Catching up on back issues of ACCU’s Overload magazine from June 2015, a couple of articles are worth mentioning for future reference:
- Terse Exception Messages by Chris Oldwood. Here, Chris relates his experience of unnecessarily long debugging sessions due to limited error information in exception messages. Often, this is due to laziness on the part of the programmer, sometimes because they expect to refactor a block of code soon and will come back to “do the error handling later” – then the refactoring never happens. I see this as a false economy – even during unit testing, having proper error messages in exceptions can speed up your own debugging.
- Get Debugging Better by Jonathan Wakely. Here, Jonathan lists a few tips for using GDB effectively, aimed at programmers like me who typically use an IDE.
This book is part of the SciFi MasterWorks series, so I had high expectations, especially as it was written by the lauded Philip K Dick. However, this book is different to others that I’ve read by him – it starts very slowly, seemingly in a normal family in a sleepy American town. Only much later does the plot encompass a more science fiction element, and a more sinister reason behind the daily puzzle that Ragle Gumm must complete is revealed.
Christopher’s is billed on OpenTable as an American restaurant. Whatever image that conjures up for you (American Diner/MacDonalds?!), it’s unlikely to be the grandeur that meets you when you dine at 18 Wellington Street, Covent Garden. We had the scallops/tuna tartare for starters, both of which were excellent. We chose steaks for the main course, both were beautiful, with the Scottish fillet having the meatier taste than the New York Strip. However, it was the sweet and sour carrots that stole the show!
This book is part of the Science Fiction MasterWorks series, which hints at its pedigree, although the series covers a broad range of SciFi styles. This one tells of adventures in space, where we follow the trail of John Truck and his ship the My Ella Speed.
This is the second book I’ve read by Andrew Gross, the first being Judge and Jury. That book started off with children being blown up on a school bus and I found it so tasteless that I didn’t finish the book.
musingstudio 