An Assumption of Competence

By Jim, on November 23rd, 2008%

My second programming job was with a small commercial bank in Fresno, CA, where I helped maintain the COBOL account processing software. I was still pretty inexperienced, having only been working in the industry for about 18 months. My previous job involved maintaining software, also in COBOL, for small banks in western Colorado.

One of . . . → Read More: An Assumption of Competence

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Debugging, Programming

More Whittling

By Jim, on November 16th, 2008%

After I whittled that knife a couple of weeks ago, I tried to make a small decorative spoon. I made two mistakes on that project: 1) I selected the wrong kind of wood and; 2) I used the wrong knife. I took a branch that I’d cut from the pear tree a few months ago . . . → Read More: More Whittling

2 comments - (Comments are closed)   Carving

Useful Notepad Feature

By Jim, on November 11th, 2008%

Somebody pointed out a useful feature of Windows Notepad: date/time stamp logging. Imagine you want to keep a diary of sorts in a Notepad file, and have a date/time stamp at each “entry”. Normally, you’d open the file, press Ctrl+End to get to the end of the file, enter the date and time manually, and . . . → Read More: Useful Notepad Feature

3 comments - (Comments are closed)   Computers

Interface Annoyances

By Jim, on November 4th, 2008%

We ran into a rather difficult class design problem recently that reveals a shortcoming in C# and, apparently, the .NET runtime (specifically, the Common Language Infrastructure, or CLI). It’s a pretty common problem, and I’m a little bit surprised it hasn’t been addressed.

As you know, C# doesn’t allow multiple inheritance. It does, however, allow . . . → Read More: Interface Annoyances

2 comments - (Comments are closed)   Programming