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As a young boy in India walking to his school, I used to wonder how drivers could tell if they were on a one-way street. It was ok for vehicles trying to enter the street from the wrong end --- A no-entry sign will prevent them from getting in. But that is not enough, of course. Vehicles coming in from the other side need to be told that they are entering a one-way street too. What if a vehicle on a one-way street suddenly wanted to turn around and go back? But in the city where I come from, the transport department must have wisely decided to save money by relying on people's observational skills. There were no signs at the entrances to one-way streets. There were only ``No-entry'' signs at their exits. I guess it makes sense because the traffic was usually so dense that you can tell one-way streets by just looking at them. There was no chance of traffic ever making it an inch ahead in the wrong direction. However, there is a fine line between impossible and illegal and that is precisely what I set out to exploit. I decided to expose the loophole in the legal system by showing that I couldn't be prosecuted by law although I had done something obviously illegal.

It seems Ken Thompson, one of the people who wrote Unix, was asked what he thought of the date-rollover problem in Unix (In the year 2038, the Unix date value wraps around to 0). His reply was that he didn't care as he was going to be dead by then. A speaker at the UniForum NZ 97 conference at Rotorua quoted this anecdote. When I mentioned this to a friend, he said that this speaks a great deal for Unix since the questioner implicitly assumed that Unix was still going to be around in 2038. Well is it? Is it worthwhile learning Unix skills and still be employable in the decades to come?