The Lone Sysadmin

“To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.”

- Robert Copeland

“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.”

- William G. McAdoo

“Don’t get mad. Get even.”

- David Plankers (1946 - 2001)*

* also, I realize that he’s probably not the first to say it, it’s just where I heard it.

“It’s hard to overemphasize how out-of-balance the economics are here. You saved maybe thirty person-seconds by skipping the review and checkpatch steps. But the cost (if this bug had gone into mainline) would be many many thousands times higher than this.” - Andrew Morton, admonishing someone on the LKML for not checking their work.

How many times a week do you work around shortcuts, where the original person saved a few minutes but cost weeks of time later?

“The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”

- Tennessee Williams

Daring Fireball featured a great quote last Sunday, Grey’s Law:

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

Interestingly enough, nobody knows who “Grey” was.

“Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new.”

“If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.”