“For profanity to appear in a program’s interaction with the user, no explicit requirement is needed when it is a common practice in the given branch of the industry.”
(the Iron Fist Coding Standard, September 2010)
Category Archives: Technical
i have no facebook login and i must scream
“We need to give this effect a name. I suggest ‘Idiot Storm’.”
(BabylonDrifter at comment 283 on the great Facebook login tarpit of 2010)
Mirroring online
I’ve just discovered the Journalpress plugin for WordPress, and plugged it into Stringybark and Greenhide, so it will mirror everything to S&B, Reloaded from now on.
So if there’s a sudden glut of imported posts clogging your reading page, well, now you know.
quote of the day
“Training wheels are a best practice—for learning how to ride a bicycle. They’re not a best practice for riding the tour de France.”
(cashto, on not writing unit tests)
SID metric of the month
“Malware code is often written very simply and quite securely, server administration isn’t nearly as good.”
(Peter Gutmann, professional paranoid, on Malware as a Service)
quote of the day
“Doing loops with tail recursion is wonderful, except when it’s not.”
(Tim Bray, having an Erlang moment)
OS X is a Unix, alright
“UNIX IS user friendly, its just picky about who its friends are.”
(anonymous)
I’ve put www.r3.net.au back on buffy instead of thomas. Now buffy’s decided its mysqld should not talk to dangerous strangers, such as the local Moodle instance. Sigh…
free knowledge!
The Software Carpentry course covers scripting and crunching in Python for scientists and engineers. And Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering book is out as a digital text. 
found on gumption@yahoogroups.com
“Who am I? I’m Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andrei and Sofie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is gonna kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart. I’m death incarnate and the last living thing that you’re ever going to see. God sent me.”
(Ivanova in Babylon 5: Between the Darkness and the Light)
Quote of the Day
” The programmers of old were mysterious and profound.
We cannot fathom their thoughts, so all we do is describe their appearance.
Aware, like a fox crossing the water.
Alert, like a general on the battlefield.
Kind, like a hostess greeting her guests.
Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.
Opaque, like black pools in darkened caves.
Who can tell the secrets of their hearts and minds?
The answer exists only in the Tao.”
(Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming)