Joel on Software: Daily Builds are Your Friend

In 1982, my family took delivery of the very first IBM-PC in Israel. We actually went down to the warehouse and waited while our PC was delivered from the port. Somehow, I convinced my dad to get the fully-decked out version, with two floppy disks, 128 K memory, and both a dot-matrix printer (for fast drafts) and a Brother Letter-Quality Daisy Wheel printer, which sounds exactly like a machine gun when it is operating, only louder. I think we got almost every accessory available: PC-DOS 1.0, the $75 technical reference manual with a complete source code listing of the BIOS, Macro Assembler, and the stunning IBM Monochrome display with a full 80 columns and ... lower case letters! The whole thing cost about $10,000 including Israel's then-ridiculous import taxes.

... we shelled out $600 for IBM Pascal, which came on three floppy diskettes. The compiler's first pass was on the first diskette, the second pass was on the second diskette, and the linker was on the third diskette. I wrote a simple "hello, world" program and compiled it. Total time elapsed: 8 minutes.

Joel's obviously older than he looks in his weblog photo! OTOH, he certainly has an old and wise head on those shoulders so I'll leave it to you to read the rest of his article on the worth of performing daily builds. Recommended.

The second semester of the academic year at Strathclyde starts tomorrow. The first semester exams finished last Friday and I've almost finished marking my questions from the Low-level Programming exam paper. Some of the answers have appalled me and I'm not sure whether to be depressed or angry. I think I'll go for anger as I know the answers to the questions set were to be found in the lecture notes and/or the coursework set for the students. I find it inconceivable that students can manage to score 0, 1, 2, ... out of 20 for a question and yet they manage it ;-) It must take a special skill.

Alas, I don't think I can quote from some of the answers. I would dearly love to as they make scary/hilarious reading. My only comfort is that those that do so badly are likely to fail most/all of their other exams and so won't be graduating with a CS degree from Strathclyde thus preserving the good name of our degree (and, incidentally, the premium employers seem to place on our graduates [which I've already alluded to in an earlier post]).

Well, back to exam marking. Wish me luck!!

Jim is Completely Shameless! The Have Browser Will Travel [hbwt] nomination for best Canadian weblog is well deserved. Like Jim, I wish I had picked up on this opportunity to nominate Free-Conversant in the best weblog application category. The other users of FC would no doubt agree. Since Grey Matter has been withdrawn they could have slipped it in there in its place.

Good luck Jim!

Microsoft decides

...not to include a Java Virtual Machine in its forthcoming Internet Explorer 6.0 Web browser

Update: Actually this seems to be a case of misreporting by ZDNET (and others). According to a Microsoft spokesperson a JVM will be shipped with IE6 - just not installed/activated by default. Can' be bothered just now to go looking for a link that has the direct quote.

The Curmudgeon 'celebrates' Burn's Night too:

Rabbie Burns, born this day in 1759. Our dog Duncan's favorite holiday

I'm glad to see that Curmudgeon didn't name the dog after me ;-)

John, don't listen to Homer - haggis is delicious. Honest! And, BTW, Curmudgeon's sheep.wav file features Groundskeeper Willie - he of the dubious Scottish accent.