Epigrams.dat

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

    -- Leonard Peikoff
%
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

    -- Dave Peacock
    -- His signature
%
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"

    -- Andy Borowitz (Creator)
    -- "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fresh_Prince_of_Bel-Air )
%
And the top story for today: wives live longer than husbands because they are
not married to women.

    -- Colin Mochrie
    -- "Who's Line is it, Anyway?" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Line_Is_It_Anyway%3F )
%
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.

    -- Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD)
%
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"

    -- Bring it On (The Original) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_It_On_(film) )
%
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?"

    -- Unknown
    -- Re: "A Parody on Aristotle's Organum" ( http://groups.google.com/group/humanities.philosophy.objectivism/msg/e0d0b5a400d47c6b?hl=en )
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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%.

    -- Shlomi Fish
    -- Based on a Technion Legend
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“God is Dead”

— Nietzsche

“Nietzsche is Dead”

— God

( writing on a toilet's wall )

    -- Anonymous toilet's wall writers
    -- Writing on a toilet's wall.
%
A serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist
entirely of jokes.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

    -- 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.

    -- One of Shlomi Fish's Lecturers
    -- Technion Class
%
[Isaac Newton falls off the tree]

Cho-Cho: Did the fall hurt you?

Newton: It wasn't the fall; it was the sudden stop at the end.

    -- Tom Ruegger
    -- Histeria! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histeria! )
%
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

    -- Donald Knuth
    -- Memo to Peter van Emde Boas ( http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/faq.html )
%
<<<

<<<

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

    -- k98sven
    -- Slashdot Comment: “Re: Misread” ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=34331&cid=3715569 )
%
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

    -- The Night Watchman
    -- Slashdot comment.
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We're on a mission from God.

-- The Blues Brothers

    -- Dan Aykroyd and John Landis
    -- "The Blues Brothers" ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/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.

    -- Unknown
    -- Unknown
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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
    -- Phonetic Punctuation ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF4qii8S3gw )
%
I guess I really am an optimist. A paranoid optimist, true, but an optimist
nonetheless.

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

    -- Larry Wall
    -- 3rd State of the Onion ( http://www.perl.com/pub/a/1999/08/onion/talk1.html )
%
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"

    -- Eric Raymond
    -- The Cathedral and the Bazaar ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-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

    -- Not clear
    -- Quotes about Democracy ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Democracy )
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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.

    -- William Lee Irwin III
%
I feel much better, now that I've given up hope.

Ashleigh Brilliant

    -- Ashleigh Brilliant
    -- "I Feel Much Better, Now That I've Given Up Hope ( http://www.amazon.com/Feel-Much-Better-That-Given/dp/0880071478 )
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I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.

Ashleigh Brilliant

    -- Ashleigh Brilliant
    -- "I Have Abandoned My Search for Truth and Am Now Looking for a Good Fantasy" ( http://www.amazon.com/Abandoned-Search-Truth-Looking-Fantasy/dp/0912800909/ref=pd_sim_b_2 )
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I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.

Ashleigh Brilliant

    -- Ashleigh Brilliant
    -- I May Not Be Totally Perfect, but Parts of Me Are Excellent ( http://www.amazon.com/Totally-Perfect-Excellent-Brilliant-Thoughts/dp/0912800674/ref=pd_sim_b_1 )
%
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the
question of whether a submarine can swim.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

    -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
    -- EWD898 - The threats to computing science ( http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html )
%
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

    -- Bill Watterson
    -- Calvin & Hobbes quotes ( http://thinkexist.com/quotation/sometimes_i_think_the_surest_sign_that/8696.html )
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The more I think about it, the more I think I should think about it some more.

Clarissa in "Clarissa Explains it All"

    -- Clarissa Explains it All ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Clarissa_Explains_It_All )
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Rusty Russell's signature:

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

    -- Rusty Russell
    -- Rusty Russell's Signature ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_Russell )
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The First Law of Thermodynamics: A system with a constant energy, volume and
pressure behaves in any way it wants.

    -- Unknown
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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.

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List ( http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0312.2/1241.html )
%
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.

    -- Iztok
    -- Linus is "owned by SCO" ( http://lwn.net/Articles/64272/ )
%
The source of my intention
really isn't crime prevention
My intention is prevention of the lie.

Scatman John
"Scatman's World"

    -- Scatman John
    -- Scatman's World ( http://www.lyricsdownload.com/scatman-scatman-s-world-lyrics.html )
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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"

    -- Eric Raymond
    -- How to Become a Hacker ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html )
%
 <strestout1>  Can GIMP save to svg?
    <rindolf>  strestout1: SVG is a vector graphics format.
    <rindolf>  strestout1: GIMP manipulates bitmaps.
 <strestout1>  Yes rindolf, I know.
 <strestout1>  I just thought it would be nice to have one app for
               everything instead of having to use inkscape for svg and
               gimp for everything else.
    <UnNamed>  It could do 3d too.
   <schumaml>  And Audio processing…
    <UnNamed>  And Audio mixing…
    <UnNamed>  And word processing…
   <schumaml>  And it gotta have a kitchen sink!
   <schumaml>  So, the real question might be: is there an image editing
               mode for Emacs? ;)

    -- "GIMP Should Manipulate SVGs"
    -- #gimp, GimpNet
%
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 )

    -- Hanah Senesh
    -- Walk to Caesarea
%
'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.'

    -- Terry Pratchett
    -- The Colour of Magic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colour_of_Magic )
%
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_.

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Message to the git mailing list ( http://lwn.net/Articles/132513/ )
%
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.

    -- Frank R. Wallace
    -- Neo Tech IV ( http://xrl.us/bmszm )
%
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.)

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Linus compares Linux and BSDs ( http://www.linux.com/articles/45571 )
%
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.

    -- Red Hat Inc. Fedora Workers
    -- Fedora Core 2 Test 2 available for x86 and x86-64 ( http://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/linux.redhat.misc/2004-03/0327.html )
%
"I took the sweet life
but I never knew
I'd be bitter from the sweet"

    -- Charlene
    -- I've Never Been to Me ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I've_Never_Been_to_Me )
%
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/)

    -- Frank R. Wallace
    -- Neo Tech Orientation and Definitions ( http://www.shlomifish.org/n-t-/neo-tech/Neo-Tech/orientation.html )
%
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.)

    -- chromatic
    -- Blog Post for 17-Novemeber-2005 ( http://www.advogato.org/person/chromatic/diary.html?start=237 )
%
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"

    -- Mo Willems
    -- Sheep in the Big City ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_in_the_Big_City )
%
Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good
with ketchup.

Source unknown.

    -- Unknown Author
    -- Internet Meme
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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](http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/30/1942259&mode=thread&tid=108&tid=126&tid=156)
]

    -- Bjarne Stroustrup
    -- F.A.Q. Entry about Java ( http://public.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#Java )
%
"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.

    -- Uncyclopedia
    -- Uncyclopedia entry about Redundancy ( http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Redundancy )
%
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](http://thedailywtf.com/forums/64833/ShowPost.aspx)

    -- The Daily WTF
    -- The Daily WTF - Enterprise SQL ( 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.

    -- The Beatles
    -- Come Together ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Together )
%
Isolde: Any museum has a certain Americana factor. But the Smithsonian… This
is the one place you can find the very essence of America, distilled.

Millie: Ooh.. do they let you drink it, and then take on mutant American
superpowers, and then go around unilaterally dispensing frontier-style justice
in the name of "Freedom"?

Isolde: No, not usually.

Millie: Museums would be a lot more fun if they'd actually *read* what I put
in their suggestion boxes.

    -- D.C. Simpson
    -- Ozy and Millie - "The Essence of America" ( http://www.ozyandmillie.org/2006/om20060417.html )
%
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](http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185216&cid=15286781)

    -- yet another coward
    -- Comment on the release of Vim version 7 ( http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185216&cid=15286781 )
%
 <deadchip>  Computer: Remove characters 'nenolod' and 'sxpert'.
 <deadchip>  *beeepbeepbeebeeep*
 <deadchip>  Computer: Resume program.
   <sxpert>  "Program cannot run without characters 'nenolod' and
             'sxpert'. restoring instances.
 <deadchip>  Computer: Command override, command code Lt. Cmdr. Milosz
             Derezynski omega-3-3-9-alpha zero. Remove instances 'nenolod'
             and 'sxpert'.
 <deadchip>  "Unable to comply."
 <deadchip>  "Computer: Is it possible to at least, _alter_ the
             subprograms nenolod and sxpert?"
 <deadchip>  "Specify parameters."
 <deadchip>  hmm i take that as a "yes"
   <sxpert>  lol
 <deadchip>  "Computer: Please remove 'nonsense' component from 'sxpert'
             character."
 <deadchip>  "Affirmative."
   <sxpert>  "unable to comply. "
 <deadchip>  bah
 <deadchip>  yeah
  <nenolod>  grr
 <deadchip>  you're truly un-nonsensifiable
 <deadchip>  hahaha
   <sxpert>  "the intellectual subroutines are not alterable"
 <deadchip>  "Computer: Is it possible to alter the _look_ of the
             character 'sxpert'?"
 <deadchip>  "Affirmative."
 <deadchip>  "Computer: Please dress character 'sxpert' in a clown's
             costume."
 <deadchip>  "Specify parameters."
 <deadchip>  "Mid-20th-century Earth, Balkan area."
 <deadchip>  "Processing. Character alteration complete."
 <deadchip>  sxpert: bah
 <deadchip>  yeah i knew you would delete the whole databank first
   <sxpert>  lol
   <geekoe>  "Computer, can we …. finally… simply remover the characters
             'sxpert'?"
   <sxpert>  "computer, here's arlequin costume. apply to character
             deadchip"
   <sxpert>  "character parameters changed"
   <sxpert>  "woop"
   <geekoe>  :D
 <deadchip>  o_O

    -- Star Trek-Like Plot
    -- #bmp, Freenode
%
I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code.

— Unknown

    -- Unknown Author
    -- Unknown
%
Pumbaa: Timon, ever wonder what those sparkly dots are up there?

Timon: Pumbaa, I don't wonder; I know.

Pumbaa: Oh. What are they?

Timon: They're fireflies. Fireflies that, uh… got stuck up on that big
bluish-black thing.

Pumbaa: Oh, gee. I always thought they were gigantic balls of gas burning
billions of miles away.

Timon: Pumbaa, with you, everything's gas.

    -- Walt Disney Corp
    -- "The Lion King" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/ )
%
>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

    -- Martin
    -- Comment in the JoS Forum ( http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.351421 )
%
[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

    -- Sjors (Dazjorz)
    -- Freenode on IRC
%
"(God) is my favourite fictional character." - Homer Simpson

    -- Matt Groening
    -- The Simpsons ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons )
%
You should learn several new words everyday--eventually you will forget how to
speak so others can understand you.

Yaakov on Freenode's #perl

    -- Yaakov
    -- Freenode's #perl Conversation.
%
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](http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-NewMath/)

    -- Stevie-O
    -- Acme::NewMath POD document ( http://search.cpan.org/dist/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.

    -- Kurt Starsinic
    -- advocacy@perl.org Email ( http://www.mail-archive.com/advocacy%40perl.org/msg01815.html )
%
 <jkauffman>  Lynx_: you do seem to do a lot of climbing
 <jkauffman>  Lynx_: you'll have the last laugh when the apocalypse comes
 <jkauffman>  you'll be physically fit
 <jkauffman>  climbing over the mountains of sulfurous ash
 <jkauffman>  bounding over rivers of lava
     <Lynx_>  sounds great
     <Lynx_>  but what will i eat?
 <jkauffman>  those who didn't bother to practice climbing
     <Lynx_>  eww
     <Lynx_>  those will be all fatty
     <Lynx_>  but maybe sulfurous ash is not so bad with some salt
 <jkauffman>  perhaps

    -- Climbing for the Apocalypse
    -- #perlcafe, Freenode
%
In Soviet Russia, every time you kill a kitten, god masturbates

GyroTech on [a Slashdot
comment](http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195378&cid=16009070)

    -- GyroTech
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195378&cid=16009070 )
%
 <jagerman>  dooky: A coworker used to like to say things like "I wrote
             this much code" while holding his hands a couple feet apart
   <mofino>  hahaha
 <jagerman>  Once I asked him "At what font size?"
   <mofino>  +30
 <q[ender]>  hahah
 <jagerman>  He never said it any more

    -- "I Wrote This Much Code"
    -- #perlcafe, Freenode
%
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](http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=196931&cid=16136657)

    -- kahei
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=196931&cid=16136657 )
%
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](http://lwn.net/Articles/188123/)

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Email Message ( http://lwn.net/Articles/188123/ )
%
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)

    -- patrixmyth
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201413&cid=16490111 )
%
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](http://lwn.net/Articles/201440/).

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Email Message ( http://lwn.net/Articles/201440/ )
%
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?

    -- Amazon.com: Oxford English Dictionary ( http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-English-Dictionary-20-Set/dp/0198611862 )
%
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)

    -- Frank R. Wallace
    -- Neo-Tech Advantage No. 14 - "Self-Growth vs. Selfless View" ( http://www.neo-tech.com/neotech/advantages/advantage14.html )
%
I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in
mind.

Alan Kay (Attributed)

    -- Alan Kay
%
 <ew73>  VB.NET is all of the fun of enforced privacy OO with all of the
         power of BASIC.
 <ew73>  java.sun.os.device.videocard.screen.pixel.dance.a.jig.and.turn.red('true')

    -- VB.NET and Java
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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!

    -- wildernesscat
    -- wildernesscat : Extra Peculiar (Blog Entry) ( http://wildernesscat.livejournal.com/530346.html )
%
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](http://lwn.net/Articles/211904/)

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Email Message ( http://lwn.net/Articles/211904/ )
%
 <castoff>  merlyn: is it true that array iteration is better performance
            wise than hash iteration?
         *  avar would guess that array iter is faster than hash iter
  <merlyn>  what is "hash iter"?
  <merlyn>  with "each()"?
 <castoff>  foreach key…
    <avar>  yeah, or keys
  <merlyn>  I don't see those as comparable
  <merlyn>  when you have a hash, and you need to iterate, you do.
  <merlyn>  when you have an array, and you need to iterate, you do
  <merlyn>  what is there to choose between?
 <castoff>  the hash has no real value stored other than the key so i
            converted to arrays
    <avar>  merlyn: you can compare the speed of the two operations
    <avar>  well duh
  <merlyn>  Why would you compare the speed of unrelated events?
  <merlyn>  "let's time baking this bread compared to driving to seattle"
  <merlyn>  it's pointless
    <ides>  merlyn: heh, yes, but I think it would make a funny
            performance comparison article! :)
  <merlyn>  "always optimize for baking bread!"
         *  avar eats merlyn
    <ides>  merlyn: I was thinking more along the lines of "Performance
            comparison on Perl vs RoR vs Ice Fishing"
  <merlyn>  "I repeated baking bread 5000 times to get the average"
  <merlyn>  "It took me six years"
    <ides>  merlyn: too bad there isn't a Benchmark module for my oven…
  <merlyn>  Ovenmark

    -- Not comparable
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
  <Teratogen>  Two atoms are walking down the street when one of them says
               "I think I've lost an electron." The second one says "are
               you sure?", to which the first one replies "Yes, I'm
               positive".
 <mpeg4codec>  So officer Schroedinger pulls over this quantum particle
               and he says ``Do you know how fast you were going?''
 <mpeg4codec>  the particle says, ``No, but I know exactly where I am.''
  <Teratogen>  everybody has heard of Schroedinger's cat experiment
  <Teratogen>  but very few people know that Schroedinger hated cats
  <Teratogen>  with a passion
  <Teratogen>  and actually experimented on them
  <Teratogen>  he even owned a set of cat-fur gloves
  <Teratogen>  cats mysteriously disappeared around Schroedinger's
               laboratory
  <Teratogen>  and there was no Chinese restaurant close by to explain the
               disappearances
 <mpeg4codec>  Schroedinger's cat: wanted dead AND alive

    -- Jokes about Particle Physics
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
Tel Aviv - a functional definition:

Free parking space free space.

Shachar Shemesh
[Blog Post](http://blog.shemesh.biz/?p=435)

    -- Shachar Shemesh
    -- "Tel Aviv - a Functional Definition" (Blog Post) ( http://blog.shemesh.biz/?p=435 )
%
        <Botje>  tecloSolaris: that's an irssi script. you can't run it
                 outside irssi.
 <tecloSolaris>  but it fails in irssi
        <Botje>  why does it fail?
       <merlyn>  it fails because of its parents!
       <merlyn>  I blame its parents
       <merlyn>  It fails because of society.
       <merlyn>  it fails as a fundamental shortcoming of Perl
       <merlyn>  it fails at succeeding
    <Teratogen>  I blame society!
       <merlyn>  I blame Teratogen's society.
       <merlyn>  I'll blame the blamer

    -- Always find someone to blame
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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/ )

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Announcement of Kernel 2.6.20 ( http://lwn.net/Articles/220544/ )
%
Sesquipedallianism:

Making excessive use of long words.

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

    -- Definition for Sesquipedallian ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sesquipedallian )
%
 <TimToady>  TimToady's Lament: The pain in reign falls mainly in the
             'splain. --

    -- TimToady's Lament
    -- #perl6, Freenode
%
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)

    -- niconorsk
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=224312&cid=18164404 )
%
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.

    -- Beowulf mailing list FAQ ( http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/beowulf-faq.txt )
%
        *  f00li5h installs q-mail
        *  dazjorz installs f00li5h
        *  Zaba installs dazjorz
 <jeeger>  qmail installs f00li5h
 <jeeger>  In soviet russia …
 <jeeger>  Software installs YOU!
        *  dazjorz rm -rf zaba
        *  f00li5h is in Soviet Australia

    -- Are you being installed?
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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.

    -- Andy Armstrong and Randal L. Schwartz
    -- Perl module-authors post ( http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.module-authors/2007/05/msg5435.html )
%
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

    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=236249&cid=19275875 )
%
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)](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/OMGWTF-Highlights-2-Misc.aspx)

    -- OMGWTF Highlights #2: Misc. (The Daily WTF) ( http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/OMGWTF-Highlights-2-Misc.aspx )
%
I think this is the idea behind dual core: 1 core belongs to microsoft, 1 core
for you.

-- sucati on [a Slashdot
comment](http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=244291&cid=19718695)

No. All your core are belong to us.

-- geobeck [in
response](http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=244291&cid=19722737).

    -- Slashdot Comments ( http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=244291&cid=19722737 )
%
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.

    -- Spell Chequer ( http://www.cleanjokeoftheday.com/jokes-spellingchequer.html )
%
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](http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=267393&cid=20200075)

    -- dhavleak
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=267393&cid=20200075 )
%
    <masak>  this definitely gives a more solid feel for kp6
    <masak>  kudos to whomever set exp_evalbot up!
  <moritz_>  masak: that was me ;)
    <masak>  moritz_: kudos
    <masak>  moritz_++
 <spinclad>  moritz_++
   <fglock>  moritz++ :)
    <masak>  moritz_++ # the best thing about karma is that it's free
    <masak>  moritz++ # oh right
  <moritz_>  thanks
  <moritz_>  "karma is like software - it's better when it's free" ;-)

    -- Free Karma
    -- #perl6, Freenode
%
   <talexb>  Wow, I've won 4M pounds sterling, and all I have to do is
             contact someone in Zambia for more information. What could
             possibly go wrong?
  <rindolf>  talexb: heh.
 <jagerman>  Wait, I thought *I* won that.
   <talexb>  rindolf, Can't believe people still fall for that line ..
   <fwiles>  damn, wish I would win something… I just seem to be
             pre-approved for about $13 billion worth of home loans
   <talexb>  Oops, sorry jagerman .. I'm already faxing this lady my Power
             of Attorney!!!
   <talexb>  fwiles, Oh, that'll buy you a nice semi in Toronto.
 <jagerman>  talexb: Oh, I'm way ahead of you then. I'm flying there to
             meet with "government officials."
 <jagerman>  I'm paying for it myself, of course, since I'll be rich once
             they transfer the money to me.
   <talexb>  jagerman, Rats! Hey, I know a couple of lawyers if you need
             'em .. very trustworthy, share some office space with some
             barbers.

    -- Getting Rich Easily
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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

    -- Frank R. Wallace
    -- Neo-Tech Advantage No. 104 ( http://www.shlomifish.org/n-t-/neo-tech/Neo-Tech/advantage104.html )
%
> > > 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
    -- Perl Module Authors Post ( http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.module-authors/2007/10/msg5907.html )
%
Geez…get any 10 lawyers together, one will be a real decent person, the other
nine will be total asshats.

[Slashdot
Comment](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.

[Slashdot
comment](http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=332831&cid=21035649)

    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=332831&cid=21035649 )
%
What *would* Jesus do?

Oh my god.

[http://xrl.us/7j6w](http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/What-would-Jesus-do/2005/05/25/1116950760739.html)

"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](http://liedra.livejournal.com/21176.html).

    -- liedra
    -- Blog Post ( http://liedra.livejournal.com/21176.html )
%
  <LeoNerd>  defc0n-: Make sure to use a nice tight knot, so your joined
             thread doesn't fall apart
    <Somni>  thread jokes, how droll
          *  LeoNerd grins "I have a whole stack of them waiting here.."
  <defc0n->  C jokes are worse, a la if (malloc(sizeof(yourmom_t)) ==
             NULL) printf("error: mom too fat\n");
 <idiotben>  joke? hell that’s good logic! =P Your
 <idiotben>  Your momma so fat, the bitch needs PAE to fit in memory w/o
             using up swap
 <idiotben>  yo momma so fat, your dad has to run RHEL4's "hugemem" kernel
 <idiotben>  your mom is sooooo fat! everyone she comes in contact with
             has a buffer overflow!
  <LeoNerd>  … she needs 64k cluster size?
  <LeoNerd>  (going for a combined fat/FAT joke there)

    -- Geeky "Your Momma's So Fat" Jokes
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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.

>>>

    -- use.perl.org Blog Post ( http://use.perl.org/~Aristotle/journal/34740 )
%
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

    -- speaker of the truth
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=339585&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=21112043 )
%
A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in.

    -- Unknown
    -- alt.sysadmin.recovery ( http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery )
%
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).

    -- Marc Merlin
    -- linux-elitists blog post ( http://allium.zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2007-October/012251.html )
%
We're not just doing it for money…We're doing it for a shitload of money!

Excerpt from Spaceballs

    -- Mel Brooks
    -- Spaceballs ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/ )
%
   <asarch>  Is there any web application framework for Perl? Something
             ala Ruby on Rails
 <integral>  asarch: Jifty and Catalyst and lots more!
  <archon->  asarch: catalyst
 <integral>  for example CGI::Application.
   <Yaakov>  asarch: Perl on Pontoons.
 <integral>  Jifty is closer to Rails than Catalyst is
 <integral>  Catalyst is like Lego, Jifty is like that not-Lego stuff that
             sucks :-)
   <asarch>  Thanks Yaakov
   <asarch>  Let me see…
   <Yaakov>  I WAS LYING
   <Yaakov>  THERE ARE NO PONTOONS
 <integral>  Why can't you just use Rails? Too slow? Too crap?
   <asarch>  lol :-D
   <Yaakov>  Ruby on Rails will always seem like Ruby on Crack to me,
             thanks to that promotional video…
 <integral>  Haskell on Highways
   <Yaakov>  Logo on Logs
   <Yaakov>  PHP on PCP
 <integral>  BCPL on Boats
 <integral>  They should bring back BCPL
   <Yaakov>  JCL on Jets
    <anno->  cobol on cobbles
   <Yaakov>  Algol on Airplanes
   <Yaakov>  Snobol on Snowmobiles
   <Yaakov>  Ada on Armored Transports

    -- %s on %s
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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!

    -- creimer
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=376757&cid=21544637 )
%
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

    -- Larry Wall
    -- State of the Onion 11 ( http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html?page=3 )
%
    <ew73>  I have discovered another benefit to the unemployed status!
    <ew73>  I can cook whenever I want.
    <sili>  ew73: cooking with… imagination?
    <ew73>  sili: I'm actually quite good at teh cookingz.
    <sili>  ew73: ARE YOU GOOD PROGRAMMAR 2/
    <ew73>  no :(
    <sili>  I guess that explains why you're unemployed :p
    <ew73>  That was mean!
    <sili>  it's not like I stole your bike
    <ew73>  That also would be mean.
 <phroggy>  good cooking impresses the ladies a lot more than good
            programming.
 <utopia_>  depends on the lady
 <phroggy>  (any present female company excepted, of course)
   <jdv79>  phroggy: except when you don't have any money
    <ew73>  phroggy: But imagine, a good cook AND a good programmer.
    <sili>  I can cook some stuff.
 <phroggy>  jdv79: yeah, that nixes the deal. I have that problem too.
   <jdv79>  its a start
    <ew73>  "Here's my recipe for mushroom stir-fry. And HERE's the source
            for my nutritional database system."
 <phroggy>  haha
     <jim>  ew73: so when you load the data model, do you get the recipe
            free?
    <ew73>  jim: Geek.
         *  jim looks around…
     <jim>  like yer any different :)

    -- Too many Freenode #perl cooks.
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
            -->  FilipeMendes has joined #perl
 <FilipeMendes>  any way to avoid having users running perl? I need
                 specify who can or who can not
 <dondelelcaro>  FilipeMendes: uh… why?
 <FilipeMendes>  security purposes
        <mauke>  haha
        <mauke>  chmod 0 /usr/bin/perl
 <dondelelcaro>  question repeated, with more emphasis and incredulity
 <FilipeMendes>  i want specify some users
       <Caelum>  FilipeMendes: why would you not want users running perl?
 <FilipeMendes>  chmod wouldnt be useful
          <dkr>  FilipeMendes: chmod 750 /usr/bin/perl; chgrp leet
                 /usr/bin/perl; and put the leet people in that group ?
 <FilipeMendes>  hmmm
 <dondelelcaro>  you realize that any user who wants can just stick their
                 own perl executable there?
     <go|dfish>  FilipeMendes: ACL , maybe.
          <dkr>  also your system scripts might rely on it
 <dondelelcaro>  (and probably all of the users actually end up using
                 perl?)
          <dkr>  modify the perl code to have it exit based on checking a
                 uid whitelist. :)
          <dkr>  change the name to something obscure only the cool people
                 know
        <mauke>  _perl
          <dkr>  realize that removing tools does not remove abilities and
                 give up
        <mauke>  the _ means it's private!
          <dkr>  mauke: :D

    -- Security by perl-deprivation
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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

    -- Andy Lester
    -- Perl's 20th Birthday ( http://perlbuzz.com/2007/12/it-was-twenty-years-ago-today.html )
%
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/

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Announcing Linux Kernel prepatch 2.6.24-rc6 ( http://lwn.net/Articles/262978/ )
%
<<<

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

    -- dmd
    -- Reddit Comment ( http://programming.reddit.com/info/1awnv/comments/c1axqc )
%
  <BinGOs>  mst: doh.
  <BinGOs>  mst++ # thinking outside the box.
     <dwu>  mst++ # utterly destroying the box.
 <Daveman>  SELL THE BOX!
     <dwu>  CAPITALIST PIG!
 <Daveman>  :D

    -- Boxing
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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

    -- Daniel J. Bernstein (DJB)
    -- "The qmail security guarantee" ( 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.

    -- HUADPE
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=411942&cid=21968648 )
%
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.

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Email ( http://lwn.net/Articles/266314/ )
%
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.

    -- jerryleecooper
    -- Talkback on ZDNet ( http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12355-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31199&messageID=579806&start=43 )
%
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?

    -- Anonymous Coward
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=399904&cid=21831406 )
%
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 ( http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/ )
%
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 ( http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/ )
%
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.

    -- Linux Genuine Advantage ( http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/ )
%
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
    -- Present Continuous, Future Perfect ( http://www.perl.org.il/presentations/larry-wall-present-continuous-future-perfect/transcript.html )
%
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
    -- Present Continuous, Future Perfect ( http://www.perl.org.il/presentations/larry-wall-present-continuous-future-perfect/transcript.html )
%
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
    -- Present Continuous, Future Perfect ( http://www.perl.org.il/presentations/larry-wall-present-continuous-future-perfect/transcript.html )
%
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
    -- Present Continuous, Future Perfect ( http://www.perl.org.il/presentations/larry-wall-present-continuous-future-perfect/transcript.html )
%
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.

    -- Larry Wall
    -- Present Continuous, Future Perfect ( http://www.perl.org.il/presentations/larry-wall-present-continuous-future-perfect/transcript.html )
%
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.

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Interview, Part II ( http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/openvoices/linus-torvalds-part-ii/ )
%
«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.

    -- boguslinks
    -- Slashdot Comment ( http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=442082&cid=22303924 )
%
      <x86>  can someone tell me what this epoch translates to in %Y-%m-%d
             format? 1202256000
 <integral>  eval: POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", gmtime(1202256000))
   <buubot>  integral: 2008-02-06
      <x86>  nice!
 <integral>  note that if you're not specifying timezone you're in for a
             world of hate
 <integral>  err, *pain
     <iank>  s/pain/butter/
     <iank>  I will dump butter on you unless you specify tz.
     <iank>  Also if you do specify tz.
     <iank>  Fuck it, I will dump butter on you, fullstop.
 <integral>  don't waste good butter on them, try margarine

    -- Timezone'd
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
            <x86>  gah
            <x86>  DateTime::Format::Strptime is not one of the core
                   modules
           <iank>  boo hoo cpan it
        <apeiron>  "i (can't|don't want to) use external modules"
           <iank>  (If only we had some sort of comprehensive archive
                   network.. for perl stuff.. complete with a convenient
                   tool you could use to easily fetch, build, and install
                   modules!)
           <iank>  apeiron: "oh, but you're a dumbass"
           <iank>  "carry on then"
 <simcop2387-lab>  iank! I know I'll call it Ruby on Rails!
       <integral>  well, it'd be different if CPAN and CPANPLUS really
                   were convenient.
            <x86>  POSIX::strptime is not a core module either
            <x86>  this sucks
        <apeiron>  Send patches or shut up. :)
           <iank>  CPAN IS VERY FUCKING CONVENIENT DO YOU WANT ME TO PUNCH
                   YOU IN THE SPLEEN
       <integral>  apt-get : cpan :: brilliant : annoying
           <iank>  this : pretentious and awkward :: 1 : 1
            <x86>  iank: not so conveinent when you're writing software to
                   be deployed on 100 servers and you dont want to have to
                   install the same module 100 times
       <integral>  bundle it with your app.
           <iank>  x86: stop failing at sysadmining
           <iank>  Or that.
       <integral>  They're also pure-perl so this is very, very trivial.
       <integral>  We have PARs which are jsut like Java's JARs for even
                   more deployability win
           <iank>  woohoo
            <mst>  and people have this retarded obsession with only using
                   core
            <mst>  I mean, anybody who does perl for a living grows out of
                   it pretty fucking fast
            <mst>  but there's always colossal whining the first time you
                   tell someone to get something from CPAN
       <integral>  But due to my last point, PAR isn't as well known as it
                   should be
            <mst>  x86: thanks for being today's example :)

    -- CPAN is your Friend (or Enemy)
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
  <mrmccrac->  GumbyBRAIN: who is man bear pig?
 <GumbyBRAIN>  Man i need to get a modification of a fried pig and eating
               without my hands wouldn't be "too much bacon" for me; i
               don't know what @inc is?
       <iank>  mrmccrac-: he is half man, and half bearpig.
            *  shaldannon is half man, half asleep
       <iank>  Half ass leap?
       <iank>  What's a leap?
            *  shaldannon stabs iank
       <iank>  oof
            *  iank punches shaldannon
            *  shaldannon kicks iank in the groin
            *  iank passes out from the pain

    -- As long as you don't resort to violence
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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.

    -- chromatic
    -- Choice of Syntax ( http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/35625 )
%
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.

    -- Mark Jason Dominus
    -- "More about How to Ask a Good Question" ( http://perl.plover.com/Questions4.html )
%
Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to replace a lightbulb?

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

    -- Unknown Author
    -- Lightbulb Jokes - Computers ( http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~omri/Humor/lightbulb.html )
%
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.

    -- Ori Pomerantz
    -- Linux Kernel Module's Programmer Guide ( http://tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.4/html/x149.html )
%
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" ( http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/35804 )
%
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.

    -- chromatic
    -- "Program vs. Script" ( http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/35804 )
%
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.

    -- chromatic
    -- "Program vs. Script" ( http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/35804 )
%
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.

    -- Bjarne Stroustrup
    -- My Other New Computer (Replacement Model) ( http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/04/my_other_new_co.html )
%
Moving pianos is dangerous.
Moving pianos are dangerous.

    -- Language Log
    -- "Nearly All Strings of Words are Ungrammatical" ( http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001816.html )
%
> 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".

    -- Whatsup.org.il Comment ( http://whatsup.org.il/article/6023 )
%
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!

    -- Andy Lester
    -- "Let a thousand flowers bloom" ( http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/sanfrancisco-pm/2008-April/001640.html )
%
 <jrockway>  "omg i have web 2.0 photoship skillz AND LOVE TEH GIT LETS
             MAKE A STARTUP!!!11!!"
  <awwaiid>  it drops my cool-concept impressedness of github like 100
             points
 <jrockway>  that's the rails mentality
 <jrockway>  "I have an idea, so I'm going to make a company"
 <jrockway>  compared to the perl version, "i have an idea, so I'm going
             to write a module"
  <awwaiid>  is that why we're all poor?
 <jrockway>  awwaiid: no, starting companies is not how you get rich :)

    -- What do you do with an idea?
    -- #moose, irc.perl.org
%
    <Khisanth>  <insert obligatory disclaimer about parsing HTML with
                regex>
       <Botje>  Khisanth =~ s/disclaimer/death threat/
    <Khisanth>  I can live with that
       <Botje>  ooh, i got write access on Khisanth
       <Botje>  Khisanth =~ s/must sleep/must give Botje all my money/
       <Botje>  and now we play the waiting game … >:)
 <afallenhope>  Botje, write&
       <Botje>  yeah
             *  Khisanth gives all of Botje's money to himself
       <Botje>  Khisanth: that's not supposed to happen!
             *  Botje resets the universe
    <Khisanth>  buggy code
     <snegtul>  no such thing Khisanth! =)
     <snegtul>  the bugs are a lie!

    -- Manipulating People with Perl
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
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'

    -- fretinator
    -- I can't imagine saying "oh, wow!" about ( http://osnews.com/thread?324615 )
%
 <pkrumins>  Prim's algorithm, om nom nom
  <f00li5h>  cats don't like being trapped in trees, is handy to know how
             to traverse one quickly!
 <pkrumins>  true
 <pkrumins>  the more tree traversal algorithms a kit knows, the sneakier
             the kit is
          *  f00li5h visits every node, travelling on the minimum weighted
             edges
 <pkrumins>  sneaky kit

    -- Cats and Computer Trees
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
<<<

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.

    -- Aristotle Pagaltzis
    -- Re: cpantesters - why exit(0)? ( http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.qa/2008/09/msg11255.html )
%
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

    -- Samuel Beckett
    -- Worstward Ho ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett#Worstward_Ho_.281983.29 )
%
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
    -- "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting" ( http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html )
%
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.

    -- Larry Wall
    -- "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting" ( http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html )
%
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
    -- "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting" ( http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html )
%
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
    -- "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting" ( http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html )
%
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.

    -- Larry Wall
    -- "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting" ( http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html )
%
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.

    -- chromatic
    -- "Re: Module::Build 0.30 is released" ( http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2008/09/msg140206.html )
%
<<<

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.

    -- Based on a page on an Objectivism Site
    -- Glossary of Nazi Germany in the Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Nazi_Germany )
%
     <sQuEE>  eval: [qr/^(\d)(?{ "x{$1}" })$/]
    <buubot>  sQuEE: [qr/(?-xism:^(\d)(?{ "x{$1}" })$)/]
           *  mauke looks at sQuEE
     <sQuEE>  :$
 <fizztpok_>  Man, I always feel like I'm getting the hang of Perl until I
              see nonsense like that.
     <mauke>  what are you trying to do?
     <sQuEE>  im trying to eval qr/$regex/ which contains ^(\d)(??{
              "x{$1}" })$ , but $@ returns null
     <mauke>  no, what are you actually trying to do?
        <ik>  sQuEE: what is the point of doing the thing that you are
              doing?
     <sQuEE>  no, that’s just a testing example
     <sQuEE>  im trying to assign $regex what i captured from a previous
              match using qr// , eval { $regex = qr/$2/ };
     <sQuEE>  im not sure what im doing wrong
     <mauke>  I'm not interested in what you're doing; what are you trying
              to achieve?
        <ik>  You're capturing a regex with a regex and attempting to use
              said regex?
        <ik>  I hope the data you're matching isn't input :(
   <PerlJam>  mauke: I'm trying to achieve world peace and this regex is
              the last thing standing in my way! ;)
  <Khisanth>  there will be no world peace!
           *  Khisanth stabs PerlJam
    <DrForr>  Can I at least have whirled peas?
           *  PerlJam fires up the whirly gig for DrForr and inserts some
              peas
           *  Khisanth dumps a bowl of whirled peas on DrForr's head
    <DrForr>  Mmm, whirled peas.

    -- "What are you trying to achieve?"
    -- #perl, Freenode
%
<<<

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.

    -- Shog9
    -- Stackoverflow.com Question ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/245062?sort=votes )
%
<<<

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

    -- jest
    -- "Worst sentence ever written about programming in the MSM" ( http://use.perl.org/~jest/journal/38229 )
%
<<<

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.

>>>

    -- slamb
    -- "What does 'lose' mean?" (Comment on an Advogato Article) ( http://www.advogato.org/article/793.html#12 )
%
      <mst>  but jrockway will bitch about them all anyway
   <stevan>  rhesa: 100% of those with the last name "Rockway" will do
             that
    <rhesa>  hehehe
     <rjbs>  Subject: catalyst framework not compatible with PERL
 <jrockway>  stevan: i am going to name my kid "Someone is WRONG"
   <stevan>  jrockway: I think that will be implied, no need to actually
             name him that
 <perigrin>  Someone is WRONG rockway
 <perigrin>  has a nice ring to it
  <Penfold>  aka 'little Bobby wrong'?
    <rhesa>  would make a great children's book series: SiW in the zoo etc
   <stevan>  :D
   <stevan>  the first one in the series should be Someone is Wrong on the
             internet
 <jrockway>  rhesa: that is a great idea!
 <jrockway>  rhesa: i have a friend who is writing a children's book
 <jrockway>  i will tell her to change the title and content immediately!
 <jrockway>  someone is wrong in the children's book industry!
     <rjbs>  "No, zookeeper. That animal doesn't have a tail; it's *not* a
             monkey!"

    -- "Someone is Wrong"
    -- #moose, irc.perl.org
%
      <jrockway>  btw, feel free to LOL:
                  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/605641/how-to-use-classarrayobjects
      <jrockway>  wow, such concise code
      <jrockway>  and i can FEEL THE SPEED from using arrays
          <rjbs>  bowl full of mush
       <rindolf>  jrockway: there was a discussion about using arrays as
                  objects in module-authors.
      <jrockway>  i read it and laughed
      <jrockway>  (yeah, someone is wrong on the internet, but i don't
                  really care)
          <rjbs>  I use JSON strings as my objects, and define my classes
                  in terms of regexps that pull out the right attributes.
          <rjbs>  It makes the code portable to JavaScript, except the
                  methods.
      <jrockway>  great plan!
      <jrockway>  regexps are fast in perl, because perl is designed for
                  parsing text
          <rjbs>  tx, can I add "endorsed by jon rockway" to my precis?
      <jrockway>  oh yeah
      <jrockway>  i recommend you reverse the JSON first, though, to
                  provide better encapsulation
      <jrockway>  otherwise people could read the objects… and that breaks
                  encapsulation, dontchaknow
          <rjbs>  I use UTF-16 and rot4096.
      <jrockway>  UTF-16 IS TOO SLOW!
       <rindolf>  Heh.
      <jrockway>  i can't believe we are even having this conversation…
                  utf-16…
      <jrockway>  i am never speaking to you again!
               *  rindolf wonders how one can combine JSON with inside-out
                  objects.
          <rjbs>  jrockway: no, no, WITHOUT the bom
          <rjbs>  BOM is what makes it slow.
          <rjbs>  rindolf: sub id { my $self = shift; $json_parser_for{
                  $self }->decode($json_for{ $self })->{id} }
       <rindolf>  rjbs: LOL.
       <rindolf>  rjbs++
         <Dylan>  unicode: somebody set us up the BOM
        <ilmari>  BOM-de-ada
       <rindolf>  Where's the BOM? There was supposed to be an
                  earth-shattering Ka-BOM!
          <rjbs>  I think Iran has it.
      <perigrin>  if it doesn't … Sen. McCain will introduce a bill to
                  provide them with one
          <rjbs>  give the bom bom bom, bom to Iran
          <rjbs>  funnier if you pronounce Iran properly
      <perigrin>  iran … iran so far away …
       <rindolf>  iRack - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw2nkoGLhrE
       <autarch>  someone set us up the BOM
 <jnapiorkowski>  I thought all our base waz ownzed or something like that
               *  confound is the king of BOM
          <rjbs>  who's the BOM king?
      <confound>  I'm the BOM king!
           <ubu>  "once i was the King of BOM"
          <rjbs>  hear me now

    -- Lightning Fast Objects
    -- #moose, irc.perl.org
%
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.

    -- David E. Wheeler
    -- pgTAP 0.20 Infiltrates Community ( http://testanything.org/pipermail/tap-l/2009-March/000314.html )
%
I'm a Lesbian born in a man's body.

    -- Unclear (origin needed)
    -- Unknown
%
<<<

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

    -- Barry Jones
    -- Barry Jones Quotes ( http://www.answers.com/topic/jones-barry-1 )
%
<<<

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

>>>

Unknown, quoted by [Admiral Hyman G.
Rickover](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover)

    -- Hyman G. Rickover
    -- Hyman G. Rickover Quotes ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/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](http://lib.cet.ac.il/Pages/item.asp?item=11025)

    -- Rabbi Mathiah Ben Charash
    -- Pirkei Avot 4, 15 ( http://lib.cet.ac.il/Pages/item.asp?item=11025 )
%
<<<

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

    -- Rabi Hanina, The Jewish Talmud
    -- "Three Levels of Learnings" (from "Thoughts about the Best Introductory (Programming) Language") ( http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/education/introductory-language/#three_levels_of_learning )
%
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.

    -- palegray.net
    -- "Re: Breaking News" Slashdot Comment ( http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1456036&cid=30220056 )
%
Yesterday I asked one of my students if she knew what an encyclopedia is, and
she said: "Is it something like Wikipedia?".

    -- alisonclement
    -- Twitter Twit ( http://twitter.com/alisonclement/status/8421314259 )
%
<<<

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

    -- J. Hall
    -- Post to writers@mit.edu . ( http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/writers )
%
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.

    -- Valerie Aurora
    -- "Sleeping with the enemy" ( http://valerieaurora.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/sleeping-with-the-enemy/ )
%
And truth be told I miss you.

And truth be told I'm lying.

    -- The All American Rejects
    -- "Gives You Hell" Lyrics ( http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics/allamericanrejects/givesyouhell.html )
%
*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.

    -- Rob Pike
    -- Slashdot Interview ( http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1153211&tid=189 )
%
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.

    -- Larry Wall
    -- "Perl, the first postmodern computer language" ( http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html )
%
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!). :-)

    -- ShadowRangerRIT
    -- "Re: Prettier Tool, Old Exploit" ( http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1704998&cid=32757810 )
%
Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to
death with a loaded Uzi.

    -- Larry Wall
    -- "Re: grep on keys of associative array s-l-o-w. Why?" (comp.lang.perl Usenet post) ( http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl/msg/3f6752f53590c106?pli=1 )
%
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](http://community.livejournal.com/shlomif_tech/37969.html) 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?

    -- Gabor Szabo
    -- What does "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." really mean? ( http://szabgab.com/blog/2009/11/1259431123.html )
%
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.

    -- Gabor Szabo
    -- Gabor Szabo (Perl programmer and trainer) ( http://szabgab.com/ )
%
(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!

    -- nitehawk214
    -- USPTO Issues Provisional Storyline Patent ( http://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/11/04/0239221/ )
%
<<<

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

    -- vanguard
    -- Freenode's ##programming
%
                *  Juliet|Awesome should publish her short stories
   <cmptrgeekken>  can #so get a discount, juju?
 <Juliet|Awesome>  only if you say nice things about them
   <cmptrgeekken>  "This book is teh s3x"
 <Juliet|Awesome>  I'm like one of those people who is so overly critical
                   about her writing and has such an intense fear of
                   failure that I never… ummmm…. get around to it
          <madsy>  Juliet|Awesome: Your title can be "Kawaii". Now get to
                   it ;-)
 <Juliet|Awesome>  Once upon a time there was midwestern computer
                   programmer who couldn't bring herself to write the
                   warped and tortured stories spinning round and round
                   her sordid imagination
       <jessicah>  and then a kiwi married her and made all things right
                   in her world
       <jessicah>  ;)
 <Juliet|Awesome>  Then she did, and it was awesome, for she was awesome.
                   She absolutely radiated with awesomeness, so much so it
                   gave all the kids at the nearby elementary school a
                   rare form of leukemia and radiation sickness

    -- The Awesome princess, rescued by the awesome prince on his awesome white horse
    -- #stackoverflow, Freenode
%
An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

    -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Attributed)
    -- Mohandas Gandhi's Quotes ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Gandhi )
%
Princess Vespa: I am Princess Vespa, daughter of Roland, King of the Druids.

Lone Starr: Oh great. That's all we needed. A Druish princess.

Barf: Funny, she doesn't look Druish.

    -- Mel Brooks
    -- Spaceballs ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/ )
%
[Greg the tech support guy is sitting in a Veterans club along with a veteran.]

Veteran: Tech support? What the hell kind of wussy veteran experience is
*that*?!

Greg: Look, pal, *you* try to deal rationally with a horde of puerile,
clueless, I-make-more-money-than-you-so-fix-this-now dorks on a daily basis
and then tell me who should get a medal.

[Pause.]

Veteran: I…I'm sorry. I didn't know...

Greg: Buddy, you have just *no idea* what *real* pain is about.

    -- Illiad
    -- UserFriendly Comic Strip for 10 October, 2001 ( http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20011010 )
%
   <Lubaf>  “yo dawg, we heard you like recursion, so we put a yo dawg, we
            heard you like recursion, so we put a yo dawg, we heard you
            like recursion…”
 <rindolf>  Lubaf: :-)
   <Lubaf>  Further variation: “yo dawg, we heard you don’t like
            fractals.”

    -- Yo Dawg
    -- #wikipedia, Freenode
%
There was one Napoleon, one George Washington, and one me!

    -- Jim Cash and Joe Epps Jr.
    -- Dick Tracy (1990 film) ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dick_Tracy_%281990_film%29 )
%
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

    -- Unknown
    -- Unknown
%
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?

    -- Daniel Browning
    -- Post to the Portland Perl Mongers Mailing List ( http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/pdx-pm-list/2011-September/006227.html )
%
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.

    -- Omega-00
    -- You Down with UDP? ( http://gregsowell.com/?p=2742 )
%
The best thing about a UDP joke is that I don’t care if you get it or not.

    -- Brandon
    -- You Down with UDP? ( http://gregsowell.com/?p=2742 )
%
Golden rule #12: When the comments do not match the code, they probably are
both wrong ;)

    -- Steven Rostedt
    -- Post to the Linux kernel mailing list ( http://lwn.net/Articles/433900/ )
%
<<<

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.

    -- Tim Flink
    -- Re: Fedora QA and Google Summer of Code 2012 ( http://lwn.net/Articles/490476/ )
%
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.

    -- Boutros
    -- NewsBiscuit Post ( http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2012/06/08/children-warned-name-of-first-pet-should-contain-8-characters-and-a-digit/ )
%
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.

    -- Lars Wirzenius
    -- Post to debian-devel ( http://lwn.net/Articles/509254/ )
%
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.

    -- Eric Raymond
    -- The Cathedral and the Bazaar ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ )
%
Thank God I found the good in goodbye!

    -- Beyoncé
    -- “Best Thing I Never Had”
%
Do one thing every day that scares you.

    -- Eleanor Roosevelt
    -- Quote ( http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/35592.html )
%
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. :-)

    -- Larry Wall
    -- Larry Wall’s “Perl Culture” Keynote ( http://cos.polyamory.org/text/T/lwall-keynote.txt )
%
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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!”

    -- Israeli Joke
    -- Google Plus Post ( https://plus.google.com/u/0/103225189892672551610/posts/JayT3qQFe2w )
%
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?”

    -- Unknown
    -- Joke ( http://jokes4all.net/joke_2138.html )
%
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.

    -- Unknown
    -- Joke ( http://shlomif.livejournal.com/66017.html )
%
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.”

    -- Unknown
    -- Jokes: Comprehending Engineers ( http://pages.infinit.net/garrick/jokes/engineers.html )
%
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.

    -- Larry Wall
    -- "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting" ( http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html )
%
I’m worser at superlatives.
And I don’t ever use no double negatives.

    -- James at War
    -- “Bad Grammar” ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj6QqCH7g0Q )
%
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.

    -- Terry Pratchett
    -- Wyrd Sisters ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd_Sisters )
%
I figured wrong (with a capital R).

    -- Harvey Danger
    -- “Wine, Women, and Song” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbpW418PDxQ )
%
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!”

    -- Unknown
    -- Joke ( http://rabbicandybox.blogspot.ca/2008/09/talking-to-wall-joke.html )
%
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 that 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.

    -- Lawrence Lessig
    -- Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_%28book%29 )
%
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](http://metacpan.org/release/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*. I've
heard it, actually I even read about it in in [The Productive
Programmer](http://productiveprogrammer.com/) I mentioned earlier in [The
Quest for the Perfect
Editor](http://szabgab.com/the-quest-for-the-perfect-editor.html) 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.

    -- Gabor Szabo
    -- “Yak Shaving” Blog Post ( http://szabgab.com/yak-shaving.html )
%
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?

    -- Ron Gilbert
    -- Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Island_2%3A_LeChuck%27s_Revenge )
%
Tim Berners-Lee's abandonment of the [Dexter Model for
hypertext](http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~mm/pdf/dexter.pdf) 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.

    -- Mark Leighton Fisher
    -- “Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web, and the Dexter Model” blog post ( http://use.perl.org/use.perl.org/_Mark%2BLeighton%2BFisher/journal/35016.html )
%
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

    -- Peter Ustinov
    -- Peter Ustinov Quotes ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Ustinov )
%
If Botticelli were alive today, he’d be working for Vogue.

    -- Peter Ustinov
    -- Peter Ustinov Quotes ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Ustinov )
%
Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

    -- Peter Ustinov
    -- Peter Ustinov Quotes ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Ustinov )
%
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

    -- Avicii
    -- “Wake Me Up” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Me_Up_%28Avicii_song%29 )
%
Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine,
public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health,
what have the Romans ever done for us?

Attendee: Brought peace?

Reg: Oh, peace - shut up!

    -- Monty Python
    -- Life of Brian (1979) ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/quotes )
%
Life is a strange thing. Just when you think you learned how to use it, it’s
gone.

    -- Shakespears Sister
    -- “Hello (Turn Your Radio On)” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_%28Turn_Your_Radio_On%29 )
%
Ape of Death: Shut up! Now you shall burn! You and your wife with the
ridiculous hair.

Vince Noir: Ridiculous hair? Have you seen yours? It’s like
split-ends-central!

Ape of Death: Shut up!

Vince Noir: Well look at it - it’s an Urban Fuzz.

Ape of Death: Shut your gub!

Vince Noir: You look ridiculous - it's like a ginger ball bag.

Ape of Death: Shut up I say! [ Rises up. ]

I’ve always had problems with my hair. Even as a child. It’s not curly, it’s
not straight. It’s somewhere in between. If I wash it, it becomes too dry, if
I lead [ ? ] it, it become too greasy.

I can't do a thing with it.

Vince Noir: Listen, there are hair products - straighteners, finishing gel.

Ape of Death: Finishing gel? What is finishing gel?

Vince Noir: Where have you been. I could sort your hair out in six minutes.

Ape of Death: Why didn’t you tell me about this? Davy? Nemo?

[The two Mandrill guards lower their gazes]

Ape of Death: You can do this for me?

[Message on the screen - “Six Minutes Later”]

Ape of Death: This is sheer liquid wonderment. For this smashing gift, I shall
set you both free. Thank you.

Vince Noir: Don’t thank me, thank Naboo’s Miracle Wax.

Ape of Death: Look at me. I’m so confident, and feel strong and super-sexy.

Hit it!

    -- The Mighty Boosh
    -- The Mighty Boosh - “The Ape of Death” Scene ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8cDbj8mLKg )
%
 <Shammah>  any time I see people talk about "Big O" as if it's some magic
            voodoo I cringe hard
 <Shammah>  > I have worked +7 years as a programmer and still don't know
            what Big O is
 <Shammah>  > Big O is very important and is one of the most important
            things you should learn!
 <Shammah>  bro, you can learn it in 10 minutes
 <Shammah>  it's not a big deal
 <Shammah>  > In particular, "Big O" (and its related data structures and
            algorithms concepts) is a key concept to making programs go
            fast.
 <Shammah>  shit like that
 <Shammah>  rustles my jimmies so hard
 <Shammah>  my poor jimmies
   <k-hos>  non stop jimmies vibration
  <_bryan>  the cloud is more annoying
  <_bryan>  aka the internet renamed
 <Shammah>  A series of tubes 3.0
  <_bryan>  my old company launched a cloud marketing campaign on the
            cloud
  <_bryan>  not a single customer of mine knew or cared
 <Shammah>  In particular, "Big O" (and its related data structures and
            algorithms concepts) is a key concept to making programs go
            fast.
 <Shammah>  the fuck did i just read
 <altered>  written by this guy http://i.imgur.com/Tsm63TJ.png
 <Shammah>  D:
   <k-hos>  sanic the hodgepodge!
 <Jonas__>  Shammah, you don't use big o magic?
 <Jonas__>  I use the big-o lib for everything
 <Shammah>  uh
 <Shammah>  I just use std::bigO();
 <Jonas__>  that's not even fast
 <Shammah>  :|
 <Jonas__>  boost::bigO<T>() is like the least you should even consider
 <Jonas__>  it's boosted so it's faster
 <Shammah>  sounds legit

    -- Big O No
    -- ##reddit-gamedev, Freenode
%
A fanatic: one who redoubles his efforts after he has forgotten his aim.

    -- George Santayana
    -- ESR: “Evaluating the harm from closed source” ( http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4371 )
%
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.

    -- Pascal Hartig
    -- “Building Vim from 1993 today” ( https://passy.svbtle.com/building-vim-from-1993-today )
%
* 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.

    -- tan620
    -- D&D Reddit “D&D Stats Explained With Tomatoes” ( http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1s9l2g/dd_stats_explained_with_tomatoes/ )
%
Some people were allocating memory before it was cool. These people are called
heapsters.

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

    -- Herm Albright
    -- “Herm Albright’s ‘Positive Attitude’” ( https://camelsnose.wordpress.com/2007/01/07/herm-albrights-positive-attitude/ )
%
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.”

    -- Herm Albright
    -- “Herm Albright’s ‘Positive Attitude’” ( https://camelsnose.wordpress.com/2007/01/07/herm-albrights-positive-attitude/ )
%
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

    -- Ken Thompson (Attributed)
    -- Ken Thompson Quote ( http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/k/kenthompso254858.html )
%
Anything less than the best is a felony.

    -- Vanilla Ice
    -- “Ice Ice Baby” Song ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Ice_Baby )
%
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.

    -- Jason Riggs
    -- Reply to “What do you think about starting new activities at the age of 36 like music or exercising?” on Quora.com ( http://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-starting-new-activities-at-the-age-of-36-like-music-or-exercising#ans3512602 )
%
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.

    -- Linus Torvalds
    -- Post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List ( http://lwn.net/Articles/509417/ )
%
“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.

    -- Aristotle (the Perl enthusiast)
    -- “Backcompat is holding us back!” ( http://blogs.perl.org/users/aristotle/2013/06/decade-scale.html )
%
*The Wise Janitor:* You gotta go out there, believe in the ball, and throw
yourself.

    -- Various Writers
    -- Not Another Teen Movie ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_another_teen_movie )
%
Reportedly, SANE (= “Scanner Access Now Easy”) was called that way in part so
one can say “TWAIN is not SANE!”.

    -- Via an Israeli FOSS Enthusiast.
    -- Unknown
%
Open source software: each person contributes a brick, but ultimately each
person receives a house in return.

    -- Brendan Scott (Attributed)
    -- Unknown
%
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.

    -- Ze Frank
    -- Unknown
%
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.

    -- Bart Baker
    -- Meghan Trainor - “All About That Bass” PARODY ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6xXEaWz5Iw )
%
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.

    -- Bart Baker
    -- Meghan Trainor - “All About That Bass” PARODY ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6xXEaWz5Iw )
%
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.

    -- xeno
    -- Chat on Freenode’s ##programming
%
There's only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of
other people's cultures, and the Dutch.

    -- Mike Myers, and Michael McCullers
    -- Austin Powers in Goldmember ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295178/quotes )
%
The greatest threat to authors and creative artists is not piracy — it’s
obscurity.

    -- Tim O’Reilly
    -- “Piracy is progressive taxation.” ( http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/08/piracy-is-progressive-taxation.html )
%
Tech needs less wizards, ninjas, and rockstars, and way more sociologists.

    -- Noah Slater
    -- Tweet ( https://twitter.com/nslater/status/545592700289155072 )
%
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.

    -- Greg Onufer
    -- Xee’s source code ( https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m )
%
Stop reinventing wheels, start building space rockets.

    -- www.cpan.org
    -- Motto of CPAN ( http://www.cpan.org/ )
%
The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.

    -- Mike Haetel (the original author of GNU grep)
    -- “Why GNU grep is fast” ( http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-August/019310.html )
%
“You may not work around any technical limitations in the software”

— Windows Vista licence

    -- Microsoft
    -- Windows Vista EULA ( http://arachnoid.com/boycott/ )
%
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!!”.

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

    -- Ultimate Giggles
    -- Facebook Post ( https://www.facebook.com/UltimateGiggles/photos/a.376099992500511.1073741828.375895982520912/837769873000185/?type=3 )
%
It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have lost at all.

    -- Samuel Butler (Unsourced)
    -- Unknown
%
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.

    -- Lars Wirzenius
    -- New project? Start with the scaffolding ( http://yakking.branchable.com/posts/scaffolding/ )
%
The cool thing about Vim is — you find something interesting with every typo.

    -- Su-Shee
    -- Freenode’s #perl conversation
%
<<<

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.

    -- chromatic
    -- Comment on “What Testing DSLs Get Wrong” ( http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/04/what-testing-dsls-get-wrong.html )
%
I achieved my fast times by multitudes of 1% reductions.

    -- Bill Raymond
    -- Post to the Freecell Solver mailing list ( https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fc-solve-discuss/conversations/messages/222 )
%
I shall explain: *Monologue*: one person talking to himself ; *Dialogue*: like
Monologue - two people talking to themselves.

    -- Shaike Ophir
    -- The English Teacher ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bpVrKm9QCc )
%
"How can you trust an encyclopedia that everyone can edit?" How can you trust
an encyclopedia that no one can edit!!

    -- David Shay
    -- Talk on an Israeli FOSS Conference
%
<<<

<<<

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.

    -- Michael G Schwern
    -- Post to the Perl-QA mailing list ( https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.qa/2005/07/msg4492.html )
%
The Wise Janitor: Look, the thing that happened with Marty - it wasn't your
fault.

The Wise Janitor: OK, it was your fault…

    -- Various Writers
    -- Not Another Teen Movie ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_another_teen_movie )
%
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.

    -- Eric Raymond
    -- The Cathedral and the Bazaar ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ )