. Just place it on top of your television, and it will automatically copy the code off the stargate programmer.

    Those shows are just stupid.