I'm here again. Trip number 21 by my calculations. I came over on Tuesday arvo and went to a Networking course on Wednesday. People skills type networking, not TCP/IP. The course was reasonable, but there was room for improvement. The morning focused mostly on the benefits of networking, and the afternoon on communication skills. Techniques for developing networks were not discussed.

On Thursday and Friday I was working in the lab on tracking down an elusive segfault. Turned out to be a case of infinite recursion. The condition that triggered the problem was present in eleven places in the code... which suggests to me that perhaps the design of the module in question is suboptimal. It's overly complex to use, places a large burden on the user, and has focused too much on optimisation and not enough on error checking.

Tomorrow (Saturday) I'm heading home in the afternoon after going to a frequent flyer gathering. We're starting with lunch, then going on an Airside Tarmac Tour of Sydney Airport, and finishing with drinks in the Qantas Club. (more info). Should be good.

Other work stuff

Our new regime at work is starting to have an influence. Our new policy is to actually do our unit tests, instead of putting them off until later. The only problem with this new-found thoroughness is that the tests keep failing. This could be seen as a problem, given that our "final" code deadline was three weeks ago.

Next week I get the envious task of walking the customer through one of our failed tests. I wrote this test last week. It really *should* be automated, but apparently its dismal failure would be problematic. Instead I've had to break it down into small, manual steps (in the form of 16 pages of Word document) so that we at least have some steps that pass. Writing this test took three days, all of it spent in Word.

Real life

A few people I know in real life have mentioned that they read this. It bothers me a bit and does partly limit what I write. I don't complain so much about individuals at work anymore because I'm scared they might read it.

Gardening

Back at home, the garden is starting to look good. Lots of rain helps. I've loaded up the garden with two trailer-loads of mulch, which was heaps of fun. There's roses flowering (like so), plenty of recently planted natives, and the lawn is starting to look a bit healthier.

I've found that I don't mind working in the garden. It can be more satisfying than working at work because finishing something is a far simpler matter. Not like our first software release, which passed factory acceptance testing 18 months ago, and for which we continue to have "final" code deadlines every month or so. Apparently we're getting some new requirements soon. But I digress. I like starting a task in the morning, finishing it in the afternoon, and never having to come back to it again.