Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon

Feed your sigmonster : the Contempt page contains some fine quotes from people like Dijkstra, Pitman and Baker ventilating their opinion on computer languages. C or Perl zealots may put on their asbestos suit :

"The perl programmer who veers off the road into the forest will get out of his car and cut down each and every tree that blocks his progress, then drive a few meters and repeat the whole process. whether he gets where he wanted to go or not is immaterial - a perl programmer will happily keep moving forward and look busy.

What really pisses me off with Perl is that people work so hard doing so terribly little while they think they have worked very little doing something really nifty. Fools!"

kristof Thu, 05/18/2006 - 21:28

In reply to by Serge van Gind…

Damnit ! I'm way too tired today to blog decently. Self-LARTing applied...
Thanx for the proofreading, Serge.

The Urban Dictionary

If Wikipedia is too dry or too objective for you, then the Urban Dictionary will give you some cool slang definitions to quote around. Some examples to give you a chuckle :

* Sun : Sun Microsystems. As in Damn that stock is going down like Sun Microsystems.

* Marriage : Suicide in it's worst form.
Jerry: Dude, Ben committed marriage yesterday.
Joe: Holy shit dude. Well, so much for hanging out with ben.

* Frodo : that last bit of poo that wont drop into the toilet : an annoying little shit that wont let go of the ring. As in :
-Are you okay in there?
-Yeah, but I gotta frodo. Come back in like 10 minutes

Serge van Gind… Thu, 05/18/2006 - 11:27

I'm afraid there's something wrong with the 'Urban Dictionary' link? It's pointing to http://kristof.willen.be/ now.

Anonymous Wed, 05/24/2006 - 23:24

* Debian : lets party like it's 1999 with all the binaries from 1999

* Ubuntu : Ubuntu is an ancient african word, meaning "I can't configure Debian"

* Gentoo : It takes three commands to install Gentoo; this is the first one :
# cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6

Proportionally sized

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

--The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

If you ever wondered how the Earth measures up to other planets or the Sun, this site might be something for you.

InstaLinux

InstaLinux is a new website developed by open source enthusiasts based on code released by Hewlett Packard allows users to point and click through a few simple screens to generate a small (less than 30 MB) installation image. When booted, it will install an operating system via the network according to the user's specifications. Debian, Ubuntu and KUbuntu are all supported on x86 and x86_64 platforms, as well as several other distributions.

The state of Linux graphics

Jon Smirl has put up a nice overview of the current (pre-X11R7) state of Linux graphics. If you wanna read more about XGL, XAA and DRI, check it out.

Speaking of which, I got a problem on my SparcDebian where the upgrade to X11R7 refuses to start, and causes a machine hang. Seems that on Sparc I'm not the only one...