Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Old Spice theme song

Heard the same piece of music 3 days in a row on the Discovery and have been trying to place it - finally tracked it back to the Old Spice theme song, which in turn is from 'O Fortuna', part of the collection known as the Carmina Burana. The composition by Carl Orff has been used in quite a few movies and TV spots to highlight a dramatic conflict.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Quote unquote

Fond of collecting quotes - these are related to software, which inherently lends itself to being lampooned. Thanks to stack overflow and google.
  • There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who can read binary and those who cannot. – Anon
  • Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. - Keith Bostic
  • In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. – Anon
  • If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. – Edsger Dijkstra
  • A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. – Mitch Ratcliffe
  • If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. – Gerald Weinberg
  • Nine people can’t make a baby in a month. – Fred Brooks
  • There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence. – Jeremy S. Anderson
  • The gap between theory and practice is not as wide in theory as it is in practice. – Anon
  • In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Another version of the above
  • We have a deal with God – he doesn’t produce software and we do not produce miracles – A s/w engineer
  • Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over? — Anonymous developer
  • Software and cathedrals are much the same – first we build them, then we pray — Samuel T. Redwine, Jr.
  • The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. – Larry Wall, in the Programming Perl book
  • Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. - Rick Osborne
  • Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. - Jamie Zawinski
  • If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. - Robert Sewell
  • On a clear disk you can seek forever. - Anon
  • The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry. - Henry Petroski
  • C++ : Where friends have access to your private members. - Gavin Russell Baker