“Bizarrely, each time we have won in England there was no coach.

“We’ve come to learn that it’s hard to motivate technical people, including ourselves, through money, colorful toys, or gigantic monitors. We try, instead, to have a mock-up ready for everything we’re about to approach so the motivation for accomplishment is instilled by our need to see something that looks cool come alive.

“The hegemony of “free” will in the long run end up narrowing our choices rather than expanding them. I still hope that there will be a way to actually sell stuff on the internet rather than having to give everything away for free, crassly plastered with ads.

“Awareness of human fallibility is dangerous knowledge, if you remind yourself of the fallibility of those who disagree with you. If I am selective about which arguments I inspect for errors, or even how hard I inspect for errors, then every new rule of rationality I learn, every new logical flaw I know how to detect, makes me that much stupider.

“The Aesthetic-Usability Effect: users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs to be easier to use than less aesthetically pleasing designs.

“Nu is written in Objective-C, and is designed to allow deep interaction with Objective-C programs. As a result, Nu has deep access to its own implementation. That gives its users an unusual ability to explore and understand Nu.

“I publish various things on the web. I write in this blog, I publish photos to my photo blog and I save snippets of interesting articles using Magnolia. Unfortunately, Facebook only allows the importing of a single RSS feed. Enter Yahoo Pipes. Using Yahoo Pipes, I can combine all three into a single RSS feed.

What I love about this system is that it ties together the three power houses of the current internet: Google (Feedburner), Yahoo and Facebook, all working together.

“Avoiding error handling results in shorter and clearer code. In C etc. you have to write something if you detect an error, but in Erlang it’s easy - don’t even bother to write code that checks for errors. Just let it crash, the Erlang runtime will provide a perfectly acceptable error diagnostic.

Then write a new linked process that observes the crashes and tries to correct the error. If it can’t correct the error it should crash (same principle). Each monitor should try a simpler error recovery strategy, until finally the error is fixed.

“It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce—even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too.

“Partnerships have been crucial; the batsmen have clung on to each other dearly. Unlike in Australia, where they rattled off one masterpiece after another, none of these innings will be termed ‘great’. Yet they’ve made a collective statement. Like a swarm of bees, they’ve combined to make life hell for the opposition.