Monthly Archives: November 2008

An Assumption of Competence

Posted on November 23, 2008 by Jim

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Programming | 1 Comment

More Whittling

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Jim

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. … Continue reading →

Posted in Carving | 2 Comments

Useful Notepad Feature

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Jim

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers | 3 Comments

Interface Annoyances

Posted on November 4, 2008 by Jim

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | 2 Comments