Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Vision of division

Today was a day of mixed emotions, I have been feeling very restless lately, I am a little stuck in a rut. A lot of my plans require a large amount of time to come to fruition though so maybe things are going ok. I could sure use a couple of shortcuts to success though! It is Ash Wednesday today, the start of lent. A traditional time of reflection and abstinence. I seem to spend my life reflecting at the moment so maybe I should try the latter and abstain from something.

I saw this crazy post on Slashdot. Its a perfect example of the sort of problem I have to put up with. The programmers at my company fall into three camps, those who think programs should handle bad data. Those that think programs crashing highlight bad data which we can then be fixed. The other groups are ambivalent on the issue.

In my opinion humble though it may be, data should be handled gracefully. Programs crashing out just serves to annoy users and whilst it highlights problems with the data it annoys the end user and can be a problem if there are no developers on site to sort it out. I am going to make a point of peppering code with error handling and input validation because I am tired of the same old bad data errors.

I was telling someone about my cat tonight, they refused to believe he is 20 years old. Its true though, we got him and his late brother when I was 7 years old and at primary school. He has been on a special diet and having regular injections for several years now I guess it goes to show that a proper diet really does extend life. Mind you I am not going to start eating his food anytime food, even if a doctor recommended it.

I spoke to one of my net friends this evening we were talking about relationships, she keeps complaining all her boyfriends are wasters, she cant find anyone nice. I pointed out she got bored quickly with nice guys preferring bad boys, so it was a little unfair to moan when the bad boy types acted well bad. She got annoyed accusing me (quite correctly) or being to morose and negative about everything. There is nothing like a little tension to bring peoples true thoughts out.

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