Desire

Tis easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it

– Benjamin Franklin in Way to Wealth

From pick the brain, found via reddit

I should have quoted one about staying away from debt

Living a satisfied life

Living in the Place you Belong,
with the People you Love,
doing the Right Work,
on Purpose

– Leider and Shapiro in Repacking your bags

People who write bad code…

“People who write bad code spend their lives fixing it. That’s one big reason they’re so slow.”

– Kevin Barnes on his Code Craft weblog

Kevin makes this statement while trying to answer why great coders get paid to little.

I think the underlying principle is quite simple: it is very hard to know if a programmer is really good. Or, in Kevins words “the manager has only a fairly limited capacity to recognize the skill of the engineer”. Anybody can call himself a programmer or web developer.

While you think about this, do read coding horror’s Why can’t programmers.. program? The answer seems to be “Hire Tough”.

With all these programmers blogging about the art and craft of programming, the question rises: how good are these writers themselves? How good a programmer am I?

Television is like…

“Television is just like making a hole in the wall. All kinds of stuff comes in, on the screen, that we would never allow to come in through the door.”
– Albert Borgmann

“You shift time to the television. If you start watching television, there’s something else you’re not doing. Who knows what you were doing before?”
– Annie Lang

Via NY Times

(Somehow, for me, this time shifting seems to apply to the PC and Internet)

Coffee Time Comics: Nerds, Dweebs and Geeks

It seems I got a little distracted from reading tech news, python podcasts and other geek brain food.

My personal favourite: Geek Pantheon (Don’t forget to click ‘next’; it totals 5 pages)

C: “Hey nerds!”

G: “If you’re going to give us a title, we prefer geeks.”

So what if you understand maths / physics / chemistry and majored in Artificial Intelligence? That doesn’t make you a nerd.

Normals just don’t get it

Marriage and science don’t mix

“Really, what’s the point of discovering the greatest thing in the world if you have no one to tell it to when you come home?”

– Bob in Marriage And Great Science Don’t Mix

Found at Steve Mitchell’s

Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman in an interview on LinuxInsider

The idea of the free software movement is that software users are morally entitled to four essential freedoms, essential for living as part of a free society where people can cooperate when they wish:

1. Freedom to run the program, as you wish.
2. Freedom to study the source code, and change it to do what you wish.
3. Freedom to make copies and distribute them to others, when you wish.
4. Freedom to distribute modified versions, when you wish.

Instead of giving priority to freedom and community, the open source philosophy agrees with Microsoft that what matters is making software powerful, reliable and convenient.

People who hold those views have a right to their opinion. I disagree with their opinion, so I vociferously object when people label me or GNU/Linux with the slogan open source.

Anyone committing aggression with software patents deserves bad things to happen

High Gene Fork Ode

“Refactoring is personal hygiene for code”

– Kevlin Henney

Gevonden via NLUUG