Boiler Overheat Lockout, Bypass Valves and Experts
There is an apocryphal tale that goes something like: A man has a problem with his boiler that continues for months and causes him no end of bother. Finally, an expert comes to see the boiler, and the...
View ArticleOur Mutual Friend Quotes
A couple of years back I was given a set of Dicken’s novels, and have been reading them intermittently over that time. I’ve just started reading ‘Our Mutual Friend’ – which has been harder-going than...
View ArticlePadding with Zeroes in Sql Server
The problem: Take an integer column with a value like 123 and output it as four digits, prefixing with zero if necessary, i.e. 123 gets output as 0123. You get situations like this if, for example, you...
View ArticleMaking the Same Mistakes, Repetitively
When an individual makes the same mistakes repetitively, you might ask why they do so, why they don’t learn (and of course; ‘Why don’t they improve?’), and so on. When the same thing happens within a...
View ArticleAutomated Builds
The picture was taken in my office a few weeks ago. It is not faked. The output of an automated build system (Team City) is reporting how many days there have been problems with the build for; and the...
View ArticleConcerns about Red-Green-Refactor
I have never worked in an environment that practices Test Driven Development (TDD), but the little that I have read suggests that there are three phases: Red – The Test is written, and checked that it...
View ArticleNot using New Media doesn’t make you a Ghost
(but please still be enthusiastic) I have enjoyed and been very interested in several of Troy Hunt’s blog posts on security, and having had my attention drawn to one the other day, I found his post...
View ArticleMaking Interview Questions Better
I’ve written before about technical interview questions, especially of the tricky Brainteaser Interview Questions, and I wanted to take a moment to recount some recent experiences hiring a couple of...
View ArticleSolving Problems Indirectly
More and more of late, I have noticed that the solutions people arrive at for problems are often very indirect. I have started to suspect that it may be a characteristic of human behaviour, but...
View ArticleSaying Things Indirectly
Last week I posted about Solving Problems Indirectly… and today I have a similar topic; saying, or communicating things indirectly. It’s best told with pictures: This is probably fairly...
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