Spirit Desire

Last night I ventured out west in Sydney to Newtown to see Sonic Youth perform Daydream Nation, their Magnum opus, released in 1988.

Newtown is very different from Manly. Much more like Camden than St. Albans. The venue, The Enmore Theatre, was great; similar in size and feel to Brixton Academy with a great atmosphere. The same can't be said about the opening act The Scientists. I've never heard them before and hopefully I will never hear them again.

Sonic, on the other hand, were magnificent. When the first tones of Teenage Riot started ringing out I got goose-bumps. The sound was crisp clear and not too loud (important for an old cod like me up in the seated section). While Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley have aged with dignity, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore look exactly like twenty years ago. I'm not sure, but I suspect there is a painting of Kim and Thurston by Basil Hallward somewhere.

Wow

(From Wikipedia)

Are you smart enough to make stupid mistakes?

make, the classic Unix program of './configure;make;sudo make install' fame, is an amazing application used by thousands of people every day. Stuart Feldman, make's inventor, was awarded the prestigious ACM Software System Award for make in 2003. Other winners of this award include Don Knuth and James Gosling. In other words, Feldman is a clever person.

So, why on Earth did Feldman decided that tab was a good first character for any line containing actions? Imagine how many man-years that have been spent on finding bugs due to typing a few spaces rather than a tab! I mean, it's not a coincidence that the programming language Whitespace isn't more widely used. According to 'The Art of Unix Programming', that I'm currently reading, this tab is one of the worst design mistakes in the history of Unix. I'm not sure if I agree, but it isn't pretty. In Feldman's own words:

Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.

Something I Learned Today

Wow, I had no idea Burt Bacharach wrote 'I say a little prayer' (performed by Aretha Franklin and a million others). In DN I found this great quote about Bacharach by Julie Burchill:

On the first day God created man and woman; on the second, the vodka martini, and on the third, the music of Burt Bacharach. And on the fourth day, man created rock'n'roll and ruined everything

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