Posts by 8BitGuru

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

Re: Unanswered question

That's "Falken", not "Falcon".

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

Re: Nice to have.

Yep - as a student in 1989 my Atari 520STFM, Yamaha PSS-480, two MIDI cables and Steinberg Pro-12 almost got me to ToTP. The only thing that stopped me was a lack of time. And talent. Mostly time though.

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

Some years back I landed a job at a large event-management outfit. The role was on a greenfield project which had been running for a year or so, being built by a sizable 3rd-party systems provider. I was entrusted to the care of 'Ada' (for that was not her name) who was a hotshot contractor assigned by the aforementioned provider who had been on the project since its inception. They were in the process of handing-over to internal staff, of which there were few - I was a new hire to beef-up the crew.

After the usual corporate-standard fortnight of sitting around waiting for a desk, a laptop, email and security permissions setup, etc. I was finally given my 'intro to the system' session by Ada. Neither of us expected this to take long - she knew the code well, and I've been getting paid to write code for 30+ years. She walked me through the repo, pulled the source, and showed me some of the code she and her associates had created.

I noticed a distinct lack of comments. As in, zero. Not one, in any source file, about anything, no matter where in the object model we were or how specialised the business logic seemed to be. Nothing at all to give even a hint of what the oftentimes-complex code did, or why it did it, or when. I made an observation to Ada, indicating my surprise. Her reply, drawn from her vast well of commercial experience (2 years out of Uni and in her first contract placement) chilled my blood.

"Comments are a code-smell."

I resigned that day.

Vital UK customs system outage contributes to travel chaos at its borders

Sounds about right

"Updated to add at 16:00 on April 18, 2022

A HMRC spokesperson told us the system is back online: "Following an outage last week, we have successfully made changes ..."

So, another 10 days before they figure-out which VM didn't restart.

By the way, could you let me have the winning Euromillions numbers for tonight please?