Writing ... or Just Practicing?

You don't normally expect zonking amounts of current to be flying around inside a computer (unless you've packed it solid with extra disk drives), so tagging a couple of skinny wires to one end of the circuit board is probably an eminently sensible approach. Those five DC volts will eventually find their way along the copper tracks and wander into the odd chip when required, and it's fairly unlikely you'll get flash-over between the connector pins or a nasty smell as several amps of current rumble uncontrolled through the resistors and capacitors. Read More...

They probably won't invite me over to Redmond again. After telling me for weeks about the wonderful summer weather there, it rained for most of the two weeks I was on site. Not many people would suggest that I have a magnetic personality, but it sure looks like the English weather followed me across the pond. We even had hail one day (in the middle of August), followed by a small tornado. And I'd taken shorts and sun cream with me. But I suppose after it rained almost the whole time during my last two trips, I should expect it. Maybe I can earn a few dollars extra by selling people my travel plans so they can plan their holidays around my trips to Redmond. Read More...

I was party to a discussion a couple of weeks ago that wandered off topic (as so many I'm involved in seem to do) into the concepts of whether a programmer is actually "OO" or not. I guess I have to admit to being a long-time railway (railroad) fanatic - an unfortunate tendency that has even, in the past, extended to model railways. So in real life (?),"OO" is the gauge of a model railway. But then someone suggested that many programmers, especially those coming from scripting languages such as classic ASP, are more "OB" than "OO". It turns out that what they mean, I'm given to understand, is that a large proportion of programmers write code that is object-based rather than object-oriented. Read More...