There are four car dealerships at a crossroad. One sells station wagons, one stylish European cars, one Batmobiles and one gives military tanks for free, well, they park them on the streets with keys in the ignition.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

Bullhorn: "But..."

Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"

-- From one of the greatest essays I've read: In the Beginning was the Command Line.

It's the time in the year
When the Fridays are Black
Full of presents and candles
Food and snowfall in stacks

Whether Grad, Staff, or Prof
Elf of Coffee, Troll of Tea
Come be social and warm
It's the Holiday TG!

- A flyer for the SCS Holiday TG.

Primary goal in life: Occasion to use the phrase: "Let me through---I'm a Computer Scientist!".

- Andrew Moore, a Professor at School of Computer Science, CMU

Brace yourself

While doing my usual rounds of Python hacking, a colleague commented how weird Python code looked as it didn't have any braces (for the uninitiated, the Python interpreter identifies control flow using indentation levels). Naturally, I smirked about it and explained how Python is different & how it helped make the code more clean. However, to be honest, I myself didn't have much clue as to why had the Python designers made such a choice. So after some late night Googling, I found this:

"One of Python's controversial features, using indentation level rather than begin/end or braces, was driven by this philosophy: since there are no braces, there are no style wars over where to put the braces. Interestingly, Lisp has exactly the same philosophy on this point: everyone uses emacs to indent their code, so they don't argue over the indentation."

- Peter Norvig, "Python for Lisp Programmers".

Moral: Good languages & good editors go together.

Niles: Still, I can't help thinking there's something Faustian about this whole thing.

Frasier: Faust was a moron. I'm gonna be a star!

- From the season 10 episode, "The Devil & Dr. Phil".

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~help/web_publishing/
web_publishing_intro.html

Create the web pages

You should create a page in the www directory called "index.html". This will be the "index page" for that directory. You can then create other web pages in the directory that index.html links to. If you are editing pages under Unix, the recommended text editor is emacs.

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Finally, a university which knows whats best.

Power ...

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four