As an integration tester, I have to second what you're saying !!

It's a real pain to integrate works done by people having a different formatting style habit. In my opinion, enforcing that everybody uses UTF-8 as a default encoding is the first rule to establish. I'm currently working with people in Mauritius and, I can understand why, some of them encode their files using UTF-16 ... It's fine but our standard is UTF-8 and, sadly, our internal SCM tools (targeting IBM Synergy 6.5a) don't like developers to mess up with that ;(

And yes ... distributing a enforced checkstyle formatting pass automatically while integrating (preferably every night) is a must have best practice ! We use maven for that and a very special Hudson plugin : blame :)
I know all other build managers in the world just smiled when they read the former sentence ;)

Hum .... I don't like this "all your base belongs to us" kind of "joke" ....

Another, funnier, joke to make on IRC is:

joe> hey, madzerg, how do you manage to put colors in your messages on IRC ??
madzerg> It's simple, just press CTRL-ALT-F4 and a number to use the color you want ... example : CTRL-ALT-F4 143 (143 stands for red).
joe> Yyyyesss !! Thanks, I'll try it NOW !!!
*** J0E has quit IRC (Connection reset by peer)
madzerg> Hehe !! :) ... This "peer" guy is such a dumbass !!! :)

My 2 cents ... ;)