I am sure every programmer does it.  Somewhere in the code, with the right click or on the right day or if the right person is using the program somethign unusual happens.  Something that doesn’t typically happen.

I once put a tickler in a program so that on every second friday at 2pm, it would remind the user to do a backup of the database.  This was a useful tip but I also put one in whereby if you clicked on a certain button exactly at 9:01AM on a Monday, it would popup a message box that said “Go Browns”.  One person found it.  Thankfully a Browns fan.

My favorite was a microsoft easter egg from the DOS days.  I believe it was in DOS 5.0 only and corrected with 6.0.  If you went into EDIT, the text editor and precursor to notepad because it was just as useless, if you clicked on File and then hit F1, it would say “No help available” and in parentheses underneath (so leave me alone).  No doubt probably added by a programmer while Master Bill breathed down his neck and made him stay on for 16 hours for the third straight day.

It can be fun and it can be dangerous too.  No one wants to do something out of fun only to have it cause a problem later on down the road.  That would not be good.  That’s a CEM there, career ending move.

I read a story todya about a programmer that actually sued for copyright infringment.  That’s gutsy.  He sued his former employer because he wrote the code for them and apparently wanted to charge them for changes so he put locks on the code and they broke the locks and made changes.  He called it copyright infringment but the courts said no way.  Read the story here

Ask an older programmer what fortran is and they may respond with a question; Which year? Fortran 77 or another version? Ask a non-programmer about Cobol and you may get replies like; “Isn’t that a form of the color blue?” Or “isn’t that an element on the periodic table?”

Fortran and Cobol are older generation programming languages and even Basic is getting to be older too. I had someone ask me the other day if people still programmed in C. Programming languages come and they go and I doubt C will ever go completely away but rather different variations of the compilers will come and go.

So how is someone to keep up? I know guys that are older than me that stick to Cobol as if there is nothing else. Then there are younger guys that want nothing to do with Basic (of any flavor) or even older scripting languages like Perl or vbscript. Give them PHP and Ajax and let them do their thing. It’s hard to really know them all but the basic principles of programming still apply to all languages regardless of how old their compiler is.

I guess it comes down to what do you want to do? If you want a website, PhP and Ajax are the key. If you want to write a user interface for a legacy mainframe system, you could stick with Cobol or try to write a COM control to be the go-between from the mainframe to the PC. It’s really more of a matter of preference, experience of your programmers, and the funds and time you have to complete your project.

If you ask me, I am glad there are so many different languages out there and I am glad they keep getting better. It makes life simpler and keeps me employed and keeps me interested. In fact, I once worked at a place that still used Mod-Comp computers. Now that’s old. That’s really old there. I never had the chance to do much with them other than admire the ancientness of them. But the guy that did know how to run them was very good at what he did. Mod comp. I wonder if they even have a website…..

This post is both for the technical side and the Christian side. If you are a computer geek, you surely know what the term garbage in, garbage out means and it probably means a lot more to you than most people realize. I am with you 100% on it too.

If you are not sure what I mean, the concept is simple. If you put bad data into a program, you get bad data out as a result. So many times I hear people say the program isn’t working the way it should. Now, I am not perfect, and I have written some really nasty bugs into code before but I can’t prevent bad data entry. I mean I can prevent some things with edit checks but if someone’s name is John and you put in James, I can’t program the computer to read your mind. Maybe some day.

For us as Christians, the concept applies too. In Matthew 15, Jesus reminds us that the concept of Clean and Unclean is not about ritualistic rules, it is about the heart. What comes from the heart tells whether the person is clean or unclean. Paul, in Philippians expands on this when he tells us to think on the things that are noble, true and just.

The concept again is simple. If you fill your life with deceitfulness, greed, lust, and other desires of the flesh, that is what your heart will be filled with and garbage will pour out of your life. But if you fill your life with truth, justice, mercy, love, and other fruits of the spirit, that is what will come out. Bad data in, means bad data out. Good thoughts and deeds in, means righteous thoughts and deeds will pour out.

I recently started using Ubuntu and I love it. I started out with Xubuntu on an old laptop with 256meg of RAM and a 40gig HD. I liked it so much that I took some more memory from another laptop that had died and upgraded to 768 and the 80gig HD. It’s an old Toshiba with a celeron M processor but it runs great with Ubuntu on it.

I also put Ubuntu on an old e-machines computer with a 256 and 40 config like the laptop had. My only problem was printing. I have a Lexmark 1185 all in one and no matter how hard I tried, I could not get the scanner to scan, even with Xane or the printer to print. But I didn’t give up. I had an old box running XP so I wrote a little VB app to take advantage of the DDE aspect of Adobe’s acrobat. I am not sure why they don’t have an OCX or API, but DDE works just as well. The app is continually looking in a samba shared folder on the Ubuntu box. If it finds a PDF file, it sends it to Acrobat Reader and prints it out to the default printer. My printer is setup on the old XP box and pretty much only handles printing. I have another XP box that net prints to that printer as well. So I can now print from Windows or Linux across the network to the same printer.

So how do I get the PDF there? I simply setup a CUPS/PDF printer option that I downloaded using Synaptic Package Manager. I had to download a file from Adobe to get it to work, but the install was simple (as is always the case with Ubuntu/Linux)

If you had a similar problem and are interested in the source code or even the exe, I assure you it is clean and safe, leave a reply and I will email it to you with the email address that you registered with.

There are two words in the English language that when used one right after the other can tear the heart out of a programmer or network administrator. They are intermittent and problem. About the only thing worse than an intermittent problem is a complete crash of a system. Both can cause your blood pressure to rise and make you consider updating your resume. It could be caused by network traffic, a piece of hardware starting to fail, a serious flaw in design of the program or many other things. But for a programmer like myself, these words make me cringe.

So often when someone has an intermittent problem, I have to think of all the different ways I can get to the aspect of the program that caused the error. Is a dll getting unloaded? Is there a timeout error? Is there a variable that didn’t get set properly? So what do I do when someone calls me and says “I am getting this error, some of the time?” I do what any good programmer would do. I say Ok, I will come over and look. I then hang-up the phone, check my email, get a drink of water, use the restroom, or check the Drudge Report. I then get up, take the long way to this person’s cube and pray along the way that the user realized what he/she was doing wrong and hear them say “Thanks for coming but it’s working fine now.” I have to think really hard if I have ever had a time when I could actually get the person to duplicate a problem that was labeled as intermittent. I don’t know when it has ever happened.

I end up gathering as much information as possible and then take the long way back to my desk and hope and pray that by the time I get there, I have either forgotten the problem existed or I have lost the piece of paper with the useful information on it. I got lucky once and the person reporting the problem went into labor and delivered a baby that day. The intermittent problem never came back when she returned six weeks later.

I have found that most of the time, not always quickly though, I am able to eventually trap the error and put in a change to prevent it. However this often causes a new intermittent problem to creep up and the process starts all over again. Next time I think I will get a cup of coffee on the way.