Friday, June 16, 2006

Where is God?

Instead of spamming all my firends, I'm posting a joke Bob e-mailed me. Read at your own risk.
---

A couple had two little boys who were always getting into trouble.
Their parents knew that if any mischief occurred in their village, their sons
were probably involved.

The boys' mother heard that an elder in town had been successful in
disciplining children, so she asked if he would speak with her sons.
The elder agreed, but asked to see them separately.

So, the mother sent her youngest son first, in the morning. The elder,
a huge man with a booming voice, sat the boy down and asked him sternly,
"Where is God?" The boy's mouth dropped open, but he made no response.
So the elder repeated the question in an even sterner tone, "Where is God!!?"
Again the wide-eyed boy made no attempt to answer.

The elder raised his voice and bellowed, "WHERE IS GOD!?" The boy
screamed and bolted from the room, ran directly home and dove into a closet,
slamming the door behind him.

When his older brother found him hiding, he asked, "What happened?"
The younger brother, gasping for breath, replied, "We are in BIG
trouble this time. God is missing, and they think WE did it!"

Friday, June 02, 2006

For my programming buddies

O'Reilly has a brief piece on the distinction between engineers and software developers, Why We're Not Really Engineers (via reddit.com). I'm not a coder, but I can appreciate the programming process being improved. Better development processes, better software. More productivity for the rest of us.

While wer'e on the topic, Oracle Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson recently criticized the software industry and its culture of "patch, patch, patch."

"What if civil engineers built bridges the way developers write code?" she asked. "What would happen is that you would get the blue bridge of death appearing on your highway in the morning."

Hopefully tools like Alloy will lead to less "blue bridges of death".