location: Adelaide, South Australia

mood: sleepy

music: Cubana Mile High Club - Loungeclash

1. Computer

Alright, I admit it: I cheated. I got help from Footy Fan's partner to put my computer back together again. Big thank you goes his way!

Note to self: I think I figured out a smart way to do it: Create and format your partitions, recreate your computer using Ghost and the Ghost images onto these new partitions, and let Ghost handle the problems for you.

Also, when did the business-types take over Norton's? Seriously, check out their website. Can you tell which suites contain Ghost and which contain something called 'Backup and Restore'? It could be about the time they stopped working on Partition Magic, or when they separated Ghost out from Norton's Systemworks. Yes that's right - half the reason for purchasing Systemworks has now been taken out of Systemworks. Too much benefits and not enough features on their website. Features like: contains Ghost.

I have finally been able to re-install Adobe Creative Suite 3. I needed to download a CS3 cleaner, which they warn you could blow your computer up, to remove installed CS3 and to clean it from the registry. So now, at long last, my computer is *starting* to be functional, which is why I am *starting* to answer people's emails. Sorry about the delay.

2. Winding down the day

I have found I quite like to wind down the day, lying in bed, listening to music or podcasts. The other day, I was lying snug in my bed, listening to Boagworld, when my Dad walks into my bedroom, about to speak, then stops and looks around. I asked him later and he thought I had a visitor with me!!

Looks like they gained inspiration from Patrick Griffith's Elastic Lawn design on CSS Zen Garden. Ooh lookee! CSSZenGarden has new designs out!

3. Understanding money

The understandingmoney website, maintained by ASIC, has a pretty good budgeting tool on it actually. I am going to try that one!

4. Lunacy

I am trying to make head or tail out of legacy code. When you Google legacy code, there are many articles about oject-oriented legacy code. This isn't OO code. This is procedural, some of which dates back to the late eighties. I kid ye not. This code has gone from Borland to GNU, via Windows and Linux. All sorts of programmers with all sorts of skill levels have worked on it. I am not impressed with some of them: I am not impressed with the individual who left the comment /* UGLY HACK: FIX ME */ in the header file, and then no more information about what the hack is/was, and where it should be fixed. I am not impressed with the complete lack of documentation.

I think I finally found the main main (though I can't be sure) and have tried to trace program calls through that. It seems as though some of the header files are implemented in particular source files, and yet the header files aren't actually #included in the source files. Have they overcome this with Make? Have they constructed something else which they use instead? I am going to have to work my way through the Make file, which I understand, constructs multiple programs with the one call.

Doxygen: I thought creating some rough documentation and graphs through Doxygen would be smart. The problem is that files for one piece of software is shared with another, and there is no clear definition where one starts and the other stops, so creating Doxygen documentation literally gets everything, not the software I am looking for.

Moral of this story: documentation rocks, and is the most important part of any programmer's job. And they should document everything that moves and everything that doesn't.