My Talkpage     Sandbox     Toolbox     Bookmarks

Thursday 27 June

Userboxes Wikipedia:Babel fr Cet utilisateur a pour langue maternelle le français. en-3 This user can contribute with an advanced level of English. nl-2 Deze gebruiker heeft een middelmatige kennis van het Nederlands. pt-1 Este usuário/utilizador pode contribuir com um nível básico de português. Search user languages Wikipédia Je contribue sur la Wikipédia francophone. I support French language Wikipedia with my contributions. This editor is a WikiGnome. 30+ This user has made over 30 contributions to Wikipedia AIM-0 This user does not understand or have any interest in AOLer. This user uses free software wherever and whenever possible. This user uses Gmail as a primary email service. This user contributes using Chromium. This user writes with the OpenOffice.org suite. This user comes from Belgium. This user is an engineer. This user is a software engineer. This user is a systems analyst. This user is a Board Game Geek. This user plays Paper and pencil games. D&D This user plays Dungeons & Dragons. LARP This user practises LARP. This user enjoys reading science fiction. ${\displaystyle \sum _{k=1}^{\infty }{x^{k} \over k!))$ This user loves problem solving. eπi+1=0 This user is a mathie. This user enjoys backpacking. This user enjoys skiing. This user is an agnostic.

Identity

• Name: Arnauld Van Muysewinkel
• Age: 53 years (1970)
• Activity: Computer Science Engineer
• Locality: Neder-Over-Heembeek (North of Brussels)

How to contact me

• Talk page
• Email: arnauldvm(at)gmail(dot)com
• Wikipédia (Français) : fr:Utilisateur:Arnauldvm

Preferred quotes

Life

• "Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies?" – "But who is going to guard the guards themselves?"
  — Juvenal, Satires
• "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness" – traditional : 与其詛咒黑暗，不如燃起蠟燭 ; simplified : 与其诅咒黑暗，不如燃起蜡烛 ; pinyin : "yǔ qí zǔ zhòu hēi àn, bù rú rán qǐ là zhú"
  — unknown origin, used by Adlai Stevenson about Eleanor Roosevelt
  other form: "Don't blame the darkness, but light a candle." – or "Don't blame the darkness of the world, lighten it instead." – or « Ne te plains pas de l'obscurité. Deviens une petite lumière. »
  — sometimes ascribed to an hypothetical Li Van Pho, chinese philosopher of 3rd century
• "Listen to the forest grow, rather than the tree falling."
  — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ?
• "Il vaut mieux penser le changement que changer le pansement." – (Stop the cure, start actual changes.)
  — Francis Blanche
• "Children do not listen to the wisdom of their elders. Nations do not listen to history. The bitter lessons of the past must ever be learned anew."
  — Albert Einstein
• "La pensée ne doit jamais se soumettre, ni à un dogme, ni à un parti, ni à une passion, ni à un intérêt, ni à une idée préconçue, ni à quoi que ce soit, si ce n'est aux faits eux-mêmes, parce que, pour elle, se soumettre, ce serait cesser d'être." – "Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be."
  — Henri Poincaré (Fêtes du LXXVe anniversaire de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles, 21 novembre 1909).
• "A truth that's told with bad intent
  Beats all the lies you can invent."
  — William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, The Ballads (or Pickering) Manuscript
• "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."
  — Bertrand Russell
• "The (pure and simple) truth is rarely pure and never simple."
  — Oscar Wilde
• "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
  — Mark Twain
• "Responsibility is the price of freedom."
  — ascribed to Elbert Hubbard

Computers

• "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."
  — Philip Lewis Karlton, see also this blog post by his son
  
  • Article from Peter Hilton: Why naming things is hard
  • Post from Martin Fowler: Two Hard Things
  • There are may nice variations of this, for example:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science:

0) Cache invalidation
1) Naming things
5) Asynchronous callbacks
2) Off-by-one errors

• "Those who can, do; those who can't, sue. Or perhaps: Those who can, innovate; those who can't, litigate."
  — Josh Bloch on Twitter
• "If an error is possible, someone will make it."
  — Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
• KISS – "Keep It Simple, Stupid."
• "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
  — Albert Einstein
• Lex parsimoniae : "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" – "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity."
  — Guillaume d'Occam, see Occam's razor
• "Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher." – "Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed."
  — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (French title: Terre des hommes (Land of Men))
• "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
  — Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare
• "Los ordenadores son inútiles. Sólo pueden darte respuestas." – "Computers are useless they can only give you answers."
  — Pablo Picasso
• "The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris."
  — Larry Wall
• "There is More Than One Way to Do it."
  — Larry Wall
• "What about WRITING it first, and rationalizing it afterwards?"
  — Larry Wall
• "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
  — Donald E. Knuth
• "Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that's just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea."
  — Michael Nielsen
• "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools, it is about how we use them and what we find out when we do."
  — Michael R. Fellows and Ian Parberry. Computing Research News. January 1993, wrongly ascribed to Edsger W. Dijkstra
• "It is not enough for code to work."
  — Robert C. Martin (Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. Prentice Hall PTR. 2008. ISBN 0-13-235088-2.)
• "There's no money to be made there. Why is that an interesting business?"
  — Bill Gates about the Internet in April 1994, cited in Barbarians Led by Bill Gates
• "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
  — Steve Jobs, Triumph of the Nerds (1996)
• "Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast."
  — ascribed to Tom Peters (initially in the context of business management)

Geek humour

• "Another failure is just another different result, but not the desired one."
  — Anonymous
• "Bei besonders anspruchsvollen Sicherheitskriterien empfiehlt sich der Einsatz des Triple-ROT13-Algorithmus (3ROT13), sowie des Triple-ROT5-Algorithmus (3ROT5)." – "It might be useful to use the enhanced rotation-algorithms Triple-ROT13 (3ROT13) and Triple-ROT5 (3ROT5) in highly secured environments."
  — Anonymous?, seen on http://rot13.de Accessed: 2008-08-26. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5aMV8CD4l)
• "Computer. This is a Class-A compulsory directive. Compute, to the last digit, the value of pi."
  — Spock, in "Star Trek: The Original Series", Season 2, "Wolf in the Fold"

Fields of interest

• History, mainly Middle Ages;
• Computer science;
• Internet;
• Games, live action role-playing game ("LARP"), role-playing game and simulation/strategy game;
• Mountain;
• Science fiction.

Contributions

See all my contributions
See all my personal pages

Pages in creation

None

Corrections to do

None