“Nobody wants ‘backup’. Everybody wants ‘restore’.”
— Heard on the Self-Hosted show, one of my favourite tech podcasts.
Category Archives: Quotes
The Geek’s Prayer
From Phil Giammattei‘s Mastodon feed…
Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention,
the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
(Thanks to Rupert Curwen for reposting.)
And the lion shall lie down with…?
From our “this may help you win a bet in the pub” collection…
If you know the quiz show ‘QI’, you might imagine Stephen Fry asking “With whom will the lion lie down?”, and Alan Davies sheepishly responding “The lamb?”… before the claxons start, indicating a wrong answer.
Because if you look at Isaiah chapter 11, where the concept originates, you find rather different domestic arrangements:
“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
So unless they were all getting cozy around the same campfire, I’m afraid lions and lambs aren’t prophesied to lie down together any time soon. As is so often the case, someone came up with a snappier version later on, and that’s what stuck with us.
Now, is anyone else now thinking about that scene in Ghostbusters?
A work of art is never finished
“A work of art”, so the saying goes, “is never finished, merely abandoned.”
This assertion rings true in many artistic spheres, to the extent that I’ve seen variations attributed to people as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci and W.H.Auden.
The site ‘Quote Investigator’ suggests that it actually originated in a 1933 essay by the poet Paul Valéry:
Aux yeux de ces amateurs d’inquiétude et de perfection, un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé, – mot qui pour eux n’a aucun sens, – mais abandonné …
and they offer this approximate translation:
In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned …
My knowledge of French idiom falls short of telling me how significant Valéry’s use of the word ‘amateur’ is, though. Is he saying that it’s the professionals who really know when a work is complete?
~
Anyway, the same original core assertion is sometime used when speaking of software: that it’s never finished, only abandoned.
It’s rare that any programmer deems his code to be complete and bug-free, which is why Donald Knuth got such attention and respect when he offered cheques to anyone finding bugs in his TeX typesetting system (released initially in the late 70s, and still widely-used today). The value of the cheques was not large… they started at $2.56, which is 2^8 cents, but the value would double each year as long as errors were still found. That takes some confidence!
He was building on the model he’d employed earlier for his books, most notably his epic work, The Art of Computer Programming. Any errors found would be corrected in the next edition. It’s a very good way to get diligent proofreaders.
Being Donald Knuth does give you some advantages when employing such a scheme, though, which others might want to consider before trying it themselves: first, there are likely to be very few errors to begin with. And second, actually receiving one of these cheques became a badge of honour, to the extent that many recipients framed them and put them on the wall, rather than actually cashing them!
For the rest of us, though, there’s that old distinction between hardware and software:
Hardware eventually fails. Software eventually works.
~
I was thinking of all this after coming across a short but pleasing article by Jose Gilgado: The Beauty of Finished Software. He gives the example of WordStar 4, which, for younger readers, was released in the early 80s. It came before WordPerfect, which came before Microsoft Word. Older readers like me can still remember some of the keystrokes. Anyway, the author George R.R. Martin, who apparently wrote the books on which Game of Thrones is based, still uses it.
Excerpt from the article:
Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it:
“It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn’t do anything else. I don’t want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don’t want a capital, if I’d wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital.”
— George R.R. Martin
This program embodies the concept of finished software — a software you can use forever with no unneeded changes.
Finished software is software that’s not expected to change, and that’s a feature! You can rely on it to do some real work.
Once you get used to the software, once the software works for you, you don’t need to learn anything new; the interface will exactly be the same, and all your files will stay relevant. No migrations, no new payments, no new changes.
I’m not sure that WordStar was ever ‘finished’ , in the sense that version 4 was followed by several later versions, but these were the days when you bought software in a box that you put on a shelf after installing it from the included floppies. You didn’t expect it to receive any further updates over-the-air. It had to be good enough to fulfill its purpose at the time of release, and do so for a considerable period.
Publishing an update was an expensive process back then, and we often think that the ease which we can do so now is a sign of progress. I wonder…
Two Quotes of the Day – take your pick!
I had heard this before, but came across it again today and liked it anew. It’s from Paul Batalden, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire:
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
It’s worth taking a moment to ponder that, for whatever kind of ‘system’ you may encounter in daily life! The corollary, I guess, is that you can only change the overall results by changing something in the system that produced them.
Now, I know from long experience that as soon as you refer to a quotation, it turns out not actually to be from the person to whom it’s normally attributed. There are lots of examples of this in the quotes I’ve posted here, and more in the collection on my personal site. If Albert Einstein, for example, had been busy saying all the insightful things he is supposed to have said, he wouldn’t have had time to develop Special Relativity into the more all-encompassing General Relativity.
But in this case, there is a nice article by Paul Batalden explaining the origins of the quote. It came, via a chain of references, from Arthur Jones, an employee of Proctor & Gamble, who originally said:
“All organisations are perfectly designed to get the results they get!”
For many people, an organisation is the type of system where this is most poignant, but it applies to other things as well.
Batalden took the concept and broadened it from the special case of an organisation to the more widely-applicable one of a ‘system’ and so it became more useful as an idea… much like General Relativity!
A phrase to ponder
Merry Christmas, everyone! (Or Merry Boxing Day, for those of you who receive my posts by email the following day!)
I was browsing the forum of the Dinghy Cruising Association yesterday, and came across a nice line from a Steve Husband, who said he had been told by his dad that
Mother is the necessity of invention.
That probably means something different to everybody, so make of it what you will!
Quote du jour
My French friend Cyril receives Status-Q updates by email, and after yesterday’s post concerning hobbies, he sent me another quote about holidays:
“Les vacances, c’est la période qui permet aux employés de se souvenir que les affaires peuvent continuer sans eux”. — E.J Wilson
or, roughly,
“A vacation is the time that allows employees to remember business can continue without them.”
I love this. I learned a very important lesson many years ago as the CEO of a small, fast-moving technology startup…
I think the company was only about six or seven people at the time, and we were in that classic startup mode: working mostly from a garden shed, having conversations every other day with investors or potential investors, watching the cashflow very carefully while convincing potential customers of our robust credentials and our ability to deliver.
But I wanted/needed to take a short holiday. Having gone from one startup to the next, I hadn’t had one for quite a long time and for various reasons I needed to take it now to coincide with other family plans. But I was torn: could I really leave this small team without their leader at such a critical time? What would the investors think? And so on…
In the end, I did decide to go, had a wonderful few days’ break, and came back to the office in some trepidation to see what had manage to survive my absence.
“Hello everyone!”, I said. “I’m back!”
The team looked up from their desks, puzzled for a moment, and then said, “Oh, yes, you’ve been away, haven’t you?”
It was a humbling and enlightening experience, and I’ve never forgotten it. Nobody is indispensable. Even you.
Anyway, there’s a nice twist to Cyril’s message. When I looked at it more carefully, I realised that he hadn’t just found a nice quotation to send back to me.
It was the first line of his vacation email auto-response.
Quote of the day
“A satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant… a defiance of the contemporary… an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked.”
— Aldo Leopold
Meme-busting
In the early days of social media, I was at a family gathering where I fear I lost some street cred with my nephew. He was talking about ‘memes’ and he said something along the lines of “Quentin will know what those are”. Yes, I confirmed, just catching the end of the conversation. ‘Meme’ is a phrase coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in The Selfish Gene. He was exploring whether cultural ideas might reproduce and spread themselves in a similar manner to the genes for certain successful biological traits. At the time, though, my nephew was probably thinking more about pictures of kittens or celebrities overlaid with bold-faced subtitles! Still, the idea of a ‘meme’ has certainly had a fair degree of meme-like success, though it has mutated over time, and many people might be ignorant of its origin!
On the subject of origins, one of the most attractive types of meme is the one that says “Well-known person X said clever thing Y”. This was very successful long before the internet, but has truly flourished since. We all love a good quotation, particularly if we can put it on a poster with a picture of Winston Churchill or Albert Einstein. I was thinking of this recently on a call when I mentioned the famous one, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research”. This is widely attributed to Albert Einstein, but probably wasn’t actually his. I have a list of some of my favourite quotes on my website, and many of them now have qualifiers alongside the attributions.
Terence Eden has just written a nice blog post on a quotation from Desmond Tutu:
A very pleasing idea, but Eden suggests that Tutu may never even have used it; in any case he almost certainly didn’t originate it. That honour is likely to go to Reginald S Lourie, a man of some eminence, but whose face, though genial enough, is much less well known than the good archbishop’s. Would this quote be as popular if it had had to spread this way?
The idea that a meme needs to attach itself to a successful organism does relate back to Dawkins’ ideas, though the effect is perhaps more closely aligned to parasitology or epidemiology than pure natural selection. (Dawkins himself was, I seem to recall, hesitant to push the meme/gene analogy too far.)
We need to be reminded of this regularly, to help us appreciate both that something isn’t necessarily true just because somebody famous said it, and that ordinary people can occasionally say extraordinary things.
As a great man* once said, “I dream of a world where the success of a great idea does not depend on the fame or fortune of its creator.” If this is your dream too, please spread the word by retweeting the image below.
* Me, in my shower, this morning.
Matthew 5:45
Looking out of the window at present, I am reminded of a verse I learned in my childhood:
The rain, it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella.
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust’s pinched the just’s umbrella.
It’s rather pleasing to discover, investigating it now, that the verse comes from Lord Bowen, a notable lawyer of the mid-19th century. (There are a few variations on the precise wording of the last line, but I still like my mother’s version above.)
Bowen had many achievements in his life, both professional and literary, and I hope he won’t mind that I remember him for this rather than his translations of Virgil.
Thought for the day
If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.
Thought for the day
The sun never asks the earth for thanks.
More info about the source here.
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