A coworker of mine sent me this link, and I just have to share it with the rest of you:

Our Caller, who art on the stack frame
Hallowed be thy Parameters
Thy Address Space come
Thy I/O be done
In Registers, as it is in Memory
Give us this day our periodic timeslices
And forgive us our page faults
As we forgive those who pass invalid parameters
Lead us not to unconditional JMPs
But deliver us from segment registers
For thine is the Address Space, the Registers, and the I/O ports
Jmp $
Ret

There are some other good ones there, so go visit.  My only critique would be to change "As we forgive those who pass invalid parameters" to "As we forgive those who page fault against us"... but that's just a minor quibble.  That's right... I used to write assembly too.  Sometimes I'm amazed at the vast numbers of languages and technologies I've actually used in my relatively short career.

Today is System Administrators Day.  Have you kissed your SysAdmin lately... or at least remembered to change your password?

Microsoft has announced that their next operating system is being planned for around 2010, and they're changing the codename from Vienna to "7".  I hope George Costanza doesn't hear about this... that's what he wants his son to be named!

Lately I've been enjoying I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER quite a lot, and have even tried making a few of my own images to submit to them.  But today I discovered that there is a group who are trying to create a programming language out of "Kitteh Speak"!  It's called LOLCODE, and it's further along than you might think.  They already have a 1.2 specification, and there are several alpha implementation for compilers... even one for Visual Studio!

Here is an example for Hello World:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Can you imagine how many of the world's problems programmers could fix if we didn't have these kinds of side projects?

Here's a pretty cool story.  My alma mater, MSOE, is building an art museum on campus:

MSOE is constructing a full-blown art museum on its downtown campus - complete with curator, exhibit manager and a permanent collection of 600 European and American paintings, prints and sculptures that date to the 16th century.

Ahead of an Oct. 20 opening, workers last week installed the steel-frame dome that crowns a four-story atrium entrance at E. State St. and Broadway.
...
What makes the art so valuable to MSOE, Viets and Grohmann concur, is its single unifying theme: work and workers in hundreds of manifestations.

Among the oldest pieces are canvases that show primitive Flemish iron smelters and old German foundries, dark and dramatic with flashes of hot orange ingots. The collection covers a gamut of realism, impressionism and expressionism - glass blowers and miners; sweaty muscles in blast furnaces and pastoral images of farm fields; railroad yards and stone quarries.

Of course I'm a little biased, but I've always considered engineering to be art.  It is the art of taking cold scientific knowledge, and combining it with craftsmanship, in order to create a useful object for the real world.  Quality engineering is something you want to have in your home, and use every day.  It's a stainless steel toaster that you don't put in your cupboard when you're not using it.  It's an iPod (or iPhone) which you proudly wear on your belt.

Engineering is the art of combining form and function to make everyone's life better.  A good piece of engineering is a thing of beauty to behold.