11 Feb
2010
11 Feb
'10
10:41 a.m.
Andrew Burton wrote:
That is shocking. I may not be writing professional
programs (thank god, no
time limits or other pressures), but when I do write software (usually for
the Amiga) I always include error checks. When attempting to save a file to
disk, I always check to make sure that there is enough space on the target
device for the file.
Oh I'm sure they've got error checks, but those don't help when
their
design was written by monkeys.
Ok, I can understand you'd want an in memory db, but why not tokenize
the XML, why not store the XML as a tree.
Why not make it so it has proper multithreading, and why not set it up
so you don't actually read and write the data from disk into memory and
instead use mmap to let the OS do that work for you?
I had Windows Media Player crash on me the other week
and jammed CPU usage
at 100% :( Not great on my laptop, as the only way to shut it down is to
pull the plug out of the mains and then pull out the battery (timed
carefully - thank god for the HD access light!).
Ouch. Well, that's not
exactly well written software either. I get by
with Miro or VLC for video and Songbird, which I also use as a browser
since it's built ontop of the same engine as Firefox and can use most of
Firefox's plugins. Much nicer than itunes or anything else I've used
recently, though it takes some work to get it to be as nice as firefox.
Running this on OS X or Linux is a godsend over that other thing from
Redmond that they claim is an operating system. I've not been able to
make any app crash the OS so far in that manner, but that's just me. :-)
It was just as it was about
to reload in the music file (something else I hate - why re-load in the
music file you were just playing, especially when it's not a large file
(<5MB)?!!) after reaching the end when the problem occured.
Well, I do like the ability for the apps I use to restore themselves to
the same state they were in before I quit them - saving context is a
good thing. Obviously if you had just crashed you should detect that
the app wasn't closed cleanly and give the user some options. If you've
seen the Session Manager plugin to Firefox, IMHO, the way to do right by
the user.
I'm certainly no expert at programming (good at
BASIC and beginner at 68K
ASM), but if you don't sort out the easy bugs (or put in safety nets) how on
earth can you expect to catch the hard-to-find ones?!
Most of this stuff is driven by marketing, and having it just barely
good enough to get it out the door, damn the users, meet the deadline no
matter what. And it shows.
The new hw is wonderful, very fast, loads of storage, loads of memory.
Sadly code monkeys barely out of high school abuse it by writing buggy
bloatware.