Daniel Martin

So this morning I was remarking to my boss that I thought I had been especially diplomatic in a recent email and had held myself back rather well considering the circumstances.

( This weekend's email )
Anyway, my boss reminded me of another time I had not been perhaps as restrained as I should. I went searching for that email and discovered that I've been archiving everything since I started here, and (for example) have messages I sent back in August 2000 to my groomsmen asking them for their measurements so that I could arrange for appropriate formalwear. Although I doubt that there's anything in there of an Enron nature (I'm just not sufficiently well paid to get into that much trouble), I sometimes wonder.

( Slightly less than diplomatic )

So my coworker may have found a bug in one of our big jewels-of-the-company core libraries. We send off the bug report along with a short sample program that demonstrates the bug; to make a long bug short, it tries a certain sequence of operations in a specific order and fails (the library call returns a bizarre error status) half-way through.

We get back the message: "we couldn't reproduce the effects you mentioned; when we compiled the code here it coredumps at the first attempted operation".
( Longer story about debugging someone else's changes )

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And now a small rant about C and the equivalence of a null pointer and an uncasted-to-anything 0.( C gripe )

It's definitely going to cause me to have to do clean-up work, and the pair programming I tried to set up isn't happening - I have a feeling that I should learn more about pair programming first and how to encourage it.

Mostly, though, I should first fix up the part I'm supposed to do.

So yesterday at work was a total bust - I spent all day avoiding getting started on this stupid little project that's in between me and the big project I want to be working on. However, because I had had priorities handed to me, I didn't want to work on the big project until the little one was out of the way. The little project involves rewriting a tedious part of a certain load process, and the big project involves rewriting the way we think about loading data, so that's very different.

Today I came into work and discovered that the little process had broken last night. In the process of cleaning up from that mess, I got more insights about what needs to be rewritten in my little project, so I might actually get to it today. Besides, the cleanup work had me start the day off being productive, rather than slipping into the pattern of spending all day flicking.

Sometimes I think that if it weren't for stuff breaking, I'd never be able to get anything done.