Alex Papadimoulis

Through the much of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Cambridge-based Thinking Machines was ahead of its time. As innovators in parallel computing, they developed a massive, 65,536 processor supercomputer known the Connection Machine. Visually, it made Cray’s distinctive look seem like a piece of outdated furniture, and was even stunning enough to star as the “impressive blinky-light server” in Jurassic Park.

"While exploring a rather large PHP codebase at my new job," Anthony C writes, "I kept coming across a rather curious pattern from the previous developers:

"I'm as much a fan of Java Generics as the next guy," writes Jim Bethancourt, "why bother with writing all that type-specific code for common collections (or - gasp - losing type safety) when one can simply go  HashMap<String, SomeObject>."

Let's All Reinvent the Wheel... Again (from K.D.)

"I have this feeling most of the day while I'm on support," writes M, "but I've never thought to try telling people."

"Not too long ago," Jess writes, "I adopted an application that needed 'a rather minor change' to its functionality. Naturally, when I started, the project owner had no idea what file or directory the functionality was in, so he gave me access to the server and sent me off. After wading through a number of oddly named directories trying to find where the site was even located, I finally found the index file I had hoped would set me in the right direction."

"Ummm," Matt wrote, "if you say so..."

Originally posted by "DrillSgtK"...

François captured this brief video of his answering machine bug for our first-ever video Error'd.