That's what we need...
Quick, get them over to Glasgow. There's a wealth of soap-dodging nutters over here!
Volunteer youths in Sierra Leone's capital Freetown last week launched "Operation Wash Lunatics" - an attempt to prettify the city's wandering, grubby male nutter population. According to the local Awareness Times, the initiative kicked off on Saturday on Sani Abacha Street, with a three-phase operation. First up, one group …
Of course there's an IT angle, roaming lunatics are what eventually happens to IT management who's jobs and livelihoods have been outsourced to a far flung country....
There's a Paris Hilton angle too, may I be the first to offer to spruce her up a bit next time she's pictured wandering in public... now where's the shaving foam.... !
At the bottom of the article it says: "Error: A thorough search of the Register database for "Sierra Leone" and "lunatics" returned [0] results. Please modify your search to contain at least one IT-related term."
This article will now serve to eliminate that error, and thus it is IT-related. :)
(Who would ever imagined that El Reg had never before covered Sierra Leone or lunatics?)
I spent 7 years living in West Africa and after a while even I didn't bat an eyelid when a naked man with a bucket on his head walked out in front of the taxi. They each had their own areas and individual quirks. Naked bucket man was the best though, and lived in the same neighbourhood as the President.
'At the bottom of the article it says: "Error: A thorough search of the Register database for "Sierra Leone" and "lunatics" returned [0] results. Please modify your search to contain at least one IT-related term." '
Indeed. Which leads to one (and only one) of 2 conclusions :
1- whoever coded the Register website knows that empty strings, badly built queries, null pointer exceptions and what have you will happen, knows to test for them and knows the value of a clean, userfriendly error message (instead of the traditional "what should never have happened, has happened. Sorry"). In which case, they should be rightly commanded.
2- in the original version of the article, the "related stories" paragraph was replaced by a crappy mySQL error message. Which quickly led to someone inserting a dirty hack to make it look as if the code had recovered gracefully from the lack of previous references to smelly african lunatics.
My money's on #2...