Weblog Jan 2005

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Coding curiosity 10: The regex from hell        

Some developers, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use a regular expression". Now they have two problems. Read more

21-Jan-2005 01:40

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Captain Ahab wildly pursuing the white whale        

Black hole projects are usually led by one or more Captain Ahabs, madly pursuing the white whale with absolute conviction, while the deckhands stand around saying "Gee, that whale looks awfully big. I'm not sure we can really take him down." Read more

21-Jan-2005 00:45

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Coding curiosity 9: T-SQL gymnastics        

T-SQL code to create a PDF, no less. Read more

21-Jan-2005 00:20

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Ground zero        

Shocking "before" and "after" satellite pictures of the Banda Aceh shoreline in Indonesia. Read more

12-Jan-2005 23:20

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Sliced off by the cutting edge        

It's rare indeed to come across a good software developer who can also write streams of intelligent prose that give some profound insights. It's even rarer when that person is female. Read more

12-Jan-2005 01:30

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The 50-million-people bug        

A rather graphic reminder that running your app successfully in production, even for 340 operational years, doesn't mean that it's bug-free. Read more

07-Jan-2005 01:10

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Coding curiosity 8: The overload that broke the C# developer's back        

Here's another oddity of the C# method overload resolution algorithm. Read more

07-Jan-2005 01:05

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Coding curiosity 7: More double trouble        

VB uses the \ operator for integer division, and the / operator for floating-point division. C#, on the other hand, overloads the / operator to mean either integer or floating-point division depending on the type of the numbers being divided. This leads to more "double trouble". Read more

07-Jan-2005 01:00

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Terrible tragedy in Asia        

It's hard for me to put into words what I feel about the Indian Ocean mega-quake and the devastation wrought by the ensuing tsunamis. Stalin, himself responsible for killing more than 40 million people, perhaps had it right when he said that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is just a statistic. So it's the individual stories of heroism and tragedy that really make the disaster real for me. Read more

02-Jan-2005 02:45