some people say programmers have the same work as chambermaids used to have: "cleaning up other people bedpans, sweeping out someone elses mess." (brian foote) endlessly. knowingly, that even when everything is nicely arranged, it wouldn´t stay that way for long. and if it is not cleaning it is glueing. somehow that doesn´t sound like a nice occupation at all.

sometimes programmers got an extraball and are allowed to change something in the room. bring in something new. in the beginning they might be pleased for getting this chance, realizing the hard way, that up from now they constantly have to carry in new goods. faster and faster. exponentially. hardware guys already showed: ways can be found to pack in that stuff.

how to say "no" seems to be a real hard problem for programmers. once be treated like genii, amazing people with their skills, brought them to the point to forget the importance of that little word. seldom urged to talk out loudly what they are writing at, they prefer to remain silent even in situations were they know in advance: now someone is really messing up my work. nevertheless "yes sir" or "yes ma´am, we do this right away" comes out with more ease. is that an educational problem? maybe. for too long these species got trained for the notion: everything is feasible.

the 16th international obfuscated c code contest is now open for entries.

Obfuscate: tr.v. -cated, -cating, -cates. 1. a. To render obscure. b. To darken. 2. To confuse: his emotions obfuscated his judgment. [LLat. obfuscare, to darken : ob(intensive) + Lat. fuscare, to darken < fuscus, dark.] -obfuscation n. obfuscatory adj

the goals:

• To write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program
• To show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way.
• To stress C compilers with unusual code.
• To illustrate some of the subtleties of the C language.
• To provide a safe forum for poor C code.

the results of the 2nd perl poetry contest are not yet known.

i am moving this up, because there is already too much scrolling involved.

:)) buy it you are in, hombres. but still can´t say if mr. arieti would take it this way. but who cares anyhow. right now i don´t.

that programming has something to do with retreat, well can´t be denied in social terms. just looking around ...

"lose sight of the global consequences of their manipulations": well, actually who could blame them, slogging to find the right line of code; would be hard to keep track anyhow.

and the last part:

"the disorder itself is viewed as progressive, even the direction is regressive: well brian, didn´t you tell me, that if a piece of code survived somehow, it will be found and reused again??? just didn´t know before, that this all has to do with schizophrenia.

maybe i should have known better, because bob birge, i nice guy who played around with protein memory devices a long time ago told me: art is a bug, and in the arzifazi world a lot of people are working hard to proof this. one example is the piece swarm, even i like the people there. their purpose also is to play and to have fun with ideas and words. don´t even try to take it serious, too many around already tough. in the best case, you read it, and some ideas pop up, that´s the purpose behind it as always or in this story: that´s the game of the more and more visabled hand behind.