Quotes About Documentation

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

I act because it's the one time I'm sure of my identity. There's no doubt. It's on paper.

Steele: So I guess there's lessons there—the lesson I should have drawn is there may be more than one bug here and I should have looked harder the first time. But another lesson is that if a bug is thought to be rare, then looking at rarely executed paths may be fruitful. And a third thing is, having good documentation about what the algorithm is trying to do, namely a reference back to Knuth, was just great.

Documenting is an art as fine as programming. It's rare I find documentation at the level I like. Usually it's much, much finer-grained than need be. It contains a bunch of irrelevancies and dangling references that assume knowledge not there. Documenting is very, very hard; it's time-consuming. To do it right, you've got to do it like programming. You've got to deconstruct it, put it together in nice ways, rewrite it when it's wrong. People don't do that.

history is our attempt to reconstruct the past from the evidence that remains

In Mexico, they don't have birth certificates... They don't have registration cards for voters. They have one national ID. We don't have a national ID.

Protect yourself by always having a record of what transpired or was said in any situation that might be considered sensitive.

Never have lives less lived been more chronicled.

How do we picture the past? Does it become clearer as it drifts into the distance? Can it be seen from more angles, a better vantage, with finer instruments for optics, and more supporting documentation to draw from? Or has its essence already vanished, leaving space for lies to multiply and thrive, spreading across paperwork that is good for nothing except, perhaps, a nervous acting captain's next snack?

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don't understand computers.

I have a British and an American passport.

Anyone who's gotten their passport in America will tell you, when you get it, it still says what country you were born in. So I remember getting my American passport. I was like, 'Woo-hoo! I'm going to travel.' And I opened it up. It said, 'Born in Iran.' I'm like, 'Oh, come on, man!'

When I go to Canada, there's all kinds of legal paperwork that has to be done. There's a special permit.

We had prepared, my staff had prepared for me a whole dossier on virtually - on George Bush on his votes on his records, what he had done over the past number of years in public service.

I really knew when I started photographing I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to be a voyeur.

By the time you have finished reading this book, you should be comfortable and confident in your understanding of IP addresses, their formats, the grouping concepts, how to subdivide groups into subnets, how to interpret the documentation for existing networks' IP addressing, and so on. Simply put, you had better know addressing and subnetting!

They record thoughts and overheard conversations, as well as maps of their personal paths, phone numbers for hotels, restaurant recommendations, airline flight numbers. Eventually

With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne's thread. Now people leave paper trails.

Hariot would make a detailed record of the New World in writing, and White would undertake a series of illustrations and paintings. Together they would be Ralegh's ears and eyes in America.

As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read.

But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.

I have all my contact sheets filed, from the first photograph I took to the present day.