Favourite Quotes [possible satire]

What is is. Perceive It. Integrate it. Act on it. Idealize it.

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
a bit or byte to read or write,
I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O

Will: "Roses are red,
Violets are Blue.
Jazz and I are black,
But, Carlton, what are you?"

Excerpt from "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air"

And the top story for today: wives live longer than husbands because they are not married to women.

Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.

I'm sexy, I'm cute, I'm popular to boot.
I'm bitchin', great hair, the boys all love to stare!
I'm wanted, I'm hot, I'm everything you're not.
I'm pretty, I'm cool, I dominate this school.
Who am I? Just guess. Guys wanna touch my chest.
I'm rockin', I smile and many think I'm vile.
I'm flying, I jump you can look but don't you hump. Whoo!
I major, I roar. I swear I'm not a whore.
We cheer and we lead - we act like we're on speed.
You hate us cause we're beautiful but we don't like you either.
We're cheerleaders. We are cheerleaders!

Excerpt from "Bring it On"

An algebra teacher is discussing a problem with a student. The teacher says: "Now, suppose x is the speed at which the train is travelling…". And the student says "But teacher, what if x is not the speed at which the train is travelling?"

Keep all the grades of the students who passed the test as is, and convert the grades of all the students who failed to 54%.

“God is Dead”

— Nietzsche

“Nietzsche is Dead”

— God

( writing on a toilet's wall )

A serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

The difference between a bad student and a good student is that a bad student forgets all the material five minutes before the exam, while a good student five minutes after it.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

It's not because they have suddenly converted to Stallmanism.

Anyone else misread that as "Stalinism"?

The word "Stalinism" is deprecated, the correct term is "GNU/Communism".

-- Spotted on Slashdot

Personally, I'd have a far better time writing scripts if I had some more creative shells to script in…

ASMsh: The Assembly shell. Commands include MOV, SHL, SHR, JNE, etc.

shellTM: Turing machine shell. Only four commands. Read, write, move left, move right. Capable of producing any programming language imaginable, given enough time and nerves of steel.

GeneSH: Four commands. G, A, T, C. Need I say more?

Qsh: Only uses one environment variable, which contains all possible values simultaneously. Method of scripting: isolate the universe in which the desired result is already accomplished, and intersect with it.

Of course, I never said they'd be easy to use. But then, if these shells existed, and I knew a sysadmin who used any of them, you can believe Sysadmin Day would be a far more celebrated holiday.

The Night Watchman on a Slashdot Comment

We're on a mission from God.

-- The Blues Brothers

It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing, but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

I'm going to do a routine now, the ones of you that have heard it before may enjoy hearing it again. The ones of you that have not heard it before - may enjoy hearing it again next time.

I guess I really am an optimist. A paranoid optimist, true, but an optimist nonetheless.

Larry Wall, "The 3rd State of the Onion"

In fact, I think Linus's [= Linus Torvalds'] cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do." Lazy like a fox. Or, as Robert Heinlein famously wrote of one of his characters, too lazy to fail.

Eric Raymond, the "Cathedral and the Bazaar"

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

Misattributed to Benjamin Franklin

Shlomi Fish: And to think that home desktops can simulate these systems [= PDP-10's and PDP-11's] much faster than those ancient mainframes.

William Lee Irwin III: Shlomi, and to think the net usefulness of the home desktops is less than what users got out of those mainframes.

#offtopic on the oftc.net IRC network.

I feel much better, now that I've given up hope.

Ashleigh Brilliant

I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.

Ashleigh Brilliant

I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.

Ashleigh Brilliant

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Sometimes I think the surest sign, that intelligent life exists else where in our universe is, is that none of it has tried to contact us.

Calvin

The more I think about it, the more I think I should think about it some more.

Clarissa in "Clarissa Explains it All"

Rusty Russell's signature:

Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an idiot.
-- Rusty Russell

The First Law of Thermodynamics: A system with a constant energy, volume and pressure behaves in any way it wants.

I wrote them (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed: the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so.)

Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List in response to SCO's Linux Kernel ownership claims.

Baby making is owned by SCO. Linus's mother never paid royalties.

Also, having a name is a SCO trade secret. By giving Linus a name, they again ask for being fined.

Best regards,

Iztok

(p.s.: Iztok is owned by SCO, and phrase "Best Regards" as well. LWN is owned by SCO.)

An LWN comment in regards to the SCO ownership claims of Linux Kernel code.

The source of my intention
really isn't crime prevention
My intention is prevention of the lie.

Scatman John
"Scatman's World"

To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

Eric S. Raymond in "How To Become a Hacker"

My God, My God,
May it never, never end.
The sand and the sea,
the jitter of the water,
the shine of the sky,
the prayer of Man.

"A Walk to Caesarea" / Hanah Senesh
( Translated from Hebrew by Shlomi Fish )

'You must know that I am not without artifice where magic is concerned,' said Weasel. 'Only last year did I - assisted by my friend there - part the notoriously powerful Archmage of Ymitury from his staff, his belt of moon jewels, and his life, in that approximate order.'

If we want to have any kind of confidence that the hash is really unbreakable, we should make it not just longer than 160 bits, we should make sure that it's two or more hashes, and that they are based on totally different principles.

And we should all digitally sign every single object too, and we should use 4096-bit PGP keys and unguessable passphrases that are at least 20 words in length. And we should then build a bunker 5 miles underground, encased in lead, so that somebody cannot flip a few bits with a ray-gun, and make us believe that the sha1's match when they don't. Oh, and we need to all wear aluminum propeller beanies to make sure that they don't use that ray-gun to make us do the modification _ourselves_.

The dictionary definition of capitalism is: An economic system characterized by private ownership of capital goods and by investments that are determined by private decision rather than by state control. Prices, production and distribution of goods are determined by a free market.

…

But most writers and commentators put dishonest altruistic-platonistic connotations on the meaning of capitalism: A system of exploitation of the weak by the strong -- devoid of love and good will. A system in which unwanted goods and services are pushed onto consumers through clever, deceptive advertising for the sole purpose of profits and greed. Capitalism dominates most Western governments. Capitalism, big business, and fascism are synonymous.

Neo-Tech IV / The Neo-Tech Discovery.

Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who disagree with me are by definition crazy. (Until I change my mind, when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens. I'm flexible, and not black-and-white.)

One bug, two bugs, tar bugs, su bugs,
grep bugs, mew bugs, old bugs, new bugs.
This bug has a little hack,
This bug has a broken stack.
Say! What a lot of bugs to track.
Yes, some are in tar, and some in su.
Some are old. And some are new.
Some in sed, and some in jed.
And some are even in parted.
Why are they in parted, jed and sed?
I do not know. Bugs should be dead!
Some in jpeg, and some in TIFF
This TIFF one has an attached diff.
From there to here, from here to there
Test release bugs are everywhere.

"I took the sweet life
but I never knew
I'd be bitter from the sweet"

Yet, acting on fully integrated honesty (Neo-Tech), not reason itself, is the basic moral act. When Genghis Khan, for example, chose to use reasoning for a specific military move, then in an out-of-context sense, he chose to act morally by protecting himself and his troops (thus filling human biological needs). But in the larger sense of fully integrated honesty, Khan's total actions were grossly immoral in choosing to use aggressive force in becoming a mass murderer (thus negating human biological needs). The highly destructive, irrational immorality of Genghis Khan's overall dictatorial military actions far outweighed any narrow, out-of-context "moral" actions. …Genghis Khan was enormously evil as were Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot.

Neo-Tech Orientation and Definitions

Why are there so many unmaintainable applications written in PHP and Perl? Because PHP and Perl let undisciplined, inexperienced programmers write useful code. So does Ruby -- but give it the popularity and longevity of PHP and Perl (at least in English-speaking circles) and I bet you'll see plenty of bad code written in Ruby too.

This seems like a variant of the Hackers and Painters fallacy. (Paul Graham is rich. Paul Graham writes Lisp. Therefore everyone who writes Lisp will get rich.) "All of the good, smart programmers I know are using Ruby. They write good code. Therefore you can't write bad code in Ruby!"

It feels like there's another fallacy in there somewhere. I want to call it the Pre-Post-Java Blindspot, where Java was the beginning of Serious Programming Languages and only its successor will unseat it. (Like any good fallacy, you have to ignore history, such as the fact that Ruby's between 10 and 12 years old.)

(I mean, if you really just can't read regular expressions, why not admit it? You could start a twelve-step program or something.)

I have upgraded the plot device's hard-drive, soft-drive and squishy drive,and it is now being the world's most powerful super-computer!

The Angry Scientist in "Sheep in the Big City"

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Source unknown.

Much of the relative simplicity of Java is - like for most new languages - partly an illusion and partly a function of its incompleteness. As time passes, Java will grow significantly in size and complexity. It will double or triple in size and grow implementation-dependent extensions or libraries. That is the way every commercially successful language has developed. Just look at any language you consider successful on a large scale. I know of no exceptions, and there are good reasons for this phenomenon. [I wrote this before 2000; now see a preview of Java 1.5 - http://xrl.us/kb3a ]

"I simply hate, detest, loathe, despise, and abhor redundancy."

An Oscar Wilde quote, that quotes Oscar Wilde on his views on Redundancy in a quote.

In yesterday's post (Bitten by the Enterprise Bug), we learned how vital enterprise application are for proactive organizations leveraging collective synergy to think outside the box and formulate their key objectives into a win-win game plan with a quality-driven approach that focuses on empowering key players to drive-up their core competencies and increase expectations with an all-around initiative to drive up the bottom-line.

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/64833/ShowPost.aspx

He says "One and one and one is three".
Got to be good-looking 'cause he's so hard to see.

Excerpt from "Come Together" by the Beatles.

Version 7? [of Vim]

GNU Emacs is at version 21.4. Can we really trust such an immature editor?

"yet another coward" in a Slashdot comment for the announcement of the release of Vim version 7. Slashdot comment

I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code.

— Unknown

That's the nice thing about UNIX, it gives you so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. :)

At least it does allow you to shoot yourself in the foot.

It doesn't say "shooting feet isn't supported"

Or you can shoot yourself in the foot by writing a management console plugin that will pass the data to Word using VBA and then call Excel via com to split it into columns and then write an activeX control to get the columns back as

[21:10] *** dazjorz changed nick to We
[21:10] * We are the Borg.
[21:10] *** We changed nick to Lower
[21:10] * Lower your shields and power down your weapons.
[21:11] *** Lower changed nick to We
[21:11] * We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
[21:11] *** We changed nick to Resistance
[21:11] * Resistance is futile.
[21:11] *** Resistance changed nick to __You
[21:11] * __You will be assimilated.
[21:11] *** __You changed nick to dazjorz

"(God) is my favourite fictional character." - Homer Simpson

You should learn several new words everyday--eventually you will forget how to speak so others can understand you.

— Yaakov on Freenode's #perl

For thousands of years, we have been plagued by mathematicians insisting that two plus two equals four. Who elected them? I, Stevie-O, am promoting an entirely new system, where two plus two equals FIVE. Eventually, it will be extended to provide other stuff these power-hungry madmen kept hidden away for themselves, such as division by zero, cold fusion, the ability to solve the halting problem, and the secret to attracting hot chicks.

Stevie-O on the Acme::NewMath POD document.
Acme-NewMath

> Should Perl do the same? [= Drop SCO Support]

Absolutely not. Perl supports defunct operating systems, buggy operating systems, commercial operating systems, and poorly marketed operating systems. It would be inappropriate to drop SCO just because it happens to be all of the above.

In Soviet Russia, every time you kill a kitten, god masturbates

GyroTech on a Slashdot comment

Recently, Richard Stallman gave a speech in which he illustrated an academic point about programming history by quoting a guy who described vi as 'an editor spread at sword-point and which is really hard to use'.

I think I speak for all moderate vi(m) users when I say -- DEATH and DAMNATION (in that order) to this Cardinal of the CTRL key! Needless to say my own local vim user group has dispatched assassins to kill Mr. Stallman, but this is hardly the end of the story. The fact is that a man has referred to another man who in turn expressed some often-voiced reservations about OUR EDITOR! On behalf of all editors of text everywhere, I implore EMACS users to return to the true path, lest you be burned at the stake and then go to hell, the Buffer From Which There Is No Unloading. We'll see how productive you are then, with your ctrl-meta-alt and your ELISP and your 'ring buffer', whatever THAT is.

Peace and love to all.
^C
^X
quit
q
QUIT
exit :exit
zz
ZZ

kahei on Slashdot

The thing is, I don't actually enjoy debugging my own machines. I _much_ prefer having other people debug _their_ machines, and fixing my machine in the process. So I didn't want just something that worked on the Mac Mini, I wanted something that works _universally_, so that hopefully people who are even crazier than me will waste _their_ time trying to get these machines working.

Linus Torvalds in an Email message

Re:Silly Iranians… ALWAYS!

First, they came for the newspapers, and I did nothing because the Farsi Side comic was just re-prints now.

Next, they came for the books, and I looked the other way because the Death to America Book of the Month Club was only recommending books to burn anyway.

Then, they came for the Satellite Dishes, and I said nothing because I still had a year left on my Infidelphia Cable contract.

Finally, they came for my Internet Service, and no one was left to hear my ululation!

patrixmyth on Slashdot

I don't guarantee that I always change my mind, but I _can_ guarantee that if most of the people I trust tell me I'm a dick-head, I'll at least give it a passing thought.

[ Chorus: "You're a dick-head, Linus" ]

Linus Torvalds in an E-mail message.

Review of the Oxford English Dictionary on Amazon.com:

[One Star]

"an epic work that has trouble holding the interest"

By: a customer

I'm at the ABs, and I still can't get a grip on the plot. Characters enter, are introduced in exhausting detail -- and then disappear again! Very frustrating. The only time an old character shows up again is in another's history! A lot like _A Dance to the Music of Time_, I suppose.

Perhaps things will become clearer when we meet Oxford, English or Dictionary -- clearly three key figures. Some kind of menage a trois?

Although the contents of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, are precisely accurate and widely integrated, Ayn Rand committed an error by distorting the word "selfishness" in fashioning a dramatic statement. The word "selfishness" does have valuable, precise denotations of "an irrational, harmful disregard for others". Rand could have strengthened her work by selecting accurate wording such as rational self-growth. Instead, she unnecessarily bent and undermined the precise, valuable meaning of selfishness. …As with selflessness, selfishness is a form of immature, destructive, irrational behavior -- a form of stupid behavior.

Neo-Tech Advantage No. 14 - "Self-Growth vs. Selfless View"

I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Alan Kay (Attributed)

Extra Peculiar

Did you watch Uri Geller's show last night? He said that if anything extraordinary happened at home during the show, people should phone in, or report it at his website. During the entire show I was installing Hebrew Windows XP for my mother-in-law, and something extraordinary did happen. The operating system got installed, came up, ran without a glitch. Should I report this to Uri?

khatul's comment:

Without a glitch, huh? Apparently you (and Uri) managed to install Linux from a Windows XP installation CD. This is much more than telekinesis. It smells like pure alien intervention. Report immediately!

It's one of those rare "perfect" kernels. So if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own d*mn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways.

You could send me and the kernel mailing list a note about it anyway, of course. (And perhaps pictures, if your dachshund is involved. Not that we'd be interested, of course. No. Just so that we'd know to avoid it next time).

Linus Torvalds announcing the 2.6.19 Linux kernel.
Email message

Tel Aviv - a functional definition:

Free parking space free space.

Shachar Shemesh
Blog Post

In a widely anticipated move, Linux "headcase" Torvalds today announced the immediate availability of the most advanced Linux kernel to date, version 2.6.20.

Before downloading the actual new kernel, most avid kernel hackers have been involved in a 2-hour pre-kernel-compilation count-down, with some even spending the preceding week doing typing exercises and reciting PI to a thousand decimal places.

The half-time entertainment is provided by randomly inserted trivial syntax errors that nerds are expected to fix at home before completing the compile, but most people actually seem to mostly enjoy watching the compile warnings, sponsored by Anheuser-Busch, scroll past.

As ICD head analyst Walter Dickweed put it: "Releasing a new kernel on Superbowl Sunday means that the important 'pasty white nerd' constituency finally has something to do while the rest of the country sits comatose in front of their 65" plasma screens".

Walter was immediately attacked for his racist and insensitive remarks by Geeks without Borders representative Marilyn vos Savant, who pointed out that not all of their members are either pasty nor white. "Some of them even shower!" she added, claiming that the constant stereotyping hurts nerds' standing in society.

Geeks outside the US were just confused about the whole issue, and were heard wondering what the big hoopla was all about. Some of the more culturally aware of them were heard snickering about balls that weren't even round.

-- Linus Torvalds announcing kernel 2.6.20

Sesquipedallianism:

Making excessive use of long words.

Definition

You fool. Why did you tell him the Spanish Inquisition is coming. Now he's going to expect it.

niconorsk on a Slashdot Comment

From the Beowulf Cluster FAQ:

11. Should I build a cluster of these 100 386s? [1999-05-13]

If it's OK with you that it'll be slower than a single Celeron-333 machine, sure. Great way to learn.

That's me in the corner.
That's me in the spotlight.
Losing my abstraction.

Trying to keep my point of view…
And I don't know if I can do it.
Oh no, I code too much.
Haven't debugged enough.

Is that why I heard you laughing?
I thought that I heard you ping.
I think I thought I saw you reply.

Slashdot Comment on Reasons to or not to use MySQL:

A nice flame war. I'm just going to sit back, crack a beer and enjoy it. It is almost memorial day weekend, you know. Hopefully it get hot enough in here to roast a hot dog.

Oh goody! I'll help get things going:

• MySQL users will have to wait until you are done with the fire before they can roast their hot dogs, since MySQL is not a real database and does not support concurrent roasting;
• I've read the PostgreSQL manual eight times and still can't figure out something as bloody simple as roasting a hot dog, though I did figure out I have to call VACUUM before I can apply ketchup;
• Serious enterprises who care about their hot dogs use Oracle, since you can roast over 10,000 dogs at once and optionally impart the taste of filet mignon;
• If you try to roast a footlong hotdog using MySQL it will silently truncate it to regular size, causing your child to cry;
• Oracle will sue you if you complain about the difficulty of starting your fire or the blackened taste of the dogs;
• With SQLite your hot dogs are pre-roasted;
• Last year on Memorial Day, mysqld leapt out of my MacBook Pro and pushed my cousin into the fire, resulting in third degree burns. And also it causes cancer. And terrorism. Blindness. Violent puppy death. BOO! MYSQL IS SCARY DON'T USE MYSQL!!

— Slashdot Comment

Max Rabkin's description for his entry is better than anything I could come up with:

"Calculator 2.0 is an enterprise-level client-side numerical productivity suite. It leverages proven technologies to provide a clear and user-friendly interface to a rich set of efficient and powerful components. It is powered by an XML database."

OMGWTF Highlights #2: Misc. (The Daily WTF)

I think this is the idea behind dual core: 1 core belongs to microsoft, 1 core for you.

-- sucati on a Slashdot comment

No. All your core are belong to us.

-- geobeck in response.

Eye have a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write.
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
and eye can put the error rite.
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Oh no, here we go again..

"Linus just made the kernel; it's irritating when he gets credit for Linux"

"Yeah, but at least he made the Kernel -- Gates just made the Basic compiler"

"That's news to me - have you ever heard of this guy called Paul Allen?"

"Doesn't matter - personally I think the Linux kernel isn't all that - I use BSD"

"Screw Linus -- he was wrong about BitKeeper and Tivo so he's wrong about MS & Novell"

"Yeah, well at least he's not a convicted monopolist"

"Yeah, until M$ stops treating me like a criminal I refuse to buy their software"

Also insert random quotes and mis-quotes such as: "When Microsoft writes an application for Linux, I've Won." - Linus Torvalds "640kb ought to be enough for everybody" - Bill Gates

That about cover it? Can we have a non-childish discussion now? If there's any other slime to be thrown, just reply to this post -- let's keep the forum clean for an actual discussion.

Slashdot comment

Poetical sing-song or hypnotically rhythmic meter are often found in the rhetoric of dictators, evangelists, sibyls, politicians, theologians, mountebanks, social "intellectuals", media men, medicine men, hallucinating psychotics, chanting shiites, and screaming terrorists. Consider how millions of normally rational Germans thrilled and responded to the poetical cadence and charisma of the consummate altruist neocheater, Adolph Hitler. The results: a reign of destruction with tens of millions of human beings slaughtered so one impotent man could indulge his mysticism to feel unearned power. All that slaughter was for nothing more than to let one neocheater feel a pseudo self-esteem. …Twenty million dead so one pip-squeak could feel big and important.

"So what!" cry the mystics as the lifetime efforts of a thousand productive, innocent individuals are blown to bits every day without a backward glance. So what if the troops roll across the country with military cadence and guns ablaze. So what if they level town after town, reducing to rubble and corpses all the values, beauty, and life that took generations of productive effort to build.

And that is all the chanting religious automatons or splendid Panzer divisions know how to do -- to destroy in a moment, without a thought, all the values that producers labored for lifetimes to build. Chanting mobs or marching troops never glance back, never think for a moment of the death and destruction they leave behind. So what! the mystics and neocheaters cry. So what if genocide happens in Russia, Nazi Germany, Cuba, Cambodia, Red China, or in our land. "I don't want to hear it! To hell with the lifetime efforts of productive individuals! …Save the snail darter!"

Neo-Tech Advantage No. 104

Ah, understood. I was stuck with Outlook at my last job, and it was impossible to get it to quote a message in a way that you could actually reply to things point by point. It seemed optimized for sending a message to every person in the company and making all of your text blue. What a fucking joke.

If it's a joke you should use Comic Sans so everyone /knows/ it's funny.

No no, Comic Sans is for presentations to the shareholders!

Somebody who is presenting to shareholders knows how to change the default font?

Weird…

Geez…get any 10 lawyers together, one will be a real decent person, the other nine will be total asshats.

Slashdot Comment

It just appears that way because it's logarithmic. 100 lawyers will net you 2 good ones, 1000 lawyers 3 good ones and so forth.

Slashdot comment

What *would* Jesus do?

Oh my god.

http://xrl.us/7j6w

"They felt Jesus would not have approved of copyright breaches."

Jesus, you da man! Stick it to those kids!

You might be interested to note that the students had studied "Exodus 20:15 - you shall not steal" which comes a little way before Jesus anyway. Wasn't the whole point of Jesus coming to make the "new commandment" that people "love one another as I have loved you" and to annul the previous commandments that were given to Moses? I was raised Christian and was Christian for a long time but now am not, but I can't quite remember the specifics of this point.

Anyway, the point is that Jesus probably would have told them to stick Exodus to the man and just get on with the lovin'. Or something.

liedra in a blog post.

Michael Frame:

Managed C++… there’s a pile of hate. Let’s take all the complexity and bad design in C++, and throw away the speed and efficiency by compiling it to .NET interpreted pseudocode instead. Microsoft has such great ideas when it comes to languages.

To which in reply, Yossi Kreinin:

What’s there not to like with C++/CLI? You can have macros expanding to templates from which generics are generated, and then have classes generated from the generics. And these classes can have a close function and two destructors, and hold references to unmanaged pointers to managed pointers! With C++, you only have duplicate features, but with C++/CLI, you can finally have triplicate ones! You see, this is a language for an expert. Experts love having 3 different ways to do things, each broken in its own way.

I think you'll find that the [Windows] Desktop Search is completely inseparable from the desktop and that the latter would be rendered completely useless if it is uninstalled. Just like IE is.

speaker of the truth in a Slashdot comment

A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in.

Apart from the fact that I congratulate you for writing bugless software without peer review, I also congratulate you for being able to write a fully RFC compliant MLM that won't blow up when you receive input you didn't account for.

Quite frankly, even a crappy sysadmin can get a reasonable mailman setup working (including nice archiving), quicker than the best coder can rewrite a full MLM from scratch. And you still have time left over to modify/fix/improve mailman to do the few things it didn't do quite right for you.

But if your attitude to coding is "I'd rather rewrite all this than soiling my eyes and hands looking at someone else's code", that's not a very good way to get hired anywhere as a coder, and even if you are super brilliant, you end up being a DJB that people snicker at with "that guy thinks he's so bright that he had to write his own libc" (instead of fixing/wrapping the few problematic pieces of them, and in the case of reasonable maintainers, contributing the code back).

We're not just doing it for money…We're doing it for a shitload of money!

Excerpt from Spaceballs

Slashdot Response to "BBC Creates 'Perl on Rails'":

This is proof that there is a conspiracy to make up absurd programming shenanigans to sell overpriced door stoppers! Coming soon…

• "Perl on Rails for Dummies"
• "Perl on Rails for Idiots"
• "Perl on Rails Bible"
• "Perl on Rails in 24 Hours"
• "Perl on Rails in a Nutshell"
• "Perl on Rails: The Missing Manual"

…at a bookstore near you to burn a hole in your wallet!

Among the generalists, the conventional wisdom is that the worse-is-better approach is more adaptive. Personally, I get a little tired of the argument: My worse-is-better is better than your worse-is-better because I'm better at being worser! Is it really true that the worse-is-better approach always wins? With Perl 6 we're trying to sneak one better-is-better cycle in there and hope to come out ahead before reverting to the tried and true worse-is-better approach. Whether that works, only time will tell.

Larry Wall in "State of the Onion 11"

It was 20 years ago today
Larry Wall taught some text to play
It's been going in & out of style
But it's stuck around for quite a while()
So may I introduce to you
The tool you've loved for all these years
Larry's Practical Extract & Report Laaaanguage

It's Larry's Practical Extract Report Lang
5.10 still has some bugs to fix
Larry's Practical Extract Report Lang
Don't ask for a date for version 6…

The regression list keeps shrinking, so we're still on track for a full 2.6.24 release in early January. Assuming we don't all overeat during the holidays and nobody gets any work done. But we all know that the holidays are really the time when we get away from the boring "real work", and can spend 24/7 on kernel hacking instead, right?

Here's to a merry christmas, doing the whole druidic festival around the tree thing.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

--Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs

— OMouse in http://programming.reddit.com/info/1awnv/comments/c1axk7

Some people, when confronted with regular expressions, always think "I know, I'll paste that Jamie Zawinski quote, and people will think I'm clever!"

These people have a problem.

— dmd in http://programming.reddit.com/info/1awnv/comments/c1axqc

I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces.

Daniel J. Bernstein (DJB) in http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html

Xeno's paradox is easily disproved in three steps:

1. Get crossbow and bolt.
2. Aim crossbow at Xeno.
3. Fire.

If the bolt moves to Xeno, then it is proved that movement is possible. Also, Xeno will be dead. Win win situation.

I bow down before you.

I thought I had done some rather horrible things with gcc built-ins and macros, but I hereby hand over my crown to you.

As my daughter would say: that patch fell out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch on the way down. Very impressive.

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me.

If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.

Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.

Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.

I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.

I mean really, after the first 6143569056076952107294386875907695350 times maybe it was worthy of a chuckle, but to keep on modding up this joke suggests some form of psychosis.

Wait, I'll put this in a way that you mods can understand:

1. go to slashdot
2. find a story
3. find a comment on that story
4. post a tired, old, lame-ass joke for the 9 billionth time
5. ???????
6. GET MODDED UP!

Ok, I followed the silly meme, where's my +5 Funny?

Linux Genuine Advantage™ is an exciting and mandatory new way for you to place your computer under the remote control of an untrusted third party!

According to an independent study conducted by some scientists, many users of Linux are running non-Genuine versions of their operating system. This puts them at the disadvantage of having their computers work normally, without periodically phoning home unannounced to see if it's OK for their computer to continue functioning. These users are also missing out on the Advantage of paying ongoing licensing fees to ensure their computer keeps operating properly.

To remedy this, we have created a new program available as a required free download: Linux Genuine Advantage™!

Finally! Linux users can experience a feature that until now remained the exclusive domain of proprietary software.

Once you've installed Linux Genuine Advantage™, you'll want to register and send in your licensing fees to receive these important benefits:

• Your computer, which worked just fine before, will continue functioning normally!
• Our software which you just installed will not disable logins on your computer (as long as our license server keeps working properly)!
• It's totally awesome! We might not raise the yearly licensing fees in the future!

Plus, if you act now, we promise not to launch unfounded lawsuits against you, slander you or our competitors in the press and the courts (possibly by using other smaller companies as pawns), or require you to pay us for software you won't use on every new computer you buy!

Get the Linux Genuine Advantage!

Did you wake up this morning and say "I wish someone would figure out a way to let me do less with my computer"? You've come to the right place!

08/25/2007 - The Windows Genuine Advantage servers went down worldwide, marking any Windows machines as pirated during Microsoft's server outage. Meanwhile, the Linux Genuine Advantage™ activation server was up the whole time. Truly another victory for Open Source software! Microsoft, contact us if you'd like to license Linux Genuine Advantage™, we'd love to enter into a lucrative licensing agreement. With the money you save, you could put the WGA programmers onto other tasks, like improving Vista!

02/03/2007 - The Linux Genuine Advantage™ crack is spreading! Someone uploaded it to The Pirate Bay! Looks like it's time to get more involved in Swedish politics from across the globe!

02/02/2007 - Linux Genuine Advantage™ has been cracked by computer hackers! Rather than improving our software, we'll be sending our team of intimidating lawyers to pay them a visit.

If you were a Unix programmer you either programmed in C or shell. And there really wasn't much in between. There were these little languages that we used on top of shell, but that was the big divide. The big revelation that hatched Perl, as it were, was that this opened up into a two-dimensional space. And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.

So Perl was hatched. As a small egg. That was Perl 1. And it was designed from the very beginning to evolve. The fact that we put sigils in front of the variables meant that the namespaces were protected from new keywords. And that was intentional, so we could evolve the language fairly rapidly without impacting.

And it evolved… And it evolved… And finally we got to Perl 5. And… So… Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that.

So I'd like to start off with my own irrationalities.

I don't think syntax should dangle in the wind. I'm with Aristotle. I think things should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Which means I like K&R bracketing. I do not like the way that Python hangs stuff out there, with no end.

I think that ordinary people dislike abstraction. That's because I dislike abstraction and I think I'm ordinary. (laughter) I might be wrong about that, but I don't know.

I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works.

I think visual metaphors are very important. How it looks. Different things should look different. Similar things should look similar. A language designer simultaneously has to care what other people think, and has to not care what other people think. Otherwise you go crazy. Well, crazier. (laughter)

And finally, I think God has free will. And therefore he created programmers with free will and that they ought to be given choices.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

• "We've got to start over from scratch" - Well, that's almost any academic language you find.
• "English phrases" - Well that's Cobol. You know, cargo cult English. (laughter)
• "Text processing doesn't matter much" - Fortran.
• "Simple languages produce simple solutions" - C.
• "If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C" - That's almost a direct quote from the original awk page.
• "I thought of a way to do it so it must be right" - That's obviously PHP. (laughter and applause)
• "You can build anything with NAND gates" - Any language designed by an electrical engineer. (laughter)
• "This is a very high level language, who cares about bits?" - The entire scope of fourth generation languages fell into this… problem.
• "Users care about elegance" - A lot of languages from Europe tend to fall into this. You know, Eiffel.
• "The specification is good enough" - Ada.
• "Abstraction equals usability" - Scheme. Things like that.
• "The common kernel should be as small as possible" - Forth.
• "Let's make this easy for the computer" - Lisp. (laughter)
• "Most programs are designed top-down" - Pascal. (laughter)
• "Everything is a vector" - APL.
• "Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children. (whispered:) Ruby. (laughter)
• "Everything is a hypothesis" - Prolog. (laughter)
• "Everything is a function" - Haskell. (laughter)
• "Programmers should never have been given free will" - Obviously, Python. (laughter)

So my psychological conjecture is that normal people, if they perceive that a computer language is forcing them to learn theory, they won't like it. In other words, hide the fancy stuff. It can be there, just hide it.

Back to dimensionality. When you are saying something linguistically, it's like taking a trip. You know, when you take a trip from California to Netanya, you don't go straight south and then straight west and then straight north. It's not orthogonal. There are little bits at the beginning. Then you take bigger hops on the planes and then you take littler hops at the end. Language works the same way, it's fractal. There is little orthogonality. At least apparently; you can have orthogonal views of it, there are orthogonal subsets. But there are multiple orthogonal subsets. At first glance it just looks like a network, and you have to navigate the geography.

Now in terms of the anthropology we try to welcome people into the tribe. We allow people to have their own little fiefdoms, where they are the ruler and can beat up on their followers.

We try to let people share with each other. We try to capture knowledge. Both of those things are why we have the CPAN, Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, which is arguably one of the greatest repositories of reusable crappy software in the world. (laughter).

And we have a culture of cooperating with other cultures too. We try to make Parrot so that other languages can ran on top of that. We've always tried to hook up Perl with everything. In kind of a humble sort of way. And finally it's culture of fun. At least we try to make it that way. And that's why I give weird talks.

So, everybody has a different idea. Everybody also has different hardware. The desktop is also where all the hardware really exists. Servers have 1% of the hardware that the desktop has in terms of different drivers and things like that. You don’t find webcams on servers generally. You don’t find oddball IDE drives on servers.

«had been responsible for the 'production and distribution of more than 90 percent of the high-quality counterfeit Microsoft software products.»

Why doesn't MSFT sell these "high-quality" products instead of the crap they've been selling us for years.

If choice of syntax were the main factor of the maintainability of existing code, wouldn't the comment mantra be "Comment what you're doing, not why"?

You can look up syntax in the language's documentation.

I don't have many examples where the author really blew it, because I try not to answer those questions. I figure that even if I don't, someone else will come along and say ``Because you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to magically know what you mean, Retardo!''. And even if nobody does come along and say this, that's not a bad thing.

Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to replace a lightbulb?

A: None! We'll fix it in software.

When the first caveman programmer chiseled the first program on the walls of the first cave computer, it was a program to paint the string `Hello, world' in Antelope pictures. Roman programming textbooks began with the `Salut, Mundi' program. I don't know what happens to people who break with this tradition, but I think it's safer not to find out. We'll start with a series of hello world programs that demonstrate the different aspects of the basics of writing a kernel module.

The difference between a program and a script isn't as subtle as most people think. A script is interpreted, and a program is compiled.

Of course, there's no reason you can't write a compiler that immediately executes the compiled form of a program without writing compilation artifacts to disk, but that's an implementation detail, and precision in technical matters is important.

Though Perl 5, for example, doesn't write out the artifacts of compilation to disk and Java and .Net do, Perl 5 is clearly an interpreter even though it evaluates the compiled form of code in the same way that the JVM and the CLR do. Why? Because it's a scripting language.

Okay, that's a facetious explanation.

The difference between a program and a script is if there's native compilation available in at least one widely-used implementation. Thus Java before the prevalence of even the HotSpot JVM and its JIT was a scripting language and now it's a programming language, except that you can write a C interpreter that doesn't have a JIT and C programs become scripts.

Of course, if someone were to write an extra optimizer step for Perl 5 to evaluate certain parts of the optree and generate native code in memory on certain platforms without writing it out to disk (uh oh…) and then execute that code under certain conditions, all Perl 5 scripts would automatically turn into programs. You know, like .pmc files, or Python's .pyc files. Uh.

As well, if more people use Punie (Perl 1 on Parrot) this year than native Perl 1 -- a possibility -- then Perl 1 scripts automatically become Perl 1 programs because Punie can use Parrot's JIT. I don't know if this powerful upgrade from script to program is retroactive, but I see no reason why not.

Perl 5 scripts were briefly programs while Ponie was viable, but the removal of the code from the Parrot tree has now downgraded them back to scripts. We apologize for the inconvenience.

To summarize, if you have a separate compilation step visible to developers, you have programs. If not, you have scripts. An exception is that if you have a separate, partial compilation step at runtime and not visible to users, then you may have programs. The presence of one implementation that performs additional compilationy thingies at runtime instantly upgrades all scripts to programs, while the presence of an interpreter for a language in which people normally write programs, not scripts, does not downgrade programs to scripts. Program-ness is sticky.

I hope this is now clear.

Ironically some JavaScript implementations have JITs, so the colloquial name of the language should change from JavaScript to JavaProgram.

Script bad, four-legs good.

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true - I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Moving pianos is dangerous.
Moving pianos are dangerous.

> Someone here said "Real Men use LaTeX". So I'll add:
> * "Real men don't install Wine"
> * "Real men don't watch T.V."

Real men don't listen to sentences that start with "Real men don't".

I have to say I cringed a little when I read it, because it helps reinforce the idea that there's a sort of Perl Hierarchy, or that there are Perl gods, or that "you must be this tall to ride".

Randal and I are just normal ol' Perl hackers. We just spend a lot of time on Perl, and writing about it, and talking about it. The only reason we are Perl luminaries is that we are Perl luminaries. I'm not necessarily a better programmer, or have better ideas, or I'm a better debugger than anyone else. I just do it and make noise about it.

Even though Joey's response was out of line, I admire his spirit of "I'm just going to go do it." TMTOWTDI is one of the cardinal rules of Perl. Similarly, over on the module-authors list, the perennial argument of "Maybe CPAN should have minimum requirements for posting modules" has raised its ugly head. Instead, I said what I always say during these arguments: "CPAN thrives BECAUSE of the unfettered uploading of shit, not in spite of it."

So to it will be with Joey's website. Maybe it will be a dismal failure. Maybe it will become the Next Great Perl resource. However, I know that there is zero chance of Next Great Perl resource if he doesn't try. The only way you get home runs is by stepping up to the plate, and if you strike out, you're doing pretty good. Batting 3/10 is a great batting average, but in real life we find those odds terrifying.

Personally, as much as I like the community around Perlmonks, I think it's a terrible site for new people, and is practically unsearchable. I'd love to see something leapfrog Perlmonks and become the Next Great Thing. That's why I stopped writing to use.perl.org, because I think it's a terrible news source. Instead, I started perlbuzz.com, and went with that. Yes, it's different, but that's OK.

Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Win95 - Wow!
Win98 - Oh
WinMe - Ow!
Win2k - Oooh
WinXp - Meh
Vista - Doh!

This mono-syllabic review brought to you by the letter 'W' and the number '7'

Surely there's a better way, no?

Ask the maintainers of M::B, EU::MM and M::I to all export a `halt` function that does just this? That would also provide a convenient spot in the respective modules’ docs for related CPAN Testers arcana, so people wouldn’t have to stumble onto a wiki page in the bottom of a locked cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “beware the leopard” in order to learn these trivia.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She'd probably look at you funny, then say something like: Well, a script is what you give the actors, but a program is what you give the audience. That Ada was one sharp lady…

Now, however it was initially intended, I think BASIC turned out to be one of the first major scripting languages, especially the extended version that DEC put onto its minicomputers called BASIC/PLUS, which happily included recursive functions with arguments. I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right.

But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncrasies. I'm just better at it than most. :-)

Anyway, when I was a RSTS programmer on a PDP-11, I certainly treated BASIC as a scripting language, at least in terms of rapid prototyping and process control. I'm sure it warped my brain forever. Perl's statement modifiers are straight out of BASIC/PLUS. It even had some cute sigils on the ends of its variables to distinguish string and integer from floating point.

But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping.

My first scripting language was written in BASIC. For my job in the computer center I wrote a language that I called JAM, short for Jury-rigged All-purpose Meta-language. Story of my life…

JAM was an inside-out text-processing language much like PHP, except that HTML hadn't been invented yet. We mostly used it as a fancy macro processor for BASIC. Unlike PHP, it did not have 3,000 functions in one namespace. We wouldn't have had the memory, for one thing.

For good or ill, when I went off to grad school, I studied linguistics, so the only computer language I used there was LISP. It was my own personal McCarthy era.

Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals.

And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.

I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. Here are some common memes floating around:

Simple language
"Everything is a string"
Rapid prototyping
Glue language
Process control
Compact/concise
Worse-is-better
Domain specific
"Batteries included"

…I don't see any real center here, at least in terms of technology. If I had to pick one metaphor, it'd be easy onramps. And a slow lane. Maybe even with some optional fast lanes.

That's not helpful. When a project doesn't release a new version, some people say "Oh, don't use it! They don't release new versions!" When a project does release a new version, some people say "Oh, don't use it! It's not perfect yet!"

Meanwhile, the so-called reliable state of the art is a jumble of Perl which writes cross platform shell scripts to install Perl code, and you customize that by writing a superclass from which platform-specific modules inherit pseudo-methods which use regular expressions to search and replace cross-platform cross-shell code, with all of the cross-platform and cross-shell quoting issues that entails. I wish I were making any of this up. (I wrote tests for part of it.)

This is why we can't have nice things.

Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country

-- John F. Kennedy (from his Inaugural Address).

The common good before the private good.

-- One of the slogans of Nazism in Nazi Germany.

What's the difference between JavaScript and Java?

One is essentially a toy, designed for writing small pieces of code, and traditionally used and abused by inexperienced programmers.

The other is a scripting language for web browsers.

R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands.

New York Times article about R, quoted in jest's use.perl.org journal

tk: A discussion is not a war, to be won or lost. It is a communal quest for truth. And you are inhibiting it by responding at only the most superficial level. Look beyond the presence of a word to its context. Respond to the thoughts expressed there. Or simply leave.

I did all I could to stop it, but it just wasn't possible. pgTAP 0.20 has somehow made its way from my Subversion server and infiltrated the PostgreSQL community. Can nothing be done to stop this menace? Its use leads to cleaner, more stable, and more-safely refactored code. This insanity must be stopped! Please review the following list of its added vileness since 0.19 to determine how you can stop the terrible, terrible influence on your PostgreSQL unit-testing practices that is pgTAP: …

Don't make the same mistake I did, where I wrote a lot of pgTAP tests for a client, and now testing database upgrades from 8.2 to 8.3 is just too reliable! And by all means, DO NOT read the documentation or download and install this monstrosity, since it could easily lead to cleaner, more stable code, and therefore losing your job!

http://pgtap.projects.postgresql.org/ http://pgfoundry.org/frs/?group_id=1000389

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Good luck with your mission.

I'm a Lesbian born in a man's body.

If you have the same ideas as everybody else, but have them one week earlier than everyone else - then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier, you will be named a lunatic.

— Barry Jones

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.

Unknown, quoted by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

Better be a tail for the lions, rather than the head of the jackals.

Rabbi Mathiah Ben Charash in Pirkei Avot 4, 15

I learned a lot from my teachers, and from my friends more than my teachers, and from my pupils the most.

— Rabbi Hanina, the Talmud

I must dispute your view in the strongest terms possible. Internet Explorer is perfectly safe for everyday use. However, as there is no such thing as perfect security, you must take additional precautions to keep evil hackers away from your data. Apply these rules according to the sensitivity of your data, from least important to most:

• Disconnect your computer from your local network. Download files on another computer, scan them for viruses, print them out, scan them into your Windows PC using OCR software, and then view the pages in IE.
• Do the above, but have a priest onsite to bless each page individually before scanning it. This is an excellent deterrent against viruses with the word "demon" in the name.
• Do the above, but encase your PC in acrylic and immerse it in a 10,000 gallon tank of holy water. Interact with it while wearing scuba gear.
• Do the above, but put a lid on the tank and immerse it in the ocean. Interact with your PC via a submersible robot in the tank from from outside while wearing scuba gear.

If you fail to follow these simple security guidelines, you can't blame Microsoft for the results.

Yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is, and she said: "Is it something like Wikipedia?".

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

By the eight brazen balls of Azuza the Bibulous Bandicoot, I'd rather be cast naked and chained into a lake of bubbling white hot fondue cheese than be one of her students.

That is, if she actually teaches anything at Berkeley [which can be, really, a lovely place full of very smart science people, theologians and historians, though you'd never know it by this whale's spout of academic doublespeak].

I suspect she sits on a lot of committees and inserts the word 'hegemony' into conversations as often as possible and is avoided at all costs during the holidays lest one become becalmed in the horse latitudes of her spleen regarding Christmas trees, "The Ref" and the hegemony of Zionist post-piety in a restructured universe of gender in-articulation.

For a full PhD at UCB in a language art, she cannot, and will not, though, write a simple, clear, understandable sentence. Think about that for a minute.

And to think my Cal state taxes pay for her office desk chair. Man.

Hegemoniously yours, etc.

J

Jonathan Schwartz’s resignation via Twitter reminded me of a strange facet of Sun company culture: I’ve never known so many married couples working for the same company. Some of them even worked on the same project together. For the same boss. From home.

Now, the exact percentage of married couples in a company can’t be used to compare companies directly – after all, it depends heavily on things like industry, age, and local marriage laws – but it seems linked to another facet of Sun company culture: Complete, almost embarrassing disconnect from public opinion.

The post-Google standard company perks – free food, on-site exercise classes, company shuttles – make it trivial to speak only to fellow employees in daily life. If you spend all day with your co-workers, socialize only with your co-workers, and then come home and eat dinner with – you guessed it – your co-worker, you might go several years without hearing the words, “Run Solaris on my desktop? Are you f—ing kidding me?“

Schwartz’s “the financial crisis did it” explanation for Sun’s demise is a symptom of an inbred company culture in which employees at all levels voluntarily isolated themselves from the larger Silicon Valley culture. Tech journalists write incessantly about the exchange of expertise and best practice between companies as a major driver of the Bay area’s success. But you have to actually talk to your competition to do that – over a beer, or maybe a pillow.

And truth be told I miss you.

And truth be told I'm lying.

One tool for one job?

Given the nature of current operating systems and applications, do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job well" has been abandoned? If so, do you think a return to this model would help bring some innovation back to software development?

(It's easier to toss a small, single-purpose app and start over than it is to toss a large, feature-laden app and start over.)

Rob Pike: Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl.

Or think about shell programming, and reductionism. How many times have we heard the mantra that a program should do one thing and do it well?

Well…Perl does one thing, and does it well. What it does well is to integrate all its features into one language. More importantly, it does this without making them all look like each other. Ducts shouldn't look like girders, and girders shouldn't look like ducts. Neither of those should look like water pipes, and it's really important that water pipes not look like sewer pipes. Or smell like sewer pipes. Modernism says that we should make all these things look the same (and preferably invisible). Postmodernism says it's okay for them to stick out, and to look different, because a duct ought to look like a duct, and a sewer pipe ought to look like a sewer pipe, and hammer ought to look like a hammer, and a telephone ought to look like either a telephone, or a Star Trek communicator. Things that are different should look different.

Which is why I didn't belabor it, or introduce it out of context. I was pointing out that Firefox's scheme is only as secure as the master password you choose. The particular bad password I chose for the Spaceballs reference on the hope that it might get a chuckle or trigger a brief moment of pleasant nostalgia, forgetting that on /., every joke must be beaten to death and explained, rehashed, insulted, re-explained by someone who thinks the insult came due to unfamiliarity, etc., until all traces of humor vanish. Oh well…

Hmm… This is an old story, so this probably won't receive any mods, but I have no idea what I'd mod it if I were moderating. Flamebait/Insightful/Funny/Interesting/Off-topic maybe? Mods, if you can coordinate to apply each of those once, it would be awesome (and I'd end up with overall neutral Karma!). :-)

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

I keep hearing and reading this nice proverb if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The latest appearance was in response to Shlomi Fish suggesting that some Ancient Perl code should be replaced by Modern Perl code.

I am not saying that every piece of code should be rewritten every 6 months, but in my understanding that sentence actually translates to let's wait till it breaks and then panic.

I think people who say that sentence are afraid that the new version will break something. Sure, there is always a chance that a change introduces an error, but, if we are afraid to touch the code, what will happen when later on we encounter a case where it does not work? For example, if we need to use it in a new environment. Will we have the courage to change the code then? How much will it cost in money, time, and lost sleep?

I think we have been trying to teach ourselves that we should have really good test coverage of our code and then we can easily refactor it and get rid of technical debt. So why do we keep hearing that sentence?

Often, when I ask the people I train if they know Perl, they tell me “I don't know Perl. I can only read it”. I wonder whether it indicates that Perl is not a write-only language as some people like to claim.

(Discussing patents on storylines.)

Hopefully someone will patent reality TV shows. I am rather sick of those.

Wait no, this wont work. You need to have a story to be able to patent it. Soon all that will be on the air is reality TV. Noooo!

Real programmers use a nice editor and a nice programming language and get it done in less than O(N!).

-- vanguard on Freenode's ##programming

An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

There was one Napoleon, one George Washington, and one me!

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

In this doggy-dog world, does grammer; spelling; “or correct” quotation usage really matter anymore? I beleive not. Case and point: mitsakes is literally a diamond dozen, but they TOTALLY don’t make me want to claw my eyes out with a dull spoon. Irregardless, it begs the question: is it a mute point? For all intensive purposes, if bad enlgish would of been the downfall of society, then we’d of seen it bye now. some say teh worst problem is loosing capitalization punctuation is also an issue i think some thoughts need to be seperated or maybe its the run on sentences? Does it try your patients when I’LOL OMG Y U BFF said IDK BRB?!! OIC, the BBQ is W/E GF IKR!! 1 How bad does it get before i.e. its something up with which you will not put?

A UDP packet walks into a bar, no one acknowledges him.

A TCP packet walks into a bar twice because no one acknowledged him the first time.

An ICMP packet walks into a bar, says “Hello!” to the bartender, who then in turn runs out to tell the ICMP packet’s wife.

A BGP peer walks into a bar, exchanges contact details with every one, then leaves and… yeah I’ve probably gone over my quota for terrible jokes today.

The best thing about a UDP joke is that I don’t care if you get it or not.

Golden rule #12: When the comments do not match the code, they probably are both wrong ;)

Way too boring, what you really want is for every package to have its own twitter account so you can tweet karma :-).

You might be on to something here! But the 140 char limit would really stifle my creativity when it comes to comments. I'd rather create Facebook pages for every package - that way we could add karma by “liking” a package.

We could even take it a step farther and use this for marketing. Just imagine - “Play farmville with glibc next Wednesday and learn about the great new features!”, “gdb has shared a picture with you”, “NetworkManager wants to be your friend”. Oh the possibilities …

Then again, the thought of getting an email saying “Anaconda is now following you on Twitter” also amuses me.

Popular pet names Rover, Cheryl and Kate could be a thing of the past. Banks are now advising parents to think carefully before naming their child’s first pet. For security reasons, the chosen name should have at least eight characters, a capital letter and a digit. It should not be the same as the name of any previous pet, and must never be written down, especially on a collar as that is the first place anyone would look. Ideally, children should consider changing the name of their pet every 12 weeks.

Expectant mothers have also been advised to choose carefully where they give birth. Anywhere that has a place name is best avoided. These are listed on maps, which are freely available on the Internet.

It’s a good idea too, security experts have warned, for children not to get friendly with certain teachers. For instance, Miss Smith may be enriching your son’s education but he should try and see if he can’t make a favourite of Father O’Grinnighan-Scythe II, even though it may mean a lot of staying late.

We tried to call Barclays’ security expert R0b Ste!nway for a comment, but he was not available for 24 hours, having answered his phone incorrectly three times in succession.

There are a ton of reasons why Debian may have an older version of an upstream release. For example, and I hasten to point out that the following list is by no means exhaustive, and not all of the possibilities are common:

• The Debian package maintainer is dead, but nobody noticed it yet, and nobody has wanted an update badly enough to do an NMU or to adopt the package.
• The upstream release is actually a fake. It's a trojan, which was put there by the NSA in order to infiltrate the CIA mainframe. The Debian package maintainer noticed this and uploaded that version of the package to non-free instead of main, since the trojan code does not come with proper source.
• Upstream has moved the RSS feed for new releases without notifying the old feed of the move, so the Debian package maintainer missed that, and doesn't actually know about the new release. Due to a complicated series of happenstance involving rainbows, midget unicorns, and the ongoing rewrite of the Netsurf web browser, the Debian package maintainer is not able to find the new feed because it would require doing a web search and their browser doesn't have working form support now. No other browser is available on the Amiga they're using as their only computer, either.
• The new release is requested by insistent Hurd porters, and the Debian package maintainer absolutely loathes the Hurd, and will refuse to upload any packages that work on the Hurd.
• The Debian package maintainer suffers from mental problems cause by reading debian-devel too much, and now has a nervous breakdown every time they recognize a name as someone whom they've seen on the list.
• The Debian development process is being sabotaged by Microsoft sending people to the developers' houses pretending to be TV license checkers or Jehova's witnesses every time they detect, using the hardware wireless keylogger embedded in every PC, that the developer is trying to run any Debian packaging command.
• Apple is also sabotaging Debian by paying me to write snarky e-mails on Debian mailing lists to distract everyone from working on the actual release, so that we can get past the freeze and start uploading things again without having to worry that it breaks things in ways that makes the freeze longer.

Some European users bugged me into adding an option to limit the number of messages retrieved per session (so they can control costs from their expensive phone networks). I resisted this for a long time, and I'm still not entirely happy about it. But if you're writing for the world, you have to listen to your customers—this doesn't change just because they're not paying you in money.

Thank God I found the good in goodbye!

Do one thing every day that scares you.

I have a book on my bookshelf that I’ve never read, but that has a great title. It says, “All Truth is God’s Truth.” And I believe that. The most viable belief systems are those that can reach out and incorporate new ideas, new memes, new metaphors, new interfaces, new extensions, new ways of doing things. My goal this year is to try to get Perl to reach out and cooperate with Java. I know it may be difficult for some of you to swallow, but Java is not the enemy. Nor is Lisp, or Python, or Tcl. That is not to say that these languages don't have good and bad points. I am not a cultural relativist. Nor am I a linguistic relativist. In case you hadn't noticed. :-)

A contest is being held to see which intelligence agency can find a rabbit in a forest as quickly as possible.

First, it's the CIA's turn. Using cutting edge satellite technology, deep electronic scans, and other high-tech equipment, it is able to locate the rabbit in a week.

Then, it's the KGB's turn. They install secret agents, bribe or threaten a few animals, and find the rabbit in two weeks.

Then it's the Shin Bet’s turn (the Shin Bet being the Israeli internal security agency). A week passes, and then two, and then three.

After two months, the camera zooms into the forest to see a bear tied to a tree with a Shin Bet agent slapping him saying “Admit you’re a rabbit! Admit you’re a rabbit! Admit it already, goddamnit!”

An engineer dies and reports to the pearly gates. St. Peter checks his dossier and says, “Ah, you’re an engineer. You are in the wrong place.”

So, the engineer reports to the gates of hell and is let in. Pretty soon, the engineer gets dissatisfied with the level of comfort in hell, and starts designing and building improvements. After a while, they’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and the engineer is a pretty popular guy.

One day, God calls Satan up on the telephone and says with a sneer, “So, how’s it going down there in hell?”

Satan replies, “Hey, things are going great. We’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and there’s no telling what this engineer is going to come up with next.”

God replies, “What? You’ve got an engineer? That’s a mistake. He should never have gotten down there; send him up here.”

Satan says, “No way. I like having an engineer on the staff, and I’m keeping him.”

God says, “Send him back up here or I’ll sue.”

Satan laughs uproariously and answers, “Yeah, right. And just where are you going to get a lawyer?”

There was a Rabbi living in Louisiana - he was great in the Torah, very friendly, extremely helpful and righteous - helps the poor, finds jobs for people, resolves feuds - everybody liked him. And he lived in a remote shack on the Louisiana coast, right before Hurricane Katrina came.

So two people arrived there in a Jeep and told the Rabbi: “Rabbi, there will be a flood, come with us so you’ll be saved.” and the Rabbi said: “No, that’s OK - God will save me.”.

And indeed it started to rain, and there was a lot of water, and so a boat arrived at the Rabbi’s house and the people there told the Rabbi: “Rabbi, there’s a flood, come with us and you’ll be saved.” and the Rabbi told them: “No, that’s OK - God will save me.” and he remained there.

And it continued to rain, and the water level went up and the Rabbi had to climb to the roof of his shack. A helicopter arrived at his shack, and the people inside told the Rabbi: “Rabbi, there’s a big flood. Come with us to safety.”, and the Rabbi said: “No, that’s OK - God will save me.”. And the Helicopter left.

The water levels rose even more, and the Rabbi drowned, and his soul went to heaven. There he confronted God and asked him: “Dear God all mighty, I have been a righteous and good man my whole life - why didn't you save me?”, and God replied “Well, I tried. I sent you a Jeep, a boat - even a helicopter - but you wouldn't accept any of them. What more could I have done?”

————

Moral of the story is: God helps them that help God help them.

Two engineering students were walking across campus when one said, “Where did you get such a great bike?” The second engineer replied, “Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take what you want." The second engineer nodded approvingly, and said: “Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”

Once I got into industry, I wrote a compiler in Pascal for a discrete event simulator, and slavered over the forthcoming Ada specs. As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

I’m worser at superlatives.
And I don’t ever use no double negatives.

It was a good storm. There was quite effective projection and passion there, and critics agreed that if it would only learn to control its thunder it would be, in years to come, a storm to watch.

I figured wrong (with a capital R).

In Jerusalem, an American female journalist heard about an old Rabbi who visited the Kotel, the Western Wall to pray twice a day every day for over five decades.

In an effort to check out the story, she goes to the holy site and there he is. She watches the old man at prayer and after about 45 minutes, when he turns to leave, she approaches him for an interview. “I’m Rebecca Smith from CNN, sir, how long have you been coming to the Wailing Wall and praying?”

“For about 50 years,” he informs her. “That’s amazing! What do you pray for?” “I pray for peace between the Jews and Arabs. I pray for all the hatred to stop and I pray for all of our children to grow up in safety and friendship.”

“And how do you feel, sir, after doing this for 50 years?”

“Like I’m talking to a brick wall!”

Blog space is different. You can see people read your writing; if you allow, you can see their comments. The consequence of both is something you can’t quite understand until you’ve endured it. Like eating spinach or working out, I force myself to suffer it because I know it’s good for me. I’ve written a blog since 2002. Each entry has a link for comments. I don’t screen or filter comments (save for spam). I don’t require people to give their real name. The forum is open for anyone to say whatever he or she wants. And people do. Some of the comments are quite brilliant. Many add important facts I’ve omitted or clarify what I’ve misunderstood. Some commentators become regulars. One character, “Three Blind Mice,” has been a regular for a long time, rarely agreeing with anything I say.

But many of the comments are as rude and abusive as language allows. There are figures— they’re called “trolls”—who live for the fights they can gin up in these spaces. They behave awfully. Their arguments are (in the main) ridiculous, and they generally make comment spaces deeply unpleasant.

Other commentators find ways around these trolls. Norms like “don’t feed the troll” are invoked whenever anyone takes a troll on. But there’s only so much that can be done, at least so long as the forum owner (me) doesn’t block certain people or force everyone to use his or her real name.

I find it insanely difficult to read these comments [to my blog posts]. Not because they’re bad or mistaken, but mainly because I have very thin skin. There’s a direct correlation between what I read and pain in my gut. Even unfair and mistaken criticism cuts me in ways hat are just silly. If I read a bad comment before bed, I don’t sleep. If I trip upon one when I’m trying to write, I can be distracted for hours. I fantasize about creating an alter ego who responds on my behalf. But I don’t have the courage for even that deception. So instead, my weakness manifests itself through the practice (extraordinarily unfair to the comment writer) of sometimes not reading what others have said.

So then why do I blog all? Well, much of the time, I have no idea why I do it. But when I do, it has something to do with an ethic I believe that we all should live by. I first learned it from a judge I clerked for, Judge Richard Posner. Posner is without a doubt the most significant legal academic and federal judge of our time, and perhaps of the last hundred years. He was also the perfect judge to clerk for. Unlike the vast majority of appeals court judges, Posner writes his own opinions. The job of the clerk was simply to argue. He would give us a draft opinion, and we’d write a long memo in critique. He’d use that to redraft the opinion.

I gave Posner comments on much more than his opinions. In particular, soon after I began teaching he sent me a draft of a book, which would eventually become Sex and Reason. Much of the book was brilliant. But there was one part I thought ridiculous. And in a series of faxes (I was teaching in Budapest, and this was long before e-mail was generally available), I sent him increasingly outrageous comments, arguing about this section of the book.

The morning after I sent one such missive, I reread it, and was shocked by its abusive tone. I wrote a sheepish follow-up, apologizing, and saying that of course, I had endless respect for Posner, blah, blah, and blah. All that was true. So too was it true that I thought my comments were unfair. But Posner responded not by accepting my apology, but by scolding me. And not by scolding me for my abusive fax, but for my apology. “I’m surrounded by sycophants,” he wrote. “The last thing in the world I need is you to filter your comments by reference to my feelings.”

I was astonished by the rebuke. But from that moment on, I divided the world into those who would follow (or even recommend) Posner’s practice, and those who wouldn’t. And however attractive the anti-Posner pose was, I wanted to believe I could follow his ethic: Never allow, or encourage, the sycophants. Reward the critics. Not because I’d ever become a judge, or a public figure as important as Posner. But because in following his example, I would avoid the worst effects of the protected life (as a tenured professor) that I would lead.

I was lucky as Ricardo SIGNES was also awake who explained that actually he has stopped using Module::Starter as he is writing Dist::Zilla that provides much better project management capabilities. I pointed him at my blog entry and after reading it he asked me if I know the expression yak shaving [= performing a task which is required by a different task which is required by… to achieve what one wants in the first place]. I've heard it, actually I even read about it in in The Productive Programmer I mentioned earlier in The Quest for the Perfect Editor but I did not really understand it.

Actually, I think I understood it back when I read the book but promptly forgotten it as I did not have any way to connect the expression to the actions or lack of actions.

I was so lucky to find Ricardo there, as he explained:

• I need to fix this bug, but first I better eat something so I don’t get tired.
• So I'm going to have some cereal, but I'm out of milk.
• So I'll go get some milk. But I heard that yak milk is the best, so I'll go out to Nepal to find a yak.
• But they're all so hairy, I can't get to their udders.
• So, first I'll just shave the yak.

This is just the way you have to teach. Now I can remember it much more easily.

If a tree falls down in the middle of the forest, and there’s no one there to hear it… what colour is the tree?

Tim Berners-Lee's abandonment of the Dexter Model for hypertext a hypertext model where all links must be resolvable at all times was (IMHO) the single biggest factor in creating a successful World Wide Web.

Before the Web, hypertext systems were assumed to have all links resolvable at all times. This was not a robust design. Now, you would think this would be more robust than the Web but it fails even for single-file hypertext systems. Early in my career, I realized that computer systems were not 100% reliable, so if wanted to create software that failed safe (or at least failed soft), you had to account for errors at every step of the way. A single-file hypertext system can still fail if access to the single file is disturbed. Across the Internet, where all computers on the Internet have not been all up at the same time since the late 1970's (and possibly not even then), you cannot build a Dexter Model hypertext system because not all of your links can be resolved all of the time.

Microsoft's Help system has become much more usable since they went to a Web (i.e. HTML) based-system. At the risk of being redundant, even if you have a lint program to verify all hypertext links and destinations, file access errors will derail your hypertext system when you use a all-resolvable-all-the-time design (and I don't know if Microsoft had such a lint tool).

It boils down to handling failures with at least a small amount of grace. Unix/Linux systems handle errors much better than Microsoft Windows 1.0-3.x systems because processes can handle out-of-bounds memory errors better (Windows NT and its descendants fall in-between Unix/Linux and 16-bit Windows). I once wrote a Perl 4-based server that would run for months at a time because it could either recover gracefully from an error or stop gracefully upon an error. The Web runs as well as it does because the software systems handle link errors with a small amount of grace, rather than just throwing up their hands or dying horribly. Thank Tim Berners-Lee and his fellow designers for the reliability of the Web we have today.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

If Botticelli were alive today, he’d be working for Vogue.

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

Feeling my way through the darkness
Guided by a beating heart
I can't tell where the journey will end
But I know where to start

They tell me I'm too young to understand
They say I'm caught up in a dream
Life will pass me by if I don't open up my eyes
Well that's fine by me

So wake me up when it's all over
When I'm wiser and I'm older
All this time I was finding myself
And I didn't know I was lost

I tried carrying the weight of the world
But I only have two hands
I hope I get the chance to travel the world
But I don't have any plans

Wish that I could stay forever this young
Not afraid to close my eyes
Life's a game made for everyone
And love is the prize

Life is a strange thing. Just when you think you learned how to use it, it’s gone.

A fanatic: one who redoubles his efforts after he has forgotten his aim.

As it turns out, compiling a C program [= Vim] from more than 20 years ago is actually a lot easier than getting a Rails app from last year to work.

• Strength is being able to crush a tomato.
• Dexterity is being able to dodge a tomato.
• Constitution is being able to eat a bad tomato.
• Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit.
• Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad.
• Charisma is being able to sell a tomato based fruit salad.

Some people were allocating memory before it was cool. These people are called heapsters.

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

A banker, who always advised his son to think big, came home one day to find the boy in the yard with the family dog and a sign, “Dog for Sale, $38,000.” The father smiled and went into the house.

The next day, the sign–and the dog–had vanished. The banker asked his son, “You didn’t get $38,000 for the dog, did you?”

“No,” the boy replied, “but I traded him for two $19,000 cats.”

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

Anything less than the best is a felony.

When I was 18, I had been drumming for about 10 years. (They say that if you want to be a good drummer, you better have started by your teenage years, or you'll never make it.)

I got a call from my neighbor. He was about 65 years old.

"Jason," he said, "I made a promise to myself when I turned 60 that I was going to do 3 things. Lose 60 pounds. Stop smoking. And learn to play a musical instrument. So far, I've done 2 of those things."

"Which two?" I asked.

"I hear you're a pretty good drummer. Would you like to teach me how to drum?"

(I didn't know what to say. You can't learn drums when you're SIXTY-FIVE! What do I tell him? Well, maybe it'd be best to let him try it, then he can move on to guitar or piano or something if he doesn't like it.)

I've never seen anyone that age take a hobby as seriously as this guy took drumming. A year later, he was pretty proficient, and I cried a little when, after I left for college, I saw a video of him playing live on stage at a concert back home.

I learned way more from him than he did from me. I figure now that I should have been the one paying him for the lesson.

You ain't dead until you decide you're dead.

Trust me: every problem in computer science may be solved by an indirection, but those indirections are expensive. Pointer chasing is just about the most expensive thing you can do on modern CPUs.

“Let’s free ourselves from the shackles and do something bold!”

I always cringe when I hear this battle cry. Isn’t that sentiment exactly what set the trajectory for the Perl 6 effort? Maybe it’s just been so long that people have forgotten.

But that is precisely how Perl 6 became such an amazingly long trek: once you remove the constraint of staying compatible, everything is suddenly, potentially, up for reconsideration. Then when you start changing things, you discover that changes in one part of the language also affect several other, remote parts of the language. So it starts with the simple desire to fix a handful of obvious problems in obvious ways… and spirals out as you make changes, and further still as you make changes in response to your changes, ever further and further.

At that point, it is exceedingly likely that the project will fizzle out before it ever comes to any fruition. But even if you have the perseverance, you face an uphill battle: unless your project has the community’s implicit blessing as the successor (as Perl 6 does, due to Larry’s presence), it is likely to simply slip into oblivion… the way Kurila did.

So yes: backcompat is holding us back… the same way that gravity is. It keeps us from floating away untethered.

Note that I’m not saying it doesn’t really hold us back. I’d love to travel to space easily, too! I still await Perl 6, as well.

But what I think, every time someone proposes to throw off the shackles of backcompat and go for it, is that we already have one Perl 6 – we don’t need another.

The Wise Janitor: You gotta go out there, believe in the ball, and throw yourself.

Reportedly, SANE (= “Scanner Access Now Easy”) was called that way in part so one can say “TWAIN is not SANE!”.

Open source software: each person contributes a brick, but ultimately each person receives a house in return.

I didn’t stop pretending when I became an adult, it’s just that when I was a kid I was pretending that I fit into the rules and structures of this world. And now that I’m an adult, I pretend that those rules and structures exist.

Hi! I’m Tony Horne, creator of P90X, and I got a brand new program for overweight pop-stars to go from bass to treble in just 90 seconds. It’s called Treble 90X.

Well, your momma might have told you “Don’t worry about your size” but in this cut-throat industry… well, your momma doesn’t know shit.

It's the kind of movie where you would expect The Rock to slide on skateboard, along moving chopper rotors, to pick up a girl that is dodging a lion on a flag pole at the 200th floor of a building that is currently collapsing.

There's only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch.

The greatest threat to authors and creative artists is not piracy — it’s obscurity.

Tech needs less wizards, ninjas, and rockstars, and way more sociologists.

At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignment should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more.

Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

PSD is not my favourite file format.

Stop reinventing wheels, start building space rockets.

The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.

“You may not work around any technical limitations in the software”

— Windows Vista licence

There was a country which bordered two enemy countries - one to the north and one to the south. So they set up a computer to report if one of the enemy countries was attacking it and placed an army officer in charge of it.

One day the computer raises the alarm and says “Attack! Attack! We are attacked!”. So the officer asks it: “From the north or from the south?” and the computer replies: “Yes.”.

The officer asks it again ”Are we getting attacked from the north or from the south?”. And the computer replies : “Yes.”.

The officer gets angry and asks: “‘Yes’, what?”. The computer thinks for a moment and replies: “Yes, SIR!!”.

Don’t use a big word when a singularly unloquacious and diminutive linguistic expression will satisfactorily accomplish the contemporary necessity.

It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have lost at all.

My latest personal project has a manual page, unit and integration tests, Debian packaging, a CI project, and a home page. I can install it and run it. It doesn’t yet do anything useful.

The cool thing about Vim is — you find something interesting with every typo.

I've never used Cucumber in anger, but I thought it was for creating testcases that could be understood by non-technical clients, so you can concretely discuss features. If you're writing a compiler then all your clients will be programmers, so there's no need for such a thing.

Our clients are the parents, guardians, and teachers of children between the ages of eight and twelve inclusive.

The intent of Cucumber is to make readable testcases, just as the intent of COBOL and AppleScript and visual component programming is to enable non-programmers to create software without having to learn how to program.

I achieved my fast times by multitudes of 1% reductions.

I shall explain: Monologue: one person talking to himself ; Dialogue: like Monologue - two people talking to themselves.

"How can you trust an encyclopedia that everyone can edit?" How can you trust an encyclopedia that no one can edit!!

So what should I do to eliminate it?

Maybe Just Nothing

The issue is that you can't special case get_current_coords to be truish, as far as Devel::Cover is concerned - it might not be.

Any fix that could be thought up is inherently problematic.

Coverage reporting is not done for the pretty colors - a human reads it, and says "OK, this is logical, get_current_coords always returns a true value". It's not a race for greens and percentages.

While I agree coverage is not a race, I disagree that a human should have to disambiguate between real missing coverage and a false negative. At least not more than once.

I'll make the same argument "no broken windows" argument here that I do about warnings and tests: eliminate all warnings, even if they are dubious. Ensure all tests pass eliminating all false negatives. Do not leave any "expected warnings" or "expected failures" because this erodes the confidence in the test suite. Warnings and test failures fail to ring alarm bells. One "expected" warning leads to two. Then four. Then finally too many to remember which are expected and which are not and you ignore them all together.

The Pragmatic Programmer does a good job with this argument. http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ppbook/extracts/no_broken_windows.html

So goes the same with coverage. Red should be a BAD color, something you do not want to see. You want to eliminate the red. But sometimes its a false negative. In that case there should be some way to tell the tool that it is, in fact, a false negative. Just like skipping tests, you store the fact that there is a false negative to make the red go away. Red remains a bad color and seeing it means something is wrong. The team doesn't have to remember which bits are expected to be uncovered and which are not.

What's missing is a way to let Devel::Cover know that a bit of coverage is not necessary. The first way to do this which pops into my mind is a comment.

my $foo = $bar || default(); # DC ignore X|0

"Hey, Devel::Cover! Ignore the case where the right side of this logic is false."

Ignored conditions would be green, but perhaps a slightly different shade of green so they can be spotted if you're looking for them.

So, did I immediately launch into a furious whirl of coding up a brand-new POP3 client to compete with the existing ones? Not on your life! I looked carefully at the POP utilities I had in hand, asking myself ``Which one is closest to what I want?'' Because:

2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

While I don't claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results, and that it's almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all.

Linus Torvalds, for example, didn't actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like operating system for PC clones. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was completely rewritten—but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the infant that would eventually become Linux.

I recall a conversation where I told that in the comics HelpDex, the protagonist has wondered whether God was a programmer and in what programming language he wrote the universe. Then she had a dream where she heard God saying "I will tell you in which language I wrote the universe: Object-Oriented COBOL!" at which point the protagonist wakes up scared.

Then, a different participant who had immigrated from the former Soviet Union said that he was reminded of a story he read in a Soviet science magazine, where God and his angels were technicians who kept changing the universe based on how humans perceived it. Then during the 20th century, they had to implement subatomic particles, black holes and more, and fondly recalled how they once took a giant world turtle, put four elephants on top, and called it a day

I thought using loops was cheating so I programmed my own samples. Then I thought using samples was cheating so I recorded real drums.

I then thought that programming it was cheating so I learnt to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating so I learnt to make my own.

I then thought that using pre-made skins was cheating so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating but I'm not sure where to go from here. I haven't made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

The word's "forgiveness",
look it up.
It's what Jesus has in store for you,
but I don't no matter what.

“They who saved one soul has saved the world Entire”

Mishnah

Midrash:

It's fine to help, convince, inspire, etc. even only one person at a time.