OddThinking

My recent entry condemning unresponsive applications took me a long time to write. I knew I was frustrated with unexpected software slowness, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

I realise now that I was confounding three separate problems: Unresponsiveness, Unexpected CPU Hogs and Outstaying Their Welcome.

Over the past 12 months, I have been getting more and more frustrated at how slow my machine sometimes gets. It has taken me a while to pin-point what my objection is.

Today I found the words.

I am as mad as hell about having a machine using only 10% CPU and 10% RAM being too busy to refresh its windows, and I’m not going to take it any more!

In which I continue to bitch about the Samsung D600 – but particularly about the PC calendar synching software that is bundled with it.

All timezone applications require you to specify what city you are in. I’ve never understood why you select the city rather than the state, province or country.

When read in Outlook, emails sent from WordPress are formatted poorly. I finally have a hypothesis to explain this behaviour.

The Rational 1000 debugger had an optional feature – the ability to step-forward or backward through the code.

An implementation of a Kakuro Solver.

The manager in charge of the test team was gossiping to me one day about the pain involved in running a stability test.

CSS Principles For the last twelve months, I have been trying to toe the party line when it comes to Cascading Style Sheets. Tables are our enemies. Div and span are allies and friends. Content shall never be mixed with formatting. Animals shall never sleep in beds. Err.. sorry, got distracted. Where was I? I […]

During a training course on Ada and the Rational 1000, we wrote an absurdly simple email client.

When it was my turn to demonstrate my software, it wasn’t very well received.