Cranky Old Programmer

One of my favourite literary quotes comes from Canadian author, Hugh MacLennan. “But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in...

I get a lot of email from all sorts of people looking for all kinds of help. I recently received, what I believe is the funniest one to date: I have a friend named redacted. He is evidently a master programmer, because he says so. However, his code keeps turning...

Earlier today, we started a pretty bold move from one data centre to a brand-spanking new one across the city. I say bold, because we had to take ourselves completely offline while we disconnected more than thirty bits of hardware, shipped it across the city, and then reassembled it all...

I received this message via the EMO inbox today: haha noobs your number sorting in project explorer is like a mistake from windows 95 this is ridiculously funny He’s right. It is ridiculously funny. I’m assuming that the sender is part of some nerd mafia and sent this message to...

I receive a lot of email from the community. Much of it is from frustrated users who are trying to make something work. Here’s a recent example: The problem was that I didn’t realise that the [project] comes ON TOP of Eclipse…I thought that the [project] was something separate and...

I am the target of a lot of email from the community. Messages that I receive generally fall into three different buckets: Eclipse project stuff from committers and project leads, requests for price quotes, and pleas for help. I do get lots of other types of email, but these are...

Two years of experience doesn’t make you “senior”. Except maybe in high school. I don’t mean this in a negative sort of way. I mean it in a trying-to-help-you-out sort of way. I’ve worked for a relatively small number of companies in my twenty-plus years of professional life. Small by...

My son is taking a course in computer programming at his high school. As is the case for many (most?) high school students in Ontario, they’re using a programming language named Turing. I initially hated the Turing programming language. That hate was a bit irrational, as–like many of my peers–I...

Our dependence on search technology grows. A while back, I posted the Top Ten Ways to Say Eclipse. It seems like every few days, I get a new one to add to my list. I get asked about Eclipse cables, Eclipse wire strippers, Eclipse massages, and more. The variety is...

The term “open and transparent” rolls off your tongue. While somewhat more cumbersome to say, I tend to prefer reversing the order: “transparent and open”. I prefer this because I believe that transparent precedes open; and far more open source projects are transparent than are open. In my experience most...