OK, this is off-topic but what the heck - it's interesting (to me, anyway).

I've seen commercial advertisements for Silver Lightning on various television shows, The product demonstration shows a person placing the Silver Lightning plate under water, then placing tarnished silver on the plate -- and like magic, the silver brightens and the tarnish vanishes.

I'm an inquisitive guy, so I assumed this was due to some kind of chemical reaction involving electrolysis, so I searched the web to see what I could find on the subject.

It turns out that silver tarnish is silver sulfide, much of which comes from the trace amounts of sulfur in the air. The Silver Lightning product is apparently nothing more than an aluminum plate, which, when placed in a solution of baking soda and water (about 1 cup per gallon) causes an electrochemical reaction that draws the sulfur away from the silver and to the aluminum.read more »

Jean-Paul Sartre said: "Hell is other people".

To which I say: "Hell is other people's code".

All kidding aside, working with other software developers' code can be daunting enough, even when the code was written by diligent, conscientious engineers.

It becomes downright nasty, bordering on torture, when it was written by someone unconcerned with the need to maintain the code later. I wonder, when working with such code, what level of Hell I've landed in.

I've seen near-identical functions located adjacent to each other in the same file, each differing by only a few characters here and there, and both spanning a half-dozen display screens, making it impossible to even tell which function you are looking at. Each having conditional compilation controlled by the same manifest constant with a near-meaningless name. The second function body #undef'd the manifest constant before the first line of the function. So there was no way to know, when looking at a particular screen full of code containing conditional compiled statements, whether the code was compiled and active in this particular context.

I've battled the vile demons of magic numbers, copy-and-paste code as a means of code 're-use', low-level communication code that pops up blocking error message dialog boxes in the middle of threaded data send routines, what-should-have-been-library-code-but-was-just-another-source-file (used in a GUI application) that unceremoniously calls exit() when an error occurs in the middle of an initialization routine.

All the while, I'm repeating to myself: "I have no mouth and I must scream".

So: When you write or maintain code, please try to keep in mind that someone else may need to read, understand, and even - *gasp* - modify the stuff you are generating. It's a good way to help make the world a better place. Really.

Resist the temptation to take that shortcut. Drop a few comments describing your assumptions. Sprinkle the code with a few assertions to describe the conditions required for proper operation - but don't rely on assertions to provide runtime error checking; use exceptions or well-defined return values if you must. If you know about a precondition or gotcha, make a note of it for the benefit of others. Do something, anything, to improve the condition while you are working on the immediate need.

Take the time to think about those who follow - They'll love you for it.

I heard a couple of back-to-back radio ads this morning. One was the predictable overstock.com Christmas commercial, prepping everyone for a mad holiday spending season. Ok, nothing unusual there.

The one that followed made me laugh: Match.com advertising that they now have many more women than men on their service. Something about a record imbalance (my words.)

So I thought to myself: match.com should work a deal with overstock.com to help eliminate their excess inventory!

I saw this in my inbox today:

From: dissembler@sevendegreesofbum.com
Subject: Ado6e Acro8at 8 79 $, 5ave 599.95
Body: Vlsi+ cheapxp4pc .com ln 1nternet Exp1orer.

This is so truly pathetic. Yes, it managed to get past gmail's spam filter. So what? It's so blatantly obvious that this is spam that one can just delete it without reading it. Out of the hundreds or thousands of spam messages that end up in my gmail spam box, this is the only kind of message that makes it through of late, and it's only rarely (one or two out of thousands!)read more »

One thought that has been popping into my head over the years, is that the internet has turned everybody (well, maybe not everybody, but sometimes it sure seems like it) into a surrogate data-entry operator.read more »

Quick Take:
Here's a collection of humorous bits about engineers and engineering, from a cow-worker.

Link

I had the 'honor' of rescuing yet another victim of a pre-installed software nightmare. A new co-worker was working with his notebook (a Hewlett-Packard, recent vintage, less than a year old with Vista Home Basic installed).

The complaint? Minimum five (yes, FIVE) minute boot time from power-on to desktop interaction.

After a cursory examination, I found that it wasn't a hardware problem, nor was it due to memory limitations: the system had 512MB RAM, Vista was using just over 300MB with no other applications running (yes, that's a lot, but this is Vista, after all).read more »

Every time I get a spam snail-mail from a bank or credit card company telling me I'm 'pre-approved' for some loan or another, I keep in mind that the prefix 'pre' means 'before' - so, pre-approved means that you are not yet approved. Your loan is in the 'pre-approval' state: before approval.

It's a word game. A weasel-word. A slimy form of disclaimer - so, if you don't have adequate credit, they won't be legally bound to give you a loan.

I'd rather be post-approved. Or just plain approved.read more »

Apparently, you can find darn near anything on eBay.

When I enter certain search keywords in a Google search box, it seems like I see an endless stream of eBay ads - promising that I can find what I'm looking for, no problem! Unfortunately, sometimes the results are comical if not downright disgusting - and they show the weakness of the ad selection techniques.

Apparently, searching Google for 'used anything' has a pretty good chance of turning up these gems.

Here are a few "interesting" search phrases, and a snapshot of the accompanying Google ads that appear on the search results pages:read more »

Not long ago, every notebook computer, every bit of stereo or A/V equipment I owned was painted black or charcoal (or was made of a black or charcoal plastic).

Now, everything is silver. Matte or satin silver. Spray-painted silver.

For some reason, silver has become the most popular car color. (Click here if the preceding link is broken.)

Silver seems like a nice color for some cars... and I even have one car that color (but that car is a 1970 Pontiac, so it was not so trendy when the color was put on the car). But there is a vast difference between a quality, glossy automotive paint finish and the chintzy look of a dull, matte silver finish painted on my notebook computer, my camcorder, my DirecTV receiver, my television cabinet (I could go on...)

I can just imagine the product design meetings held in consumer product companies everywhere: "Silver is most popular! Silver is the way to go! Let's make it SILVER!" read more »