Recent Articles

Dec 2021

Leading From Affronts

by in Feature Articles on

Scientists frequently need software to support their research, but rarely are strong developers. And why should they be, that software is written to accomplish a goal, and it's the goal which matters to them more than anything about the software itself.

That's where Jared comes in. He worked in a university IT department and his job was simply to write the software the researchers needed. They frequently had a very clear picture of what they needed, along with big piles of math to explain it, plus piles of example input and expected output data.

10 comments - Last comment @ 09:37

The Other Washington

by in Error'd on

This week, anonymous Franz starts us off with a catch-22. "I opened MS Word (first time after reboot) and a dialog box opens that tells me to close a dialog box. This was the only open dialog box... I guess even software makes excuses to be lazy on Fridays."

14 comments - Last comment @ 09:23

A Split in the Database

by in CodeSOD on

Oracle is… special. While their core product is their database software, what they actually sell is layers and layers of ERPs and HR systems that run on top of that database. And what they really make money on is the consulting required to keep those monsters from eating your company's IT team alive.

Because these ERPs are meant to be all things to all customers, you also will find that there are a lot of columns named things like attribute3. Your company's custom logic can stuff anything you want in there. "Do as thou wilt," as they say. And suffer the consequences.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-12-03

Two Comparisons, Hold the Case

by in CodeSOD on

There are a lot of times when we want string comparisons to be case insensitive. It's quite a lot of cases, so every language is going to give us a way to easily specify that's what we want.

Take, for example, this C# code, written by one of Robin's team-mates.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2021-12-03
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