Actually, I like this. A quick and easy way to send someone something straight from Dominus' Good Advice and Maxims for Programmers. ;-)

(You'll like it even more when you're cranky.)

Heh heh ... I get such a kick out of that list each time I read it :)

One of my favorites is:

    #11943 Ah yes, and you are the first person to have noticed this bug since 1987. Sure.

It reminds me of a programmer I worked with in the 1980s, who had just recently converted to C from FORTRAN, and had gotten into the (bad) habit of declaring array dimensions to have one extra value each:

    int max_length[NSHAPES + 1], max_height[NSHAPES + 1];

    /* ... */

    for (i = 1; i <= NSHAPES; i++) {
        /* ... */
    }
[download]

(Which is a lot like the (equally bad) strategy in Perl of reassigning the variable $[ ...)

As a result of index renumbering, this programmer would encounter, at least once a week, some hard-to-find bug, and would always ask me "Do you think this might be a compiler bug?"  If only I'd had MJD's list back then! ;)

---

s''(q.S:$/9=(T1';s;(..)(..);$..=substr+crypt($1,$2),2,3;eg;print$..$/

I love those funny quotes. I thought it would be cool to have one of them displayed on every PerlMonks page.

So I came up with the following Free Nodelet Hack, which displays a string, chosen at random from a list. If you integrate this with your Free Nodelet, then each time a page is loaded one of the fortunes is displayed in the nodelet. (Actually, the <p id="fortune_p"></p> could be anywhere, such as in your Personal Nodelet.)

<p id="fortune_p"></p>

<script type="text/javascript">
<!-- 
  var fortunes = new Array( "Abandon desire", "Abandon normal instruct
+ions", "Accept advice" ); // etc.
  var p = document.getElementById('fortune_p');
  var txt  = document.createTextNode( fortunes[ Math.floor( Math.rando
+m() * fortunes.length ) ] );
  p.appendChild(txt);
// -->
</script>
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