I couldn’t resist the temptation; I’ve made my page XHTML. Again, work done just so that the page looks exactly the same as it used to. But it’s better, honest! It’s fully standards compliant, and easily upgradable, and flexible and it might even be easily viewable on mobile phones! (Oh yes, I know that I have legions of devoted fans reading this on their phones.)
It’s funny the way maintaining code works. If there’s enough of it, you can be sure that there will be all sorts of bugs in it, or that bugs will appear in response to various incremental changes. Fixing a slew of problems in HOL recently, I decided that what I was doing was analogous to carefully examining a patch of soil in a garden, walking slowly in a stooped posture, and looking for weeds or noxious insects. You’re forced to turn over every stone, and scrutinise everything at length. Of course, if we had extensive regression test suites, some of this work could be done automatically...
Some links:
- An article about Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, 10 years on.
- Saddam actually died some years ago; we’ve only seen body doubles since.
- “Seriousness is voluptuous” (the quote appears at the end of the article).
- Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books on modern international relations, and how the US is making a mess of them.
- A graph of the SARS epidemic.
- Finally, a beautiful snippet by David Chess.
Comments