Monthly Archives: November, 2006

The dangers of clever programming

There’s often a temptation for coders to come up with the cleverest solution to a problem, one which accomplishes the greatest amount in the fewest lines of code, for example, or takes advantage of the most obscure features of the programming language. Such solutions may be intellectually very satisfying, but are often not ideal for other reasons. I really like this quote from Brian Kernighan, which I heard for the first time last week:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

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Bezel buttons

How do you interact with a screen on a device without putting finger-marks on it?
You make the frame touch-sensitive, according to a recent Apple patent.

Many people are speculating that the diagrams give a good idea of what the next iPod might look like…

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Disaster waiting to happen?

For a few years now, the majority of computers sold have been laptops. It’s not surprising; I’m not sure what I’d do without mine.

But one downside is that laptop-sized hard disks are much less robust than their desktop equivalents. The manufacturers often quote an expected life of just a small number of years. And as more and more people are storing very valuable data – like the family photos – on these little devices, the potential for heartbreak is getting ever larger.

This is why I always have at least two complete recent backups on external hard disks, and why I make sure that they’re full-size desktop drives. I don’t carry them around with me, either, which probably increases their lifespan dramatically! If you’re a Mac user, treat yourself to a copy of the excellent SuperDuper software and £100-worth of external firewire hard disk, and you won’t regret it.

But if all else fails and you have a failing laptop disk and you really need to get your data off it, you might be able to help it along with a little reorientation…

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