Adventures in software engineering

Java puzzle: “x = x;”

Here’s a good puzzle for Java lovers. John Programmer had a Java program. The program never printed anything to the console, no matter how many times he ran it. He decided to clean up the code a bit. Somewhere in the middle of the program John saw this line: x = x; He removed it. […] …

Java puzzle: “x = x;” Read More »

Fast Fourier Transform with Booleans

I had a program that produced boolean expressions with thousands of variables and operations, pages upon pages of stuff like "… ⋁ (¬A473 ⋀ B732) ⋁ (A232 ⋀ ¬C987) ⋁ …", certainly not human-readable.

The generator started off being pretty buggy. How was I to find a bug in such a generator?

Tangent: Robert Freidson told me that I was fucked in the head.

Fast Fourier Transform with Booleans Read More »

Virtual Memory in 64K

In the 1980s I wrote a database management system. The system was too large to run in the 64k of RAM available on our minicomputer, so I ended up implementing a virtual memory mechanism.

Tangent: What does this have to do with the FBI and KGB?

Virtual Memory in 64K Read More »

Model-View-Feature

This was a highly abstract platform for building all kinds of visual modeling systems with heterogenous models.

At the end of the article, I declare that this was the highest achievement of my career and then dispute that declaration.

Model-View-Feature Read More »