Thursday, October 25, 2007

catching up on this week

this week started out bad - i got completely derailed from my integration work into investigating customer issues with a new release. I must have burned 2.5 days nailing this stupid thing down. the usual problems getting things setup and reproduced - and of course the debug build didn't show the problem. eventually i found it - a measly little off-by-one error where one of my predecessors compensated for the null byte of a C string twice. In just the right circumstances, the source string would exactly fill the allocated storage, and attempts to copy out that extra byte caused an access fault. first i had to decode the algorithm though - turns out its some hashing variation from Sedgewick - it completely avoids compacting in return for quick response. I just wonder how quick it is now compared to the more standard implementations such as STL. And of course this is legacy code with no test cases.

iPhone Tech Talk on Tuesday was moderately interesting. Much of the technical material now available online, at least in video format, but it was good to have some discussion around it. I thought the UI portion was particularly good - advice for general UI design, with a slant toward mobile devices.
Very customer-centric and conceptual - sometimes develoers et al have a hard time with drilling down into "features" a bit early.

Also, we had a good trails-planning session last week, and should have some awesome work planned for Grand Forest East this weekend. Come help! see http://www.bitrails.org/ for details.

Oh, also last week, SeaJUG hosted Daniel Shore talking about Agile Development implementation, quite a good discusson on both the technical and structural/social aspects of implementing any agile methodology.

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