I’m listening to two guys in the next cubicle discuss boolean logic in our product. I’m innately interested in this topic, because I wrote the logic engine. The two guys talking are the guy responsible for presenting the choices to the user and generating the appropriate XML, and the guy responsible for taking the XML after it has been transmitted to the remote sites and stuffing the values into the database so that my logic engine can use that information. Two computer scientists, probably with degrees in computer science, discussing something that is at the very core of computer science. And like everybody else in this office except me, they’re getting it wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. And I’m wondering if I’m going to have to run over there and smack one or both of them until they get it right.
Continue reading “Cause and Effect”
Day: July 19, 2004
Good weekend
Well, that was fun. Harry and Vicki and Emily have already written about it, and I attempted to write something as a comment in Harry’s blog, but the registration system on his blog stymied me.
Anyway, I enjoyed the weekend immensely. I have to confess, however, that the abundance of kids overwhelmed me and I had to go off by myself to recharge a lot. Fortunately my work project is horribly behind schedule so I had a ready excuse to sneak off into a quiet corner to ponder the wonders of the Observer/Observable classes and the “fireContentChanged” methods in AbstractTableModel classes.
The highlight of the weekend for me was the Saturday evening discussion, mostly because it’s good to find people who are far more politically aware, astute and active than I who are not totally paranoid about the election. My personal feeling is that dirty tricks are going to give us at least 4 more years of this crap (and a good possibility of the complete destruction of democracy in the process), and it’s good to know that Angus and Harry and Misha aren’t totally convinced that this is a done deal. (But I’m not giving up my Canadian passport, either.)