For the past few days we’ve been intensely renovating and redecorating our workspace. The walls have been painted, a whole section of the wall has been torn out, and everything smells of fresh paint. There’s a ton of furniture, old computers and other stuff lying around, but step by step, we’re completing the job. Anyhow, [...]
Category Archives: Software Development
June 1, 2007
09:25
09:25
May 17, 2007
09:51
09:51
Delphi Hacks
Very impressive.
May 8, 2007
08:49
08:49
09:35 and Everything is FUBAR
A state of FUBAR occurred today at 09:35. Unusually fast, I thought. I tried to run a program I’ve written today from a mapped drive, t:. It works beautifully when I run it from my hard drive on c:, but .NET considers t: to be less secure, and therefore the program throws a SecurityException when [...]
April 27, 2007
08:54
08:54
Favorite Pet Peeve #1
Programs that put files in the root. Like, “c:\panda.rpt”. Or “c:\c28791e0aa1b31a2a343bd\update”. A directory I can’t delete. For some reason. The root is sacred space.
April 25, 2007
09:15
09:15
Guess the Product and Win a Coffee Mug!
Count the buzzwords. And no, you don’t win a coffee mug. It’s just a fancy title. Who writes texts like these? They must be on crack or something.
April 24, 2007
13:51
13:51
jQuery AJAX Oddities in Firefox
Ran into a strange problem today. I’m building a site in PHP5 with some recently found Ajax stuff using the wonderful jQuery library. However, the problem I found was that when I used SSPI/NTLM authentication, the ajax queries sent to the server would always generate a login screen. It was very weird, because it worked [...]
April 16, 2007
21:55
21:55
Small Caps in PHP
Who would have thought that it would be so difficult to create images with text in PHP, especially using small capitals? I’m building a website where the titles are supposed to be in small capitals. To simplify things, I didn’t want to create it in Photoshop, but just have php render everything automatically. Which it [...]
April 12, 2007
15:16
15:16
Mysteries
Sometimes, things just start working, without reason. This is a great mystery.
April 10, 2007
13:24
13:24
Things I Would Rather Do than Work with ASP.NET
Smell the roses along the way. Go out fishing. Kiss a pretty girl. Drive a taxi. Hold a public presentation. Listen to music. Make music. Write a technical paper. Write a content management system in PHP. Write a haiku in Japanese. Write a haiku in FORTRAN. Learn Erlang. Learn French. Run a mile. Repair a [...]
April 4, 2007
13:34
13:34
2:34pm and All is Well
Microsoft has an unnerving ability to make the complicated easy, the easy complicated, and the supposedly obvious absolutely unintelligible.
April 3, 2007
15:15
15:15
log4net? Not for Me
I’ve just made a decision not to build my logging in any application on log4net. I’m sure log4net is a wonderful tool that can log anything, anywhere, to any log consumer. But after sitting here struggling for hours in trying to get it to log correctly – both for myself and for a client’s ASP.NET [...]
March 28, 2007
10:14
10:14
Think Twice
Over the years, I’ve come to formulate a policy towards software development and Microsoft in particular. “Think twice before building a solution on a Microsoft platform.” Why do I say this? I’m not unreasonably biased against Microsoft. I’ve almost never used Linux, I don’t do Java, I hack my way through Delphi, PHP and Visual [...]
March 16, 2007
22:11
22:11
Time is Money
“Time is the most valuable commodity you can spend, for once you’ve spent it, you can never get it back.” What we do with our time is as important as how we spend our money. There’s an inflow of 24 new, fresh, wonderful hours every day. Usually 8 of these go directly into work, sometimes [...]
March 7, 2007
14:30
14:30
Suitable Uses for the DesktopShooter Program
The only program I was inspired to developed in my spare time while working for TE was the therapeutic tool DesktopShooter. Enclosing below a suitable use for this excellent little utility. The dialog shown below is the new, enhanced WinHlp32.exe.
February 24, 2007
12:34
12:34
From OPOOP to POPO
Once upon a time, while still in high school, I ran a BBS called OPOOP. This was a very mysterious name, and it meant “Organized Programmers against Object-Oriented Programming”. This was in the days when every program written in C++ suddenly became half a megabyte bigger than the C equivalent; and in those days, half [...]
February 1, 2007
15:54
15:54
Borland Makefiles
What’s the point of having makefiles if they don’t work? Borland Developer Studio (formerly known as Delphi) builds nice little project group files, that look exactly like makefiles. The problem is that if the projects included in the makefiles are in subfolders, the makefile doesn’t recurse into these directories, but runs dcc32 from the current [...]
January 7, 2007
15:57
15:57
Future Software Development: My Predictions for the Next 50 Years
The discipline of writing computer software has existed for about 50 years now, give or take. Over the years we’ve learned a lot, produced a lot of good software and immense amounts of bad software. The current discipline is maturing slowly, but it’s a far cry from other fields of engineering which have been around [...]
December 11, 2006
22:57
22:57
Object Workspaces
Ever since my little adventure in C# and Collection services, I’ve been thinking more and more radical ideas about CRUD operations in an application. Hibernate is a nice tool for solving the persistence part of an object space (i.e. the objects that make up a system); this and similar toolkits provide the functionality to stream [...]
November 20, 2006
14:18
14:18
Final Countdown
4.5 days left of my employment. I’ve cruised into the final week here. Friday at 1700 hours is Liberty Hour, when I will dance out of the halls, with bells ringing and choirs singing. And then, six weeks of long, wonderful, blissful nothing (oh! nothing! bliss!) until I start my new job. “We may allow [...]
November 16, 2006
11:49
11:49
“Oops”
System administration isn’t always easy. I just read some horror stories from Unix administration, one here and another one here. And I so much share the grief and agony of the administrators who accidentially typed in the right command, in the wrong place, and wiped out the accumulated work of 100 users in one second. [...]