Tag: Software development
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The agony and the ecstasy of debugging
View image | gettyimages.com If you have ever written a computer program with any degree of seriousness then you will know the feeling: your heart sinking as you realise what you thought was a perfectly good piece of code has a bug somewhere less than obvious. In my case this has happened twice in a…
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Chase down that bug
If there are rules for software development, one of them should be never let a bug go unsquashed. This has been demonstrated to me again this week – when I had a bug in some Microblaze interrupt code. I realised I no longer needed to use the code and then puzzled over whether to find…
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LRU queue strangeness
For the last week or so I have been writing and then debugging (and so mainly debugging) a least-recently-used (LRU) page replacement system on my Microblaze simulation. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered – I had a working first-in-first-out (FIFO) system after all. But no one seriously uses FIFO, so I had to write some LRU…
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Sometimes, admitting defeat is the very best thing you can do
I have spent the last month and half or so writing a particular computer program to model how some code would run on a 16 core “network-on-chip” device. There were a lot of problems to get over – for although I had already written a Groovy/Java program to do the same thing, that code just…
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“Dreaming in Code” – a review
I did not actually read Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software – I listened to it as I pounded treadmills and pulled cross-trainers and so on in the gym. That ought to be a giveaway that it doesn’t actually contain any code or maths or…
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How to get a job as a developer
Last night I went to a Birkbeck training session for prospective mentors. I did not realise before I turned up that all, or almost all, the would-be mentors would be MSc Computer Science graduates. In the end that fact alone turned what could have been a pretty dull way to spend a Friday night into…
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Making a hash of universal credit
A hash algorithm, for computer scientists, is a way of turning one long string (some words, a number etc) into a shorter “hash code“. Hashing is used in multiple ways – for instance to check that a file you have downloaded matches the one on the server (you hash the downloaded file data and check…
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Universal Credit: heading for a pile up?
If the UK government’s Universal Credit project fails it won’t be an ordinary car crash, but a motorway pile up – battering the poor as lazy and feckless has become something of a political sport in Britain in recent months, but failing to pay people the money they need to live will likely change the…
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Weasel words from the DWP on Universal Credit?
Britain is once more being an IT pioneer, with the world’s biggest “agile” software development project – for the Universal Credit that will, the law states, replace a myriad of different state benefits in the autumn of 2013. If you know anything about software development the above sentence ought to make you feel, at the…
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The problem with Git
This blog on the things that are wrong with Git is right in so many ways – certainly I have found it a very steep learning curve over the years especially, as the article points out, the man files are close to useless. That said, I am more or less on top of it all…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 