Ciaran’s Random Writings

Yep, as of this morning, I consider Java as malware. Having put up with the JRE updater being used as an advertising platform for some time now, the final nail in the coffin came this morning with JRE 6 Update 5. This attempts to install a stinking “Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox/Mozilla”, and while there’s a checkbox to turn it off, it’s enabled by default.

As far as I’m concerned, this is totally unacceptable and Java and Sun just went down an awful long way in my estimation.

I guess you’re worried that when your project has no bugs, or when maintenance becomes too easy, someone is going to start wondering what they’re paying you for. What you need is technical debt. Here my top 10 ways to sneak some into your codebase. As well as plenty of future bugs, this will ensure that any maintenance or expansion tasks take as long as possible.

1. Create lots of overloaded versions of the same function. Only use one.
2. Copy and paste code. For bonus points, change the pasted versions slightly.
3. Leave chunks of commented out code (”Green Code”) lying around.
4. Don’t use existing core logic. Reimplement it within the user interface using your own strange methodology. Make sure it behaves subtly differently. No need to check that, it will.
5. Check several unrelated changes in at once. Only mention one in the check-in comment.
6. Never use 5 lines of code where 50 will do.
7. Never use 50 lines of code where several classes that almost resemble a GOF pattern you misunderstood will do.
8. Invent your own naming conventions.
9. Never fix a bug - hide it. For example, deal with null reference problems by simply sticking an if-not-null around the offending code. This saves you having to look for the real source of the problem, and also ensures the bug will come round again in a more subtle and interesting manner.
10. Leaving out documentation is too obvious. Much better to document it, but make sure the code doesn’t do what the documentation claims.

Finally sunshine is upon us. This means gardening, and during the week the ability to work in the garden, at least when it’s possible to angle the laptop away from the sun so the screen is still visible. The orchard is a mass of blossom at the moment. The apple tree pictured right is probably the best apple tree in the world. When they’re ready, which will be around mid-September, they’re enormous, deep red, and pink in the middle. The picture below is a close-up of the blossom from the same tree, hacked about with using qtpfsgui to make it look arty farty. For once I’m quite pleased with the results.

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Kiko (she has a name now) took her first trip to Suffolk to meet Meg, a real Border Collie. They spent the entire weekend wrestling in the garden, leading to another gratuitous set of doggy pictures…

We took a trip to Huddersfield yesterday and returned with a seven week old puppy. She’s half Border Collie - the mother is a rescue dog who started getting fat when they got her home and then produced four large puppies, so the identity of the father is unknown.

Brimham Rocks has been on my list of favourite places for a long time, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I realised we’d never taken Mia there. We’ve put that right more than once recently.

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Can you guess what it is from the picture? It’s a driveshaft. Not very exciting to most people I suppose, but if you’d been waiting six weeks for the bloody thing to turn up, you might see it my way.

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Any software developer will be able to tell tales of bug reports that don’t give enough information to reproduce the problem. My all-time favourite said just this: “When you take off from the aircraft carrier in the F4 Phantom, it crashes.” Not an unusual scenario - a complex flight-sim written entirely in 80×86 assembler tends to either work perfectly, or crash.

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Sadly, a very important member of the family is no longer with us. Apart from the postman, Mika was everybody and everything’s best friend.

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Why are hardware manufacturers so incompetent when it comes to software? The wonderful message below was followed by three more equally insane error dialogs.