A spooky win in the braces war

One of the weirdest coincidences ever proving I was right.

There are many debates in programming style, outright religious wars over style of how to layout your code.

Andy Dent

Nov 20

A Reassuring Murmur

How a debugging “comment” became a user feature

Andy Dent

Nov 19

Boxing up Best Practices

Sysadmin Snippets — a tale of tapes and tangled good intentions.

Andy Dent

Nov 13

Picture of DB25 serial cable, black with connectors at each end with 25 pins in two rows

Sysadmin Snippets — Cable Tales 1

Tangles and a kind of debugging

Andy Dent

Nov 13

Sysadmin snippets — Intro

Experiences from when I was not just a developer

Andy Dent

Nov 13

Scientists and Sticky Notes

My useful analogy for XML data, and how it breaks.

Andy Dent

Nov 8

Grids showing memory layouts as intended by lecturer versus the reality of the HP compiler inserting an alignment byte.

Homework helper vs lecturer

Back around 1988 I was mostly working as a VAX mainframe sysadmin, at Griffin Coal Mining.

Andy Dent

Nov 7

Photo of a Burroughs B20 workstation, an old computer on a desk with green display on left and main unit in front with clipboard built in and holding paper notes. Some computer manuals are to the right of the keyboard.

It didn’t add up!

A savvy workman knows that sometimes you DO blame the tool

Andy Dent

Nov 6

Picture of a Durango early desktop computer with built-in printer, keyboard and monitor off to one side.

My first professional bug

A tale of lost innocence

Path to a job

Andy Dent

Nov 6

Recent bugs deserve a re-read

Sopwith Software Tales are mostly going to be blasts from the past, but for those of you who are mostly here for heroic tales of bugs, I thought it would be worth linking a few more-recent ones.