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about

A brief dissertation on the First Law of Cybernetic Entomology

True stories. This song is particularly popular with kids; Chaos, my eldest, insists on performing the cockroach in the last verse.

lyrics

Around the chattering printer, the stories that are told
Of programs and their lurking bugs would make your blood run cold
It's the same the whole world over, from Apple to Big Blue
And I swear upon a stack of cards these tales I tell are true.

And it's bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs,
Bugs, bugs, BUGS!
There's always one more bug.

Columbia stood ready for her first trip to the sky:
America's first shuttle, with the whole world standing by,
But with thirty seconds left to go a warning flag unfurled
And it took them all next week to find the Bug Heard Round the World.

chorus

They were heading for the tropics on a long range testing flight
The crew on board the brand-new jet thought things were working right
'Til they went past the Equator and the plane flipped upside down,
They damn near took the software team and ran them out of town.

chorus

A tapeworm laid the network low; it spread itself around
Through loopholes in the system code its programmer had found;
But not all of the bugs it found were relics from the past:
One more bug made the tapeworm spread a thousand times too fast.

spoken, slowly:

And when the final program's run and all its data saved
They'll take the last dead programmer and lay him in his grave
And the very last bug left in sight, a cockroach passing by
Will walk across his coffin there, as if to say, ``Nice try.''

chorus

credits

from Coffee, Computers, and Song, released July 1, 2007
My kids, Emerald and Chaos, on backup vocals

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about

Steve Savitzky Seattle, Washington

Notorious hacker/songwriter Steve Savitzky has been kicking around the Net since the days of bang-paths and bearskins, and writes songs of computers, spacecraft, love, friendship -- and sometimes all four at once.

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