Welcome to the Desiderata Project

GEEKERATA

(A UNIX Analog of Desiderata (Max Ehrman, 1927))
(mainly as addressed to a network process)

Badri Krishnamoorthy
badri@srtc.com

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Route placidly amid channel noise and network failures,
And remember what throughput there may be in executing all alone.

As far as possible, without overflowing buffer
Be on communicative terms with all processes.
Broadcast your data quietly and clearly
And listen(2) to others.
Even to the null and the unreachable,
They too have their requests.
Avoid long and argumentative sessions
They are burdensome to the ether.

If you compare your priority with others'
You may become vain or bitter
For always there will be greater and lesser processes than yourself.

Enjoy your CPUtime as well as your idletime.
Keep cognizance of your portmapper, however low-level
It is a constant port in the changing mappings of the network.

Exercise caution in your execution,
For the kernel is full of traps.
But let this not blind you to what swap space there is;
Many channels strive for high bandwidths, and everywhere
Computing is full of parallelism.

Be yourself. (Check with getpid(2) frequently)
Especially do not forge NFS file handles.
Neither be cynical about sockets,
For in the face of all congestion and delays
They are as powerful as STREAMS.

Take kindly the influx of new requests,
Gracefully re-prioritizing the older ones.

Nurture support of check-points to rollback from sudden crashes
But do not thrash pages due to imagined pagefaults:
Many core dumps are born of bus error or segmentation faults.

Beyond a nominal consideration,
Be nice(1) to other processes.

You are a child in the kernel space
No less than the daemons and the device drivers,
You have a right to execute here.
And whether or not it is apparent to you
No doubt the kernel is crashing, though it shouldn't.

Therefore be at peace with your programmer
However geeky you think s/he is.
And wherever your read(2)'s and recvfrom(2)'s,
In the noisy communication channels of the network,
Keep a valid (void *) buf available in your address space.
With all its stopped jobs, missing arguments and broken pipes,
It is still a UNIX shell.

Be backward-compatible.
Strive to be up and running always.

Respectfully Quoted :

``There has been confusion about the authorship of this poem. In 1956, the rector of St Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland, used the poem in a collection of mimeographed inspirational material for his congregation. Someone printing it later said it was found in Old St Paul's Church, Baltimore, dated 1692. The year 1692 is the founding date of the church and has nothing to do with the poem, which was written in 1927. It was widely distributed with the 1692 date."

Fred D. Cavinder, ``Desiderata'', TWA Ambassador, August 1973, pp. 14-15

"Desiderata" fue escrito en 1927 por Max Ehrmann (1872-1945), abogado y filósofo de Harvard y publicado en 1948, después de su muerte, por su viuda, en el libro "Los poemas de Max Ehrman".
En 1956, el reverendo Kates, pastor de la iglesia de San Pablo en Baltimore (Maryland), incluyó el texto en una colección de poemas de su congregación.
Alguien cambió la fecha del poema unos 200 años al decir erróneamente que el poema se encontró en una inscripción fechada en 1692 grabada en una tumba de la antigua Iglesia de San Pablo de Baltimore. El año 1692 es el año en que se fundó la iglesia y no tiene nada que ver con la fecha de creación del poema.

Es gab einige Verwirrung, was den Ursprung dieses Gedichtes betrifft. 1956 benutzte es der Rektor der St. Paul´s Kirche in Baltimore / Maryland, in einer vervielfältigten Sammlung geistlicher Texte für seine Gemeinde. In einem späteren Nachdruck wurde gesagt, es sei in "der alten Sankt Pauls-Kirche gefunden" worden und datiere von 1692. Das Jahr 1692 ist jedoch das Baujahr der Kirche und hat nichts mit dem Text zu tun, der 1927 geschrieben wurde. Der Text hat - zusammen mit dem falschen Datum - weite Verbreitung gefunden.