tudy .ro – Tudor Damian
I plan to live forever. So far, so good.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind
Jul 16th
I rarely do this, but some stuff that’s been hapening lately (not to me, but to some of the people I know), really made me want to do it.
<rant>
It seems that lately, most people seem to subscribe to the policy of “an eye for an eye”, which is known throughout the universe for its stupidity. Even Buddha and Christ have quite a different vision but nobody’s paid much attention to them, not even the Buddhists or the Christians. Humans… sometimes it’s hard to imagine how we’ve made it this far.
Anyway, here are some quotes to (hopefully) clear things out:
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” (Gandhi)
“Live well. It is the greatest revenge.” (The Talmud)
“To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.” (Confucius)
“When anger rises, think of the consequences.” (Confucius)
“Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.” (Scott Adams)
“There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.” (John Billings)
“Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you.” (Austin O’Malley)
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” (Buddha)
“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.” (Tenzin Gyatso)
</rant>
I’m done. 
Cherie Carter Scott – rules of life
Oct 12th
Cherie Carter-Scott’s theories explain our attitudes and behaviour with a special clarity, and provide a practical guide to behaviour and self development. Dr. Carter-Scott achieved her PhD in human and organisational development and for the nearly 30 years has been an international lecturer, consultant and author. She founded the MMS (Motivation Management Service) Institute and has been called a guardian angel to CEO’s. Carter-Scott’s book ‘If Life Is A Game, These Are The Rules’ is essential reading if you are interested in behaviour, relationships, communications, and human personality. Cherie Carter-Scott’s rules for life – also known as ‘The Ten Rules For Being Human’ and referenced in her book with Jack Canfield: ‘Chicken Soup For The Soul’ – are a map for understanding and pursuing personal development, and for helping others to understand and develop too. ‘If Life Is A Game, These Are The Rules’ is also commonly referenced book in the life-coaching industry.Here is a brief summary and explanation of Cherie Carter-Scott’s ‘rules of life’.
Cherie Carter-Scott’s rules of life
(Carter Scott references this quotation:) “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” (Helen Keller)
Rule One – You will receive a body. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s yours for life, so accept it. What counts is what’s inside.
Rule Two – You will be presented with lessons. Life is a constant learning experience, which every day provides opportunities for you to learn more. These lessons specific to you, and learning them ‘is the key to discovering and fulfilling the meaning and relevance of your own life’.
Rule Three – There are no mistakes, only lessons. Your development towards wisdom is a process of experimentation, trial and error, so it’s inevitable things will not always go to plan or turn out how you’d want. Compassion is the remedy for harsh judgement – of ourselves and others. Forgiveness is not only divine – it’s also ‘the act of erasing an emotional debt’. Behaving ethically, with integrity, and with humour – especially the ability to laugh at yourself and your own mishaps – are central to the perspective that ‘mistakes’ are simply lessons we must learn.
Rule Four – The lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons repeat until learned. What manifest as problems and challenges, irritations and frustrations are more lessons – they will repeat until you see them as such and learn from them. Your own awareness and your ability to change are requisites of executing this rule. Also fundamental is the acceptance that you are not a victim of fate or circumstance – ‘causality’ must be acknowledged; that is to say: things happen to you because of how you are and what you do. To blame anyone or anything else for your misfortunes is an escape and a denial; you yourself are responsible for you, and what happens to you. Patience is required – change doesn’t happen overnight, so give change time to happen.
Rule Five – Learning does not end. While you are alive there are always lessons to be learned. Surrender to the ‘rhythm of life’, don’t struggle against it. Commit to the process of constant learning and change – be humble enough to always acknowledge your own weaknesses, and be flexible enough to adapt from what you may be accustomed to, because rigidity will deny you the freedom of new possibilities.
Rule Six – “There” is no better than “here”. The other side of the hill may be greener than your own, but being there is not the key to endless happiness. Be grateful for and enjoy what you have, and where you are on your journey. Appreciate the abundance of what’s good in your life, rather than measure and amass things that do not actually lead to happiness. Living in the present helps you attain peace.
Rule Seven – Others are only mirrors of you. You love or hate something about another person according to what you love or hate about yourself. Be tolerant; accept others as they are, and strive for clarity of self-awareness; strive to truly understand and have an objective perception of your own self, your thoughts and feelings. Negative experiences are opportunities to heal the wounds that you carry. Support others, and by doing so you support yourself. Where you are unable to support others it is a sign that you are not adequately attending to your own needs.
Rule Eight – What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. Take responsibility for yourself. Learn to let go when you cannot change things. Don’t get angry about things – bitter memories clutter your mind. Courage resides in all of us – use it when you need to do what’s right for you. We all possess a strong natural power and adventurous spirit, which you should draw on to embrace what lies ahead.
Rule Nine - Your answers lie inside of you. Trust your instincts and your innermost feelings, whether you hear them as a little voice or a flash of inspiration. Listen to feelings as well as sounds. Look, listen, and trust. Draw on your natural inspiration.
Rule Ten - You will forget all this at birth. We are all born with all of these capabilities – our early experiences lead us into a physical world, away from our spiritual selves, so that we become doubtful, cynical and lacking belief and confidence. The ten Rules are not commandments, they are universal truths that apply to us all. When you lose your way, call upon them. Have faith in the strength of your spirit. Aspire to be wise – wisdom is the ultimate path of your life, and it knows no limits other than those you impose on yourself.
Quotes about C and CPP
Mar 29th
I recently stumbled upon an interesting collection of quotes related to C and C++. Many of you may have heard of C/C++, and some of you have probably written a few lines of C/C++ code in your lifetime. Anyhow, with no further ado, here we go…
One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs. (Robert Firth)
I have stopped reading Stephen King novels. Now I just read C code instead. (Richard O’Keefe)
C++ has its place in the history of programming languages. Just as Caligula has his place in the history of the Roman Empire. (Robert Firth)
C++ is an atrocity, the bletcherous scab of the computing world, responsible for more buffer overflows, more security breaches, more blue screens of death, more mysterious failures than any other computer language in the history of the planet Earth. (Eric Lee Green)
Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp. (Paul Graham)
Arguing that Java is better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than tree bark. (Thant Tessman)
If C++ has taught me one thing, it’s this: Just because the system is consistent doesn’t mean it’s not the work of Satan. (Andrew Plotkin)
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg. (Bjarne Stroustrup)
Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks. (Thant Tessman)
If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor and when was the last time you needed one? (Tom Cargill)
In My Egotistical Opinion, most people’s C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt. (Blair P. Houghton)
A system composed of 100,000 lines of C++ is not be sneezed at, but we don’t have that much trouble developing 100,000 lines of COBOL today. The real test of OOP will come when systems of 1 to 10 million lines of code are developed. (Ed Yourdon)
C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string. (Jamie Zawinski)
Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out. (Bjarne Stroustrup)
I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. (Alan Kay)
There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation. (Bertrand Meyer)
C++ will do for C what Algol-68 did for Algol. (David L Jones)
C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as “a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language.” (MIT Jargon Dictionary)
C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good. (Bertrand Meyer)
PL/I and Ada started out with all the bloat, were very daunting languages, and got bad reputations (deservedly). C++ has shown that if you slowly bloat up a language over a period of years, people don’t seem to mind as much. (James Hague)
Java is, in many ways, C++–. (Michael Feldman)
You can’t prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It’s really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar. (Bill Joy)
C is quirky, flawed and an enormous success. (Dennis Ritchie)
Eiffel borrows quite heavily from some earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good programming construct in C we would have used it as well. (Bertrand Meyer)
A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors. (Waldi Ravens)
All C programs do the same thing: look at a character and do nothing with it. (Peter Weinberger)
Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, “OK, we’ll do them both”. So the language is too baroque for my taste. (Donald E Knuth)
The last good thing written in C++ was the Pachelbel Canon. (Jerry Olson)
Other advanced languages, such as assembler and C, were not terribly complex in themselves, but the environments in which applications were developed were downright weird, with mines scattered about everywhere, ready to blow the inattentive programmer out of the water. (Bruce Tognazzini)
Going from programming in Pascal to programming in C, is like learning to write in Morse code. (J P Candusso)
To me C++ seems to be a language that has sacrificed orthogonality and elegance for random expediency. (Meilir Page-Jones)
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Philip Greenspun)
C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce. (Scott McKay)
Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses. (Richard P Gabriel)
It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trival details of a program — such as where its bugs are. (David Keppel)
I view the landslide of C use in education as something of a calamity. (Nicklaus Wirth)
C++ is like jamming a helicopter inside a Miata and expecting some sort of improvement. (Drew Olbrich)
Pointers are like jumps, leading wildly from one part of the data structure to another. Their introduction into high-level languages has been a step backwards from which we may never recover. (Tony Hoare)
C++: Simula in wolf’s clothing. (Bjarne Stroustrup)
The belief is still widespread in the commputing community that C and its derivatives are programming languages — languages intended for people to write programs in. This is a regrettable misunderstanding. (Bertrand Meyer)
From a practical viewpoint, it’s easy to see that C will always be with us, taking a place beside Fortran and Cobol as the right tool for certain jobs. (Larry O’Brien)
I consider C++ the most significant technical hazard to the survival of your project and do so without apologies. (Alistair Cockburn)
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)
