April 15, 2009
“HAVE YOU EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT THIS PROJECT FOR MORE THAN A MILLISECOND? THE SPEC FOR THIS PROJECT WILL BE 5,000 PAGES! IT WILL TAKE THOUSANDS OF MAN-YEARS TO IMPLEMENT, AND *NOBODY* WILL UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKS OR HOW TO USE IT, EVEN IF WE SOMEHOW MANAGE TO LAUNCH IT!”
The thought that has gone through every software developer’s mind at some point during a big project, as channeled throuh the inimitable Steve Yegge.
March 31, 2009
Zeppelin Sightings: Over Stanford this Weekend

They put up one of my airship photos.

March 29, 2009
Square Wave, also by Steve Hanov. Fanboyish to post two links back-to-back but this one hit a little too close to home for me.

Square Wave, also by Steve Hanov. Fanboyish to post two links back-to-back but this one hit a little too close to home for me.

How a programmer reads your resume by Steve Hanov. Seems like this would work pretty well. By way of Jeremy Zawodny.

How a programmer reads your resume by Steve Hanov. Seems like this would work pretty well. By way of Jeremy Zawodny.

March 27, 2009
“Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday blamed the global economic crisis on “white people with blue eyes” and said it was wrong that black and indigenous people should pay for white people’s mistakes.”
I’m usually all about blaming whitey for most troubles, but maybe this is a bit much. From the Financial Times, by way of a colleague.  (My eyes are green, and probably bloodshot by the way.)

Creme That Egg! (via allonewordplease) — a Rube Goldberg contraption can make pretty much anything better.

March 12, 2009
“The file system is not “truncating” files. The application is truncating the files, or is constantly overwriting the files using the rename system call. This is a fundamentally unsafe thing to do, and ext3 just happened to paper things over.”
Theodore Ts’o in a bug comment on how data loss can occur on Ext4. Knowing how the file system works is what separates real programmers from people that hack things together (i.e. people like me).  By way of Jeremy Zawodny.
February 15, 2009

Count files in subdirectories

find . -type f -print | awk '{ FS="/"; print $2; }' | uniq -c | sort -n

There’s not an easy way (as far as I know) to get a summary of how many files are in each subdirectory of a given parent directory, so I came up with this one-liner.

February 9, 2009
“Customer: ‘You’re part computer?’
Me: ‘Yes sir, I am a cyborg.’”
Not Always Right. I always wanted to say something like this when I worked tech support.
February 8, 2009
Flickr: The Far side Reenactments Pool

by way of Jeff Atwood.