As a programmer, I have a highly developed talent for figuring out ways code can go wrong. Corner case arguments? Weird combinations? Illegal uses? Gotta find them all, and make sure they don't break the system. Gotta think of every way things can go south ( Read more... )

I've been reading Joel on Software blog recently, finding it extremely interesting both at a technical level and for thinking about careers and companies in general. In particular, I want to share this entry, called Hitting the High Notes which very nicely nails some of what makes programming different from engineering and more similar to design. ( Read more... )

Not long till System administrator appreciation day, now ( Read more... )

At least when it comes to making web interfaces. I'm part of doing a working prototype of a system for surveying installations. In two days, I took it from a fairly standard data entry system that requires a lot of clicking around to a system with substantial workflow support that makes use of available data whenever possible. It's slick and ( Read more... )

According to this, good programmers are strongly correlated with people who can accept meaninglessness:

To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion.
They found a near-perfect ( Read more... )

I was editing some text in Emacs and its quirks and weirdnesses just became too much for me. I saved out and switched to GEdit, a barebones editor that just the standard keybindings that I'm getting used to from IntelliJ and other places. My 15-year-long affair with Emacs is over. I will only go back for things where I really need Emacs' combined ( Read more... )

My three months trial period is nearly up at the new job (not naming it this time, as the prez has a running search on the name and quickly picked up on my last post:), and I still like it a lot. It can be a bit hectic at times, especially when our sales people promise things that just don't fit well with our design, and require it be ready in a ( Read more... )

Just found out a freaky thing about Javascript. Not only does each function have an argument.object that includes a callee field containing the function itself (allowing anonymous recursive functions), you can rewrite it. The code behind the cut defines a function that always makes a recursive call at the end, except to escape it rewrites its own ( Read more... )

The thing I dislike the most about Gnome is how little information for developers there seems to be. Trying to find something about how the thumbnailer is supposed to be incorporated into a project, I just find patches and blog entries, not actual documentation. Given that many other projects have no such problem, and Gnome apparently has no ( Read more... )

So I'm going to create a plugin for my photo organizing program, KPhotoAlbum. This pugin will allow me to experiment with various ways of measuring relative sharpness of an image, in order to automatically find the sharpest of a series of images of the same subject (similar to what my old Coolpix 955 did, called "Best Shot Selector"). It's a way ( Read more... )