— Laura Thompson of Mozilla Corporation in http://bit.ly/ak61qe
— YAGNI, the programmer’s equivalent of Clippy
how can I work when it smells like this?
where F ==
by a reCAPTCHA while signing up for a Twitter account. I now officially love reCAPTCHA that much more. Immediately following this event, my lady says,
Now what do I do?
to which she answered herself with
What else? Follow Conan O’Brien
I love my wife. Lots.
This is from the first row of image results for flubbing huge:

make: *** No rule to make target `money'. Stop.
It’s not that I don’t have enough money. I live a very privileged life in this here fattest state of the fattest nation in the world.
I just don’t trust myself to do simple arithmetic — specifically for balancing my checkbook.
fancy at first
My first solution used Python’s
decimal library and did the trick just fine. But then I got the wacky idea that I should take the opportunity to learn how to do decimal math with bc.
Dumb idea?
…probably
… but if that’s the case, then so was making myself learn sed and awk… which are now very much part of my daily shell scripting habits.
I use Dropbox for lazy version control — not least because I keep my data files and “code” files in the same directory for the sake of yet more laziness. My file layout looks like this:
.
|-- bank-balance
|-- checkbooking*
|-- last-done
|-- Makefile
|-- my-balance
`-- outstanding
the Makefile
As seen below, the target is “last-done” and its dependencies are all of the data files — “bank-balance”, “my-balance”, and “outstanding”.
the bash + bc script
As said above, the following bash script just uses bc to do the decimal math.
And with that, I’d much appreciate it if somebody would hurry up and tell me what I’m doing wrong.
:)
My 2002 Bianchi Volpe is still serving me well. Thank you, nation of Italy, for insisting on making high-quality bicycles.
— mcrute
— third-hand via coworker