Friday, June 19, 2009

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Friday, June 12, 2009

On joining an EMC NAS to a SAMBA 3.x domain

I have a SAMBA 3.x domain with security = user, so each SAMBA account must have a corresponding entry to /etc/passwd. The same thing holds for machine accounts, although Debian complains that machinename$ is not a valid user name.

The password-based join is what people should prefer to use, but 'smbpasswd -a -m' should match NT4 is this respect (setting a password matching the machine name).

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Mathematical Point of View

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?
Here's a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:
If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.
Then:
H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%
And
K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%
But,
A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%
And,
B-U-L-L -S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%
AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.
A-S-S-K-I-S-S -I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+ 9+14+7 = 118%
So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that While Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, it's the Bullshit and Ass Kissing that will put you over the top.

Team Work

There are four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would do it, Anybody could have done it but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.