Lessons Learned For Developers

Found this unfortunate routine in a code base:

uint32_t byteswap(uint32_t word) { uint8_t* ptr = (uint8_t*)&word; return ((ptr[3] << 24) | (ptr[2] << 16) | (ptr[1] << 8) | (ptr[0])); }

Too bad it only swaps in one direction. If you're already on a big-endian platform, this routine will do nothing! Probably not what you were expecting to happen. A correct routine will swap the byte order regardless of the platform it is running on:

Many users, are complaining that when they launch an Adobe product, they get an error message that says:

Server Busy. This action cannot be completed because the other program is busy. Choose ‘Switch To’ to activate the busy program and correct the problem.

In my case, I got this message almost every time I launched Adobe Lightroom. Others seem to see this problem with Dreamweaver, and other Adobe products.

On my Windows 7 system, I was able to stop this error message from appearing by preventing my hard disk from going to sleep. This can be done by following this instructions:

A long piece, but there are some great nuggets that nicely capture the occasional absurdity of professional software development.

Programming is debugging. It’s the expectation that things won’t work. This is not something people bring up, just like they don’t bring up their medical history on the first date.

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I've had terrible meetings in my life when I sat between two teams and one of them explained, at length, why Agile with Kanban was better than Agile with Scrum. You could smell the money burning.

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This is not a way to hijack RSA, but something that will make your paranoia greatly swell.

Amazing. A nefarious key authority can embed enough information into the public key to recover the corresponding private key at anytime. The key pair still works, and look completely normal unless you already knew the key pair was tinkered with during generation.