/etc

[flwyd]

The big excitement at work today was that Cedar's desk was very clean and organized, replete with desk organization devices. Eating dinner, some of us speculated on the reasons. Did he come in on the weekend to clean his desk? Did his wife make him do it? One person said "I think she might take issue with that." I responded "That wouldn't hurt very much; she wears Crocs." It was at least fifteen seconds before I realized the phrase was "take issue," not "take a shoe." But I think I like my version. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to spread the phrase

"I take a shoe with that." Complete with a menacing grab for your foot and a shake with your fist. Extra points if you wear mithril-spiked high heels.

---

It must be interesting to work on a project like writing MS Office for Windows XP. Not only would you find bugs in your project, you'll also find bugs in the operating system/core libraries. Unlike an end user who might blue screen once in a while, you'd encounter bugs that never get to market and have to be able to distinguish them from the bugs in Office that never get to market. And in an organization like Microsoft, you can't stick your head over the cubicle wall and find someone to fix your bug.

I wonder what percentage of the code in MS Office are workarounds for problems in other Microsoft products. I wonder what percentage are workarounds for problems which have since been fixed.

Update, day next: I meant Windows Vista, not XP, but Microsoft stopped naming their releases in sequential order so I can't keep track late at night.

Comments

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

My experience in doing software testing and development for large corporations is that often, preexisting bugs that you find when you are testing new code are often not of interest to the people who developed the new code, even if the bug is in a software artifact that they indeed had modified. With luck, they'll throw it over the wall to the maintenance group, where it may languish forever. There really are reasons for this. In any case, the reason for the change needs to be documented, and the possible side effects of the change need to be investigated - both something busy developers of new code don't have time for. More than once has a fix to a problem badly affected customers who had developed work-arounds for outstanding problems - and frequently the corrected code will break workarounds.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

That's a real pain. My fiance was working on some low-level Mac stuff, and he was chasing a bug for several months that turned out to be an issue inside some basic Mac OS function. It was fixed in the next version of the OS, but I think between him and the guy before him at least 5 months was wasted searching for the source of the bug.

[trism.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but I have to a shoe spreading that phrase.

[clarsa.livejournal.com]

In some animated movie trailer, I was mystified to hear a character say, "You have a dead toupee." Well, one would hope so. For some reason, that phrase has popped up in other movies recently and I figured out they meant to say, "You have a debt to pay."

I will take a shoe, and I hereby invite you to mind the health of your toupee.