Month: September 2005

Liability

BBC News commentator Bill Thompson has written a great article about software liability. Having worked at a transport/traffic software company during the first 2 years of my working life where a mistake by the programmers or QA can potentially results in fatality, I agree with Bill Thompson.

Yes, software will cost more to develop and test* but the reduction of support and bug fixing will offset the initial cost somewhat. More importantly, I want software that works most of the time, if not always. Not software that works the majority of the time if I am lucky.

* We had to proof (or able to provide proof) that our testings exercise every line and branch of our software. Thus we spent extraordinary amount of time generating contrived scenarios in order to exercise some obscure error conditions.

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A Decade

According to my calendar (and memory), today is the ten years anniversary since Leah and I first dated. Time flies by, indeed. Sentimental and nostalgic seekers please head to Leah’s blog. Only dull posts are allowed here (These are not the fun post you are looking for. Move along).

(Ok, what’s the point of having a semi-geek blog with geek content in each post? So geeks read on, normal people move along.)

Keeping track of anniversary dates aren’t easy even in this day and age of advanced PIM such as Outlook or iCal. Try doing that 10 years back and you can imagine the effort I had to put into. First PIM I used is the Starfish’s Sidekick (remember that?) on my 386 monochrome laptop. Next was the first version of Microsoft Outlook, and then Outlook 97. Finally when I migrated to the Mac I moved the data to Palm Desktop which wasn’t (and still isn’t) that good a PIM. Finally when Apple released iCal (and iSync for syncing with PDA/Phone) I settled my calendar data in iCal.

And this concluded the geek broadcast.

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Manchester

Going back to Manchester (photos here) after 7 years was a revelation. We landed at Manchester Airport last Wednesday morning after a red-eye Continental flight from JFK. Food was bad even by economy seat standard. Our very stylish hotel is in East Didsbury, which is south of centre Manchester and just as we were getting settle down my mom called me on the cell phone. It turned out she and my dad were already outside Manchester even though I’ve emailed her two weeks beforehand that we were meeting up for lunch on Friday instead of Wednesday! Still, since they were already in the city we changed our plan and took the number 42 bus into Chinatown in the centre.

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Off we go again

After spending only two nights at our apartment since San Fancisco, we are off east again to Manchester, U.K. for a friends’ wedding. More than 9 years ago we shared college apartments for two years, Leah, me, Angela, and Andy. And now I am traveling back to Manchester for the first time since I left after graduation, and after the IRA bombing.

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