The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.— Vincent Lombardi
Recently in Quotable Category
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson
On the same theme as yesterday's quotable:
Software needs an editor like a writer needs an editor or a museum needs a curator.
-- Jason Fried
Once you get a piece of code to the point where you believe it works - it’s passing its tests - go back over it and edit it. That is, go back and edit it for clarity, flow, and style. Just as if it were an essay.
-- Michael McCracken [via Daring Fireball]
Referring to an article in the Wall Street Journal on the problems Duke University recently suffered and initially blamed on the presence of iPhone's on campus (proven to be a bogus excuse), John Gruber of Daring Fireball comes up with this translation:
Translation: A lot of IT infrastructure is fragile rickety crap, and the people responsible for it aren’t smart enough to fix it so they make rules and place blame based on little more than superstition.
Based on my experience he's right, but I'm not sure I'd use such harsh words. I think the typical IT staffer is far less motivated and up-to-date is more adapt then saying these people aren't smart. They also operate in a highly political environment that saps intelligence.
I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time.
-- Charles M. Schulz
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charlie Mingus
Posted on Mike Doughty's weblog:
I watch the American Idol.
It is the terrible awful show.
Watching it makes Jesus angry.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. -- Henry David Thoreau
This was in my (unconfigured) Gmail Web Clip display when I checked my mail this afternoon.
...all the PHP code I’ve seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places. -- Tim Bray
I've done a bit of PHP coding and I have to agree. I was lost trying to structure my code in some clean and reusable way. The PHP code in MT using Smarty isn't too bad, but its hardly the norm. I think ultimately the problem is that PHP makes it easy for people who don't know what they are doing to achieve results even at the expense of good solid development practices and methodologies.
