Family Life

I’ve been programming all day. I started the morning with some error programming. That is, ways to manage errors and recover gracefully from problems without crashing. In my line of work I use very robust industrial controllers. Short of being hit by lightning (and I’ve seen that happen once), the software never crashes. Ever. The machine is another story. The software can quite happily cause the machine to crash. Literally. With a bang. And bent metal. Meanwhile the software sits there patiently waiting for the machine to get back on its feet. That could take days and a team of trained technicians. So I’m very keen to avoid crashes.

Error programming is quite repetitive and tedious, so around lunchtime I made some additions to the electrical drawings, just for some variety. These particular drawings were put together by an intern, and quite messy. I was very tempted to go in and tidy things up as a way of putting off my original job. There are 60-plus drawings to “improve”. I only needed to work on three. I restrained myself.

In the afternoon I decided to tackle some complicated code I’d been putting off saving till last. I ended up with a simple, short, elegant solution that looked too basic to do the job, but just might work. I’ll try it out tomorrow. As long as the machine doesn’t crash.

And then it was time to quit work and go spend time with my family. See? Wasn’t that a fun day?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 11:28 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.