Shlomi Fish's Favourite Fortunes

What is is

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

I/O, I/O…

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

Roses are red, Violets are Blue ("Fresh Prince of Bel-Air")

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"

"Wives live longer than husbands…"

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

Let others praise ancient times

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

"Bring it On": Cheerleader Song

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"

"Suppose x is the speed…"

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?

The Shibber Factor

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

"God is Dead"

-- Neitzsche

"Neitzsche is Dead"

-- God

( writing on a toilet's wall )

A serious Philosophical Work

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

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.

Histeria! - "did the Fall Hurt You?"

Knuth: Beware of Bugs

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

Stallmanism vs. Stalinism

> > "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

Slashdot: Creative Shells

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

Mission from God

We're on a mission from God.

-- The Blues Brothers

Sitting Here Doing Nothing

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

"The ones of you that have heard it before"

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.

-- Victor Borge

Larry Wall: "I'm an Optimist"

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

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

"Linus Torvalds's Greatest Hack"

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…"

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

On Tech Progress

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 is less than what users got out of those mainframes.

"I feel much better…"

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

Ashleigh Brilliant

"I have abandoned my search…"

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

Ashleigh Brilliant

"I may not be totally perfect…"

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

Ashleigh Brilliant

Dijkstra on Whether a Computer can Think

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

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Intelligent Life

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

Clarissa in "Clarissa Explains it All"

Rusty Russell's Signature

Rusty Russell's signature:

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

The First Law of Thermodynamics

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

Linus Torvalds about His Macros

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.

Everything is Owned by SCO

Baby making is owned by SCO. Linus's mother never payed royalities.

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

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

Scatman John
"Scatman's World"

ESR: "To follow the Path"

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"

"GIMP Should Manipulate SVGs" on #gimp

Hanah Senesh: Walk to Caesarea

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 )

"I am not without artifice where magic is concerned…"

'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.'

Linus Torvalds about the SHA1 Security

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_.

Neo-Tech: About Capitalism

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.

"People who disagree with me…"

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,

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.

Charlene: The Sweet Life

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

Neo-Tech: Fully Integrated Honesty

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
http://www.neo-tech.com/orientation/

chromatic: "Ruby Code Can't Be Bad"

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 Upgraded the Plot Device's…

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"

Affairs of Dragons

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

Source unknown.

Bjarne Stroustrup about Java

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 ]

Oscar Wilde on Redundancy (from the Uncyclopedia)

"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.

Vital Enterprise Applications Are (DailyWTF)

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

Beatles: "Come Together"

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.

The Smithosnian (from Ozy and Millie)

Slashdot: Vim Version 7

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. http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185216&cid=15286781

Star Trek Plot on FreeNode's #bmp - The Beep Media Player channel.

I'd love to change the world

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

-- Unknown

"What are stars?" on the Lion King

Martin about UNIX Letting You Shoot Yourself in the Foot

>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

Dazjorz: "We are the Borg on IRC"

[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…

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

Learn several new words everyday

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

Yaakov on Freenode's #perl

Acme::NewMath

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.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-NewMath/

Should Perl drop SCO Support?

> 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 inappropropriate to drop SCO just because it happens to be all of the above.

Climbing for the Apocalypse on #perlcafe

Slashdot: "In Soviet Russia…"

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

GyroTech on http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195378&cid=16009070

"I Wrote This Much Code" on Freenode's #perlcafe

Slashdot: Dealing with RMS's Vim Attitude

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 http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=196931&cid=16136657

Linus: "debugging my own machines"

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 http://lwn.net/Articles/188123/

Slasdhot: Iran: "First they came for"

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 http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201413&cid=16490111

Linus Torvalds: "I Won't Always Change my Mind"

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 on http://lwn.net/Articles/201440/

Review of the Oxford English Dictionary

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?

Neo-Tech: Selfishness

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"
http://www.neo-tech.com/neotech/advantages/advantage14.html

Alan Kay on C++

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

Alan Kay (Attributed)

VB.NET and Java Freenode's #perl

Wilderness Cat: Extra Peculiar

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!

Linus Torvalds: Rare "Perfect" Kernels

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.
http://lwn.net/Articles/211904/

"Not comparable" on Freenode's #perl

Jokes about Particle Physics on Freenode's #perl

Tel Aviv - a functional definition

Tel Aviv - a functional definition:

Free parking space free space.

Shachar Shemesh
http://blog.shemesh.biz/?p=435

Always find someone to blame on Freenode's #perl.

Linus Torvalds: Releasing Kernel 2.6.20 on Superbowl Sunday

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 ( http://lwn.net/Articles/220544/ )

Sesquipedallianism

Sesquipedallianism:

Making excessive use of long words.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sesquipedallian

TimToady's Lament

Slashdot: The Spanish Inquisition

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

niconorsk on a Slashdot Comment
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=224312&cid=18164404

Cluster of 386s

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.

Are you being installed in FreeNode's #perl

Losing my Abstraction

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.

Memorial Day Weekend and SQL Databases

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!!

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=236249&cid=19275875

DailyWTF: Calculator 2.0

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."

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/OMGWTF-Highlights-2-Misc.aspx

Slashdot: Dual Core and Microsoft

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

-- sucati on http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=244291&cid=19718695

No. All your core are belong to us.

-- geobeck on http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=244291&cid=19722737

"Eye have a Spelling Chequer"

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.

Slashdot: Linus and Bill Gates

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.

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=267393&cid=20200075

Free Karma on Freenode's #perl6.

Getting rich easily on Freenode's #perl.

Neo-Tech: All the Destruction for What?

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

Fonts and Microsoft

> > > 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...

    Jonathan Rockway, Andy Armstrong, Jonathan Rockway, and Adrian Howard
    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.module-authors/2007/10/msg5907.html

Slashdot: 1 out of 10 Lawyers

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

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=332831&cid=21033847

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.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=332831&cid=21035649

What would Jesus do?

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 http://liedra.livejournal.com/21176.html

Geeky "Your Momma's So Fat" Jokes

use.perl.org - Managed C++

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.»

Slashdot: Windows Desktop Search

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 http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=339585&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=21112043

A mouse is a device

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

alt.sysadmin.recovery

Writing a Mailing List Manager from Scratch

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).

"Not doing it for money"

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

Excerpt from Spaceballs

"%s on %s" on Freenode's #perl

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

Slasdhot 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!

"Worse is Better" (Larry Wall)

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"
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html?page=3

Too many Freenode #perl cooks.

Security by perl-deprivation on Freenode's #perl.

"It was 20 years ago today…"

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...

http://perlbuzz.com/2007/12/it-was-twenty-years-ago-today.html
on Perl's 20th Birthday

Linus Torvalds: The Purpose of Holidays

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.

Linus Torvalds announcing Linux Kernel prepatch 2.6.24-rc6
http://lwn.net/Articles/262978/

Counter-qouting Jamie Zawinski

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

Boxing on Freenode's #perl

DJB on Command Interfaces

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

Slashdot: Xeno's Paradox

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.

Linus Torvalds: "The Patch Fell…"

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.

jerryleecooper on Windows

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.

Slashdot: Keep Modding up this Joke

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 #1

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!

Linux Genuine Advantage #2

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!

Linux Genuine Advantage - News

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.

Larry Wall: Manipulexity and Whipuptitude

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.

Larry Wall's "My Own Irrationationalities"

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.

Larry Wall's "Irrationalities of Other Languages"

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.

Larry Wall - Taking a Trip

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.

Larry Wall - "Anthrpology"

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.

Linus Torvalds: Hardware for Servers

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.

Slashdot: High-Quality Microsoft Products

«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.

Timezone'd on Freenode's #perl

CPAN is your Friend (or Enemy) on Frenode's #perl

As long as you don't resort to violence on Freenode's #perl

chromatic: Choice of Syntax

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.

Mark Jason Dominus - "More about How to Ask a Good Question"

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.

Light Bulb Joke

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

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

Linux Kernel Module's Programmer Guide: Beginning Programmers

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.

chromatic - "Program vs. Script" - #1

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.

chromatic - "Program vs. Script" - #2

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 becaues 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.

chromatic - "Program vs. Script" - #3

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.

Stroustrup on Ease of Use

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

Moving pianos is dangerous.
Moving pianos are dangerous.

"Real men don't"

> 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".

"Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom"

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!

What do you do with ideas?

Manipulating People Using Perl

OSNews.com: Mono Syllabic Review

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'

Cats and Computer Trees

"Stumble on a Wiki Page"

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.

Samuel Beckett - Ever Tried

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Larry Wall on Ada Lovelace

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...

Larry Wall on BASIC

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 idiosyncracies. 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.

Larry Wall - JAM (no not that one)

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.

Larry Wall - LISP

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.

Larry Wall - Common Memes Floating Around

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.

chromatic - Perl's reliable state of the art

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" and more

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 are You Trying to Achieve?

What's the Difference Between JavaScript and Java?

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…"

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 - http://use.perl.org/~jest/journal/38229

"A discussion is not a war"

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.

"Someone is Wrong"

Lightning Fast Objects

"pgTAP 0.20 Infiltrates Community"

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 refctored 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.