Back in old country, I once had a programmer working for me who made himself famous with the following quote:
"I have fixed that bug, do you want me to compile it too ?".
In his mind, he was done as soon as he identified the bug and put the fix in the code. All the rest was trivial and unimportant routine.
During last 20 years I have worked with many very different developers and learned the hard way, how very many different meanings the word "done" can have. For some, done means that coding just finished and he/she successfully compiled the projects and stepped through some of the code paths with debugger with negligible occurrences of major crash. Whether the code is in CVS, commented - who cares ?
Continuing from here.
Ch-7: Digging into the source code
In this chapter, Mike describes the tools that work with, around or towards source code: Idlasm, Reflector and FxCop. The book is written for Visual Studio 2003, so some references are slightly outdated - but there is one utility that stands out and is still more useful than ever: Lutz Roeder's Reflector. It is part of the Visual Studio 2005 (albeit in older version that you can get on the Web site).
1960
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?
1970 (Traditional)
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production
is 4/5 of this price, or in other words, $80. What is his profit?
1970 (New Math)
A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth a dollar. Make a square array of 100 dots to represent the elements of set M. The set C of the cost of production contains 20 fewer elements than set M. Represent set C as a subset of K and answer the following question:
What is the cardinality of set P of profits?
I have recently picked very interesting book that I have read about year ago, from Mike Gunderloy named Coder to Developer, with subtitle Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software. It is an excellent book and I highly recommend to give it a look if you are in software development business on Microsoft platform. Easy read, practical, useful.When I was reading it back in 2006, it was before we have set up own development lab and started the biometric project. With this recent experience, I was re-reading the book with quite different view: unlike before, I knew what we tried, what worked and what did not. Unlike before, I have now broader experience with what it means developing software and run large project inside the organization, creating and maintaining infrastructure for team of developers and leading the project design and implementation.
Few of my favorites:
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. [Alan Kay]
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. [Brian W. Kernighan]
It is Friday again, time to clean up the link cache. I'll try to make this a Friday affair and stick with weekly schedule.
The DRM is having hard time: after Steve Jobs article about how DRM is bad, EMI announcement of considering dropping the DRM, another of Net celebrities - cryptography legend Bruce Schneier (of Applied Crypography and Blowfish fame) wrote an article for Forbes Why Vista DRM Is Bad for you. He makes several good points, it is good read.
Connie, our HR director came few weeks ago with interesting idea: give the team a chance to get better understanding of "implementation details" of their very own "inner software" - the personality type evaluation using Myers-Briggs approach. Connie holds certification for this type of classification.
The classification in a nutshell, assigns to everybody four letters, one from each pair: E or I, N or S, T or F, J or P. The first letter indicates preference for Extraversion or Introversion, the second characterizes the main source of information input: Sensation or iNtuition, the third the way how the information is processed - by Thinking or Feeling and the last one characterizes the degree of "structure" and organization in all the previous: more organized and structured (Judging) or less organized and more ad-hoc (Perceiving). Now all this is terrible oversimplification (sorry Connie), so if you really want to get more information try this - or if you are in Ottawa, call Connie Deschamps at Thinknostic dot com and schedule a session :-).
On Tuesday evening, the Ottawa Dotnet Users Group organized presentation of Adam Machanic from Boston with title "Designing Highly Concurrent SQL Server Database Applications". I was not sure whether I will make it, because because I did not feel really well, but I am very happy I went.
It was probably one of the best presentations I have seen in Microsoft Glacier Room on 100 Queen Street. I am not sure whether because it was indeed so great or because it touches closely what we are doing.
I found out by accident that the famous Get a Mac ads exists in many versions:
Some nations have their own actors
http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/jp/getamac/ads/
Other have only just language version of Long && Hodgman act
http://www.apple.com/de/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/fr/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/it/getamac/ads/
http://www.apple.com/es/getamac/
The Austria and German speaking part of Switzerland are using German version of the ads (no surprise there) - http://www.apple.com/chde/getamac/ - and the francophone part of Switzerland uses the French version. As it looks like, Italian and Romansch speaking Swiss do not count :-(
After lots of attempts (see here, here and here), I have finally resolved my disk space problems and the RAID-5 NAS server is up and running since about two weeks now. I have stayed with Fedora 6, successfully installed Samba, configured the shares and copied all family JPEG's, videos, MP3's etc onto the huge 907 GB large RAID5 share. The old NSLU2 is still dead - I did not have any time to try to re-flash it, but all content of it's disk was without any issues readable by the new server (the NSLU2 was using ext3 filesystem) so I did not even have to try to use backups.