The Deep North

Received Development Methodology Introduction This is called 'The Received Methodology' because nothing has really been invented here beyond tidying up the process and describing it. It is, in bits and pieces, what some working programmers pass on to one another. It already exists in the wild on its own. It is 'what we do'. There is some merit in formalizing some of the stages so that work is easier to characterize and carve off and so that developers do not have to make apologies for the real-world fact that things generally are not 'first time right' in the meaningful sense of being 'the best' or surviving in the marketplace without revision. Things like 'pair programming', 'design patterns', 'RAD', 'Use cases', 'XP' (eXtreme Programming)', 'Agile Programming', test driven design, etc, all have their place within this framework, if only because they *DO* happen and this is a description of ...

Message sent to Microsoft in response to an error message about attempting to find out what an error message in Event View means (using the dysfunctional "Event Log Online Help" link): Nobody ever reads or at least acts on these things. Simplest of errors encountered literally millions of times every single day attempting to look up error information. To add a little additional extra pain you require the user to log into an obscure account to get a message saying: We're sorry, but the page you requested could not be found. It's because of user-hostile nonsense like this that I, my family, friends and co-workers have essentially left Microsoft in favor of iOSx or Linux. Good luck getting us back with this ongoing pointless irritation -- for something that a few developers could fix with a bit of scripting. OMFG!!! --- If MS wanted to fix this, they could probably do it in a week or so using a few students searching source code with simple scripts and an updat...

The people getting all jazzed up about global warming and biodiversity, if they care so much, should  spend some of their energy attempting to understand what they are talking about. Genetic differences are not all equally important nor are they all equally hard-won. Important characteristics will suffer no appreciable effect from a few degrees change in temperature, wandering water tables or whatever. Climate change, even in the highly unlikely event that it follows the path predicted by alarmists, will have a negligible impact on biodiversity. In the time that it has taken to evolve the higher animals, the earth has undergone many changes significantly more radical than the modest changes in climate that even the most nutty alarmist predicts. If one examines the various adaptations as they currently exist, it is quite clear that life on earth has endured changes of temperature larger than the worst case projected by the IPCC. These temperature changes are common enough th...

Modern Alert Screen I have some ongoing design notes that I add to every now and then. It is sometimes when I get a brainstorm about how to do something  new or better. More often than not it is prompted by something so old, bad, stupid and annoying that it forces me to pay attention. Just about three years ago, I encountered one of those profoundly annoying status alerts. It took the focus away from what I was working on. It started hijacking my keystrokes. It forced me to stop what I was doing and make sense of their idiotic message. For whatever reason, this really sent me over the edge. The impertinence of these journeyman programmers is sometimes more than I can bear.  I stopped that day to create the mother of all annoying alerts and put into it every one of the annoying practices these things foist upon us. As ridiculous as it may seem, every single one of these items are based on real events that happen with real software. It is entirely impossible to exaggerate...