In my many years of experience in programming I have noticed that there are some programmers who refuse to use a debugger, or try to use the debugger as little as possible, as in, only when they run out of alternative options. They tend to rely solely on the diagnostic log to troubleshoot problems in their code, so their code tends to spew thousands of lines of log entries per second, and they keep trying to divine the causes of exceptions by looking at post-mortem stack traces.

Quite often these people do not understand what usefulness others find in debuggers. I once requested the lead developer of a certain shop (Powernet, Athens, Greece, circa 2000) to enable debugging for me on their development web server so that I can run my debugger on the web site that I was developing in that shop, and she asked me “what do you need a debugger for?” Luckily, she proceeded to fulfil my request after a couple of long seconds of me staring blankly at her.

Listen folks, if you want to be called a “programmer” and if you want to be worth the cost of the keyboard you are pounding on, the debugger needs to be your absolute first tool of choice at the slightest need for troubleshooting, not your last tool of choice, not even your second tool of choice. Companies that develop IDEs go through huge pains to provide us with nice sleek and powerful debuggers so that we can do our job better, don’t you dare let their efforts go to waste.

A call stack trace in the diagnostic log of your program will tell you which function was called by which function, and that’s all. This is enough in many simple cases, but when things get just slightly complicated, (and they usually do,) it is not enough. Lacking any additional information, what you end up doing is theorizing about what might have happened instead of looking and seeing what happened.

A memo to developers all over the world about the pronunciation of the word “apache”.

Folks, just so that you know, the world famous Apache Software Foundation which lends its name to the world famous Apache Web Server is not pronounced uh-pach; it is pronounced uh-pach-ee. The final letter is not a silent “e”, it is a loudly and clearly pronounced “e”.

There exist two words in English which are spelled “Apache”; one is of French origin, and according to dictionary.com it means “a Parisian gangster, rowdy, or ruffian”. This one does end in a silent “e”, but it is not the one that the Apache Software Foundation was named after.

Nowadays the interwebz abounds with beautiful images of our Earth from orbit. Lately I have picked up the habit of trying to figure out what part of our world is visible when I see such an image. It is usually quite a puzzle, since the scale of the picture is not always obvious, parts of it are always obscured by clouds, the North can really be anywhere, and worst of all, countries are not painted with different colors! (Duh!) I am usually successful in this, but today I had a real tough one.

If you live outside of Europe you might be lucky enough to have no idea what this is all about, but if you live in Europe you are probably sick and tired by now of this message popping up every time you first visit a site:

This site uses cookies to help deliver services. By using this site, you agree to the use of cookies. {Learn more} {Got it}

The creators of these sites are not to blame for these messages; they are being forced to display them against their will, (and waste money and resources in doing so,) in order to comply with EU regulations. These messages are mandated by law.

This question was sighted on stackoverflow.com on Thursday, April 30, 2013. It was deleted within 2 minutes from being posted, but not before I managed to take a screenshot of the summary.

It is funny when you can tell what’s wrong with the code by just looking at the summary!

A few days ago one of the svchost.exe processes on my machine (Win7 64) started exhibiting this annoying behavior: it will start with about 30 to 40 megabytes of memory, which stays roughly constant for a while, but then later it begins bloating, slowly but surely, possibly at a slightly exponential rate, until a few hours later it is taking up so many gigabytes that I cannot work on my computer anymore. So, I have to stop what I am doing, save everything, and restart the computer, only to have to go through the same ordeal a few hours later.