Renaissance

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Now is there programmer who can escape from the clutches of the null pointer? I think no. It is like the “Yeldra natu sani” every C programmer is destined to suffer from it. The above error popped up from Windows Media player.

Meanwhile, I wonder what they teach at those so called premier institutes of computer engineering. One of computer science grad names a variable as “anded” because it stores the result of bit wise and of two other variables.

# Tcl snippet
set anded [hexpr $addr & $def(MASK)]
puts $anded

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Information that is complex to decode! (via SVN blog)

I hate the Microsoft project for the same reason. One gets lost in deciphering the color codes, dependences and other unrelated information.

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“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Douglas Adams, English humorist and science fiction novelist, perhaps
best known for his novel “The Hitch hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

You either get bogged down by the impending deadlines or you learn to enjoy them. Now that I am trying to enjoy the dooming deadline as it approaches me. I don’t know if it will make whooshing sound as it passes me.

As some one said, Schedules are made so that you can miss them. Making a schedule has been a mixed bag for me till now. Spot on if the I am in total control (read individual work) wayward for a group. There is more to programming.

Here I list the schedule made for WinWord at Microsoft for amusement purpose. The chart is adapted from Steve’s Rapid Development book.

Some lessons from WinWord schedule. Aggressive schedule prevented accurate planning. A 60-80 percentage was wishful thinking. The constant part of the schedule was firefighting.

This project experienced extremely high turnover. It had four development leads in 5 years, including two who quit the project because of schedule pressure and one who quit because of medical reason.

Because of schedule pressure, developers shortchanges their feature implementations, declaring them to be done even though they had low quality and in fact were incomplete. The result was that WinWord spent 12 months in Stabilization a period that had been expected to be take only 3 months!

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So you have decided to buy Vista at last.

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