Philosophical Geek

This is an issue I run into constantly at my job.
Frank Kelly wrote up a good summary of some items. They’re simple, easy to understand, easy to follow, even for non-programmers.
In fact, I’m sending this link out to everyone in my group here at work.
Technorati Tags: testing,programming,bug reporting
Popularity: 3% [?]
Tags: bugs, Links/News, programming, [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Filed under: Code, Link/News, Tips | No Comments »

The importance of measuring performance changes is a topic that has been covered by others smarter and more experienced than me, but I have a recent simple tale.
I’ve simplified the code quite a bit in order to demonstrate the issue. Suppose I have a wrapper around an image (it has many more attributes):

[...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Filed under: Code, Software Development, Tips | No Comments »

One of the key requirements for being able to reliably update software is the confidence that the changes you are making are safe. The amount of confidence required increases with the complexity of the system.
In my day job I work on a real-time messaging system that can have very, very little downtime. As the service [...]

Popularity: 13% [?]

Filed under: Software Development, Tips | 5 Comments »

Getting a weird COM Exception with the cryptic ID 0×8055001E?
We’ve been struggling with this problem for over a year now, and we finally have a solution.
We have some critical code that is contacting Exchange server via COM Interop and CDOEX.DLL to read some inboxes and process e-mails. About once a month or so, we get [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Filed under: Code, Tips | No Comments »

I’ve been meaning to write about this software for a while. When I started my current job, all software development was done by an outside contractor. I quickly took over, and that necessitated implementing a lot of tools and procedures to handle our large C++ and C# code base.
Choosing Subversion for source control was easy–free, [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Filed under: Link/News | No Comments »

A colleague at work recently got a second video card–a bottom of the barrel (or close to it) nVidia MX 4000 (PCI). He had an existing AGP nVidia Vanta. Well…the installation did not go well. It did something to Windows so that it consistently blue-screened during the driver load process (the progress bar moving in [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Thoughts On Tech and More, Tips | 1 Comment »

Much is being made lately about vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, and various people are either haughtily dengrating the Mac while others are pooh-poohing the results with bad logic.
All of the ridiculous claims of “My OS is [better | more secure | safer] than your OS” is getting old. All these problems really do is [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Software Development | 2 Comments »

Yesterday was a golden day. Everything I touched turned to gold. I solved all the problems that came up, fixed bugs right and left, and even figured out the root cause of a bug that’s been plaguing us for a month or so.
Some days are like that. I like days like this, because I feel [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Software Development | 1 Comment »

I had talked before about the random play function in my car stereo, particularly the playing of Arlington every time I drive past Arlington National Cemetery.
It happened AGAIN. This is the 5th time in a row. I haven’t heard the song, otherwise.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Tags: bugs, music, programming, random

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Code, Humor, Music, Film, Theater | No Comments »