The one thing that I always loved about computer science is the "build and run" gratification that you get. Sure it takes a while to code perhaps, but you can see most of the time how this piece is going to fit into the thing you're trying to build. And once you have a piece done, compile and run. Get a simple answer, it will run or some semi-colon is missing. The part you wrote is either now present in the program, or causes the program to freeze.
Historically that was the case anyway. Now that the project are bigger and more complex, things get more interesting. Lets say you wrote this piece of code, and yes it did work, and everything was fine. Well one day, some person decided to run your piece of code while eating a blueberry muffin. This person usually prefers cantaloupe, but today was a treat. All of a sudden because of this seemingly unrelated coincidence, the power goes out for the entire neighborhood. Those are the fun bugs to find. And no, my software hasn't caused a blackout, yet.
I can appreciate bugs that have some sort of cascading effect. Those are sometimes even cool to watch. These are the bugs where a beaver chips a tooth, which causes a log to be cut incorrectly, causing the damn to fail, flooding a campsite, and that's why your boots outside the the campsite are soaking wet (true story, got the tooth to prove it). Bugs like these have sort of a long path to follow, they're mostly straight forward, and it's relatively obvious where one leads to the next.
Bugs that I will not stand for are bugs that just hop along causing all their ruckus at the end. It's like a tick in the yard that jumped on a dog, then on the cat that the dog chased, then on the floor, that you stepped near to get infected with something bad. The cause of the result just got passed around and there's less of a evidence path to follow when finding where you might have a "tick colony" or something.
Which leads me to our nice bug today. Apparently while running our software, you can run someone else's software. We have a dialog that says you shouldn't do that, but computer users don't like to read dialogs, me included. Well, while running these two unrelated pieces of software, after closing their software, the subdirectories in our software's directory all get renamed. To make this even more fun, it only does this after running a specific portion of our software. This portion is specific, but large. We can narrow it down, but to run each test scenario takes upwards of 30-40 minutes to get the answer.
Thus mixing my two least favorite items, devious bugs and non-instant gratification. Today was a long day...
Showing posts with label Work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Work. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Today, I moved
We played a bit of musical chairs in the office today. Interestingly enough, I ended up with one of the most visible cubes in the whole office. To make it more interesting, the person who was in this cube was quite the popular fella, so today was filled with "oh, you're here now? Well that will take some getting used to... ".
The downer parts of the move: my cabinet door opens above the cabinet instead of into the cabinet, so I can't really count on being able to keep things on top of the cabinet like I used to. The keyboard tray in the new cube is slightly smaller, so my mouse is on a different level than the keyboard. I'm in a very public place, I see everyone walk by and vice versa. The founder / "boss dude"'s office is right in front of me, along with the rest of the C<>O's and their offices lining the wall. Plus now I have a window to another cube to my back. That's probably the weirdest part. I have no one looking over my shoulder, but I sure as hell could have someone stalking me through the glass. I miss the privacy.
There's a couple sips of lemonade though. The cube was much brighter when I first moved in. That just took unscrewing a couple of the light bulbs above my cube. Problem solved. The cube also has a bookshelf inside of it, taking up more space that I'd really like. But since I can't readily keep anything in my cabinet anymore, the bookshelf works famously. Lemonade from Lemons. The desks were arranged so I faced away from the entrance of my cube. I really didn't like this because then people coming up to me couldn't easily get my attention. A few stripped screws later, the desks are arranged "correctly". Crisis averted.
The intent of the shuffle is to get some of the teams that work together to sit closer together. AT least that's what the end result looks like. The architecture / engine people all sit together, closer to the embedded (dos) programmers. The UI team is all sitting in a pretty little row. The "new super secret project" people are also all sitting in an area together as well.
The only part of the move that was inconvenient was the not announcing it. I sort of just came into work today and that was the big part of the morning for me, moving the horde of computers and misc stuff. Everything seems to be in place now though. It's still never home, but it'll do.
The downer parts of the move: my cabinet door opens above the cabinet instead of into the cabinet, so I can't really count on being able to keep things on top of the cabinet like I used to. The keyboard tray in the new cube is slightly smaller, so my mouse is on a different level than the keyboard. I'm in a very public place, I see everyone walk by and vice versa. The founder / "boss dude"'s office is right in front of me, along with the rest of the C<>O's and their offices lining the wall. Plus now I have a window to another cube to my back. That's probably the weirdest part. I have no one looking over my shoulder, but I sure as hell could have someone stalking me through the glass. I miss the privacy.
There's a couple sips of lemonade though. The cube was much brighter when I first moved in. That just took unscrewing a couple of the light bulbs above my cube. Problem solved. The cube also has a bookshelf inside of it, taking up more space that I'd really like. But since I can't readily keep anything in my cabinet anymore, the bookshelf works famously. Lemonade from Lemons. The desks were arranged so I faced away from the entrance of my cube. I really didn't like this because then people coming up to me couldn't easily get my attention. A few stripped screws later, the desks are arranged "correctly". Crisis averted.
The intent of the shuffle is to get some of the teams that work together to sit closer together. AT least that's what the end result looks like. The architecture / engine people all sit together, closer to the embedded (dos) programmers. The UI team is all sitting in a pretty little row. The "new super secret project" people are also all sitting in an area together as well.
The only part of the move that was inconvenient was the not announcing it. I sort of just came into work today and that was the big part of the morning for me, moving the horde of computers and misc stuff. Everything seems to be in place now though. It's still never home, but it'll do.
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