Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
Randal Schwartz (co-author of Programming Perl) did just this thing and was taken to court and Convicted of three felony counts, with (deferred) jail time. Read all about it at
You hear (pun) a lot about how integrating speech with user interface toolkits will solve the Accessibility Problem. Screen Scrapers can dive through the widget hierarchy and present an audio form to a blind user. The problem is, that these apps really don't work well. Trying to make an application that was developed for a sighted user work for a blind user really can't be solved at the toolkit level.
Solutions such as EmacsSpeak provide much more accessibilty for blind technical users.
A napster clone (client and server) has a lot of interesting programming problems to solve.
- GUI - Networking - Multi-threads
Its large enough that it would probably require a team to complete in a semester, but small enough to actually finish.
In the end, the students will have a real good feel for what its like to write an application that is forming the basis for a whole new industry. It also has the teen-rebel smell to it.
One of the big advantages of Java now is that the code is truely mobile. Platforms such as Java/RMI and the more elaborate Java/Jini allow not only data but code to be sent over the wire. The 'recompile for every platform' model just doesn't work when you want to ship code as well as data.
Although this book is not a life-changer (ala GoF or Mr. Becks XP book). It still is a good read. It had me feeling pretty guilty about the many holes in my background (I never did learn how to use yacc/lex). One of the best parts of the book is the 'Resources' appendix. This resource list is a good start at defining the 'Programmer's Canon', the required reading for all in our profession. This list includes off-line as well as online resources ranging from the ACM journals to slashdot.
This book inspires me to keep honing my craft and then tells me how to do it.
Distributed.net has a similar problem with keeping a hostile client from supplying bad results. There solution is basically the same as Carmacks: keep some bits of the code private. Here is what they say: Why is distributed.net still not completely open-source with all parts of its source code?
Although we are providing all of the code linked on this page for public perusal, it is still necessary to keep select portions of the codebase unavailable for general distribution. Indeed, this is an aspect of our operations that we would very much like to be able to eliminate.
Quite truthfully, releasing binary-only clients still does not completely eliminate the possibility of sabotage, since it is relatively easy for any knowledgeable person to disasemble or patch binaries. This is actually quite a trivial task, so we urge you not to try. Indeed, security through obscurity is actually not secure at all, and we do not claim it to be such.
The source code available from this page is really all of the algorithmic code that would be of interest. The only code that is not present is the file-access and network socket code, which is not terribly interesting (nor pleasant to try to comprehend). The computational cores and platform-specific optimizations included in this package is what you would want to look at if you are interested in how the client works, or how you can increase the speed of the client for your processor.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about anyone else, but for me, there is nothing better at Christmas time than playing board games with family and friends.
Any suggestions for new, interesting family board games for this year like Settlers of Catan , or Monopoly?
Hmmm ... the PDF I read didn't say one bad thing about Adobe.
My favorites from comp.risks concern the test flights for the F-16.
....ouch.
When the test pilots checked to see what would happen if they tried to put the landing gear up while the plane was on the tarmack
When they pilots flew the plane over the equator (luckily in a simulator, the plane flipped over).
More on these here:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.44.html
Erector fans should keep an eye out, though!
Actually, most Erector set fans probably already have an eye out, sometimes two eyes out.
The only country that can win the VIM war is Uganda.
That's John BigbooTAY
Randal Schwartz (co-author of Programming Perl) did just this thing and was taken to court and Convicted of three felony counts, with (deferred) jail time. Read all about it at
State of Oregon v. Randal Schwartz
Ah ... I can see Jeff Bezos filling out the zero-click shopping patent application right now.
in 'vi' how to I ^M
get rid of all these^M
pesky DOS line-feed^M
characters^M
^Z
Doesn't some other linux company own the word "red" ?
You hear (pun) a lot about how integrating speech with user interface toolkits will solve the Accessibility Problem. Screen Scrapers can dive through the widget hierarchy and present an audio form to a blind user. The problem is, that these apps really don't work well. Trying to make an application that was developed for a sighted user work for a blind user really can't be solved at the toolkit level.
Solutions such as EmacsSpeak provide much more accessibilty for blind technical users.
A napster clone (client and server) has a lot of interesting programming problems to solve.
- GUI
- Networking
- Multi-threads
Its large enough that it would probably require a team to complete in a semester, but small enough to actually finish.
In the end, the students will have a real good feel for what its like to write an application that is forming the basis for a whole new industry. It also has the teen-rebel smell to it.
PBL
One of the big advantages of Java now is that the code is truely mobile. Platforms such as Java/RMI and the more elaborate Java/Jini allow not only data but code to be sent over the wire. The 'recompile for every platform' model just doesn't work when you want to ship code as well as data.
Although this book is not a life-changer (ala GoF or Mr. Becks XP book). It still is a good read. It had me feeling pretty guilty about the many holes in my background (I never did learn how to use yacc/lex). One of the best parts of the book is the 'Resources' appendix. This resource list is a good start at defining the 'Programmer's Canon', the required reading for all in our profession. This list includes off-line as well as online resources ranging from the ACM journals to slashdot.
This book inspires me to keep honing my craft and then tells me how to do it.
Distributed.net has a similar problem with keeping a hostile client from supplying
bad results. There solution is basically the same as Carmacks: keep some bits of the code private. Here is what they say:
Why is distributed.net still not completely open-source with all parts of its source code?