Some interesting Software Quotes...

Some Interesting Software Quotes....


UNIX is simple. But It just needs a genius to understand its simplicity.

--Dennis Ritchie

Before software can be reusable, it first has to be usable.

--Ralph Johnson

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

--Fred Brooks

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why it works. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.

It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.

-Steve McConnell Code Complete

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation.

-Gerald Weinberg

The Six Phases of a Project:

Enthusiasm

Disillusionment

Panic

Search for the Guilty

Punishment of the Innocent

Praise for non-participants

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, 'How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?' Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

--Steve McConnell Code Complete

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

--Bertrand Russell

No matter how slick (efficient) the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empirewas that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

--Robert Firth

Fifty years of programming language research and we end up with C++?

--Richard A. O'Keefe

C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

--Edsger Dijkstra

You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time.

--(Bertrand Meyer)

(Thoughtful...)

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works.

--Alan J. Perlis

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

--Bill Gates

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

--Tom Cargill

Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.

--Anon

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

--Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

I did say something along the lines of "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off."

--Bjarne Stroustrup

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.

--Alan Cooper About Face

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

--Pablo Picasso

If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.

--attributed to Norm Schryer

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

--Will Rogers

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer .

--Fred Brooks, Jr.

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

--Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability --Edsger W.Dijkstra

I've finally learned what "upward compatible" means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.

--Dennie van Tassel

Rules of Optimization:

Rule 1: Don't do it.

Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.

--M.A. Jackson

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

--Alan Kay

Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn't.

--Alan J. Perlis

Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand.

--Putt's Law

Copy and paste is a design error

--David Parnas

Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.

--Eagleson's law

The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can't go far wrong.

--Verity Stob

Wonderful Quotes.....

Wonderfull Quotes

"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort."

"Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them."

"Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot."

"If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it. It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives the blogosphere a bad reputation."

"The moment eternal - just that and no more -
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!"
~ Robert Browning

"The right to be alone--the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man."

"Among those whom I like, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh."

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on."
--Albert Einstein

"A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?"

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
--Mahatma Gandhi

"If you don't ask, you don't get."

"Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal."

Software

What's Best for Web Analytics: Client, Server or Hosted?

If you are looking for a Web analytics application, you'll find more than 100 vendors who are ready to jump in with statistical bells and whistles that measure your site's effectiveness. But before you get too impressed with the capabilities of any particular vendor, it can be particularly helpful to determine which type of analytics solution best suits your business.

For Web analytics, the three underlying differences are commonly referred to as server-side, client-side, and hosted solutions. Each, of course, has its pros and cons. And some enterprises choose to use a combination of these tool types to get the most comprehensive understanding of visitor behavior on their sites.

If it's up to you to choose a Web analytics solution for your business, you'll probably find it helpful to consider your budget and what your hosting company supports, as well as your appetite for statistics. Here are some basic concepts and inside tips from the experts to help you get started.

Surveying Server-Side

Server-side analytics tools are software applications installed on your Web site's server. These are usually pre-installed by your hosting company and accessed through your Web site's control panel. These tools make a record of each time a visitor pings your server and they tabulate data such as when visitors came through your virtual doors, where they came from, and what files they viewed.

Server-side analytics offer benefits such as anywhere access, high reliability and relatively low cost. Although the most basic server-side tools for Web analytics are typically free, enterprise-level analytics of course come with a higher price tag.

Another advantage of Web analytics that are based on the server side is privacy because the data is stored in-house. And, since they record pings, server-side analytics can offer better insights into site failures so you can fix issues like broken links. There are some downsides, though, such as portability. If you change hosting providers, you could lose your historical information unless you have kept a chronicle offline.

The Web analytics industry is moving from visits and pageviews to analytics that reflect more about what people are paying attention to, according to Ed Schipul, CEO of the Houston-based Schipul Web marketing company that created Tendenci -- a hosted application designed for management associations.

Schipul says companies need to record "events" that reflect actions. It may be, for example, that a visitor to your site first clicks to watch a video, then reads more about the product, and then finally makes contact. All of those activities may occur on the same page. Enterprise-grade server-side solutions can offer critical insights.

"The best analytics come from server-side smart systems built into your application itself so you can look at events that you view as desirable [and those] that reflect what the visitor is paying attention to," Schipul says. Enterprises, he adds, must have a server-side solution because the cost of even an expensive statistics package for an enterprise is nothing compared to the value of the business intelligence it gathers.

Calling on Client-Side Tools

The second type of solution for Web analytics is based on the client-side. These are desktop applications that are installed on your computer. With client-side software, you can call up the stored data quickly and even access the stats without an Internet connection. You can also keep your original log files and store them independently, offering you ultimate control of your data.

Unlike hosted solutions that offer monthly rates, client-side tools come at a premium and it's paid up front. Although you can get into a client-side tool for $500, you may pay well more than that for the most robust versions. Still, this can be an attractive option for enterprises because it frees them from any long-term entanglement with a host. Simply stated, your data won't be held hostage on the host's server. Client-side software also lets you manage multiple domains. For all their benefits, though, client-side tools could leave you empty handed if your system crashes and you don't have a back up.

For large organizations that are concerned with integration with existing enterprise applications, the long-term return on investment is often better with client-side Web analytics applications, according to Rod Radojevic, vice president of product management at Varicent Software, which offers Web analytics for sales performance management.

"One of the drivers for client-side Web analytics applications is the ability to leverage best practices in different areas of the organization," Radojevic said. "For example, companies that have mastered Web analytics for product profitability analysis, and other corporate performance management applications, are looking to extend Web analytics into other areas such as sales operations."

How About Hosted Analytics?

The third option is hosted solutions, or on-demand Web analytics solutions. These software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are installed on your vendor's server. These tools require you to log into to the Web site of your Application Service Provider (ASP) in order to view and analyze your data, but that's about all you have to do. There's no downloading, no installation, no maintenance and no log parsing. That frees you up to spend more time analyzing the data.

Hosted applications come with monthly fees, which can be easier on the corporate budget, and you can access the data from any computer with an Internet connection. With page tagging -- capturing data only for the pages you want to track -- you can limit the amount of unnecessary data to wade though. Of course, that means if you forget to tag a special landing page, then you'll miss vital opportunities to track your promotion, unless you are using server-side analytics as a back up. Much the same, you won't necessarily know about site errors unless error pages and redirect pages have Javascript embedded in the tags.

"Hosted and software-as-a-service applications tend to be siloed and not always easily extendable," Radojevic argued. "On the other hand, hosted and software-as-a-service applications are a great fit for smaller organizations with limited IT resources. These organizations typically prefer fewer options."

Using Multiple Tools

At the end of the day, using multiple tools can be a key strategy for firms that want the best of all worlds. Using server-side tools offers a good baseline from which to draw error messages, spider activity and other metrics that rely specifically on tracking visitor pings to your server. Adding more robust client-side or hosted solutions on top of that can offer different angles on your data.

Schipul said his firm does have a few clients who run both an enterprise server-side application and a client-side application, because they believe the duplication adds value to the analytics equation. "While enterprise-level server-side analytics are more powerful, it definitely does help to have client-side analytics passing the data back to the server in an intelligent way," he explained. "Perhaps a video pings back to the server on completion. This would have to be client-side initiated, hence the need for both client and server side."

Now that you've got a handle on the pros and cons of the tool types, you can decide which vendor or vendors is right for you. Stay tuned to this column for a look at how to choose Web analytics vendors.