Tom Lachecki

(Tomalak Geret'kal)

Mistake Overflow: One Company's Catalogue of Errors

Stack Overflow, the programming Q&A website founded in 2009, set out to be different. To "make the internet a better place". Faced with endless forums full of technical suggestions of dubious authority, and with the next best thing paywalled off, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood wanted to create a community focused solely on building a […]

On Star Trek Discovery (Season One)

I've been putting off writing this for months, because I couldn't figure out what to say. CBS's expansion of the Star Trek universe is certainly divisive, to say the least: there are those who laud its grittier aesthetic, its more adult characters, its design expansion and its storyline, while some becry a perceived departure from […]

TV rundown 2015

Here's a brief reaction to some of this year's best new TV, in no particular order. I've spoilt the frak out of them, too, so don't read if you don't want to know what happens. There are a number of well-received shows I haven't gotten around to yet. If you're a fan of something not on this list, #sorrynotsorry.

Nobody Writes Testcases Any More…

When I say "testcases", I don't mean a unit test, or even a functional test, or any set of instructions to verify the correctness of a program. I'm talking about the reduced example you create when you're debugging a program you already know to be functioning incorrectly. Let me demonstrate.

Line endings and Bash red herrings

It's just taken a colleague and I a number of hours — on release day, naturally — to track down a fault with a shell script, because Bash was unclear in its error reporting.

Can't Add A "Picture Location" For Desktop Wallpapers in Windows 7?

If, like me, you have disabled Windows 7's "Libraries" feature, and later found that you are unable to add "Picture Locations" for your desktop wallpaper, you don't have to workaround it by manually copying your desired wallpaper into a default folder.

What To Do When Your VB.NET Project Icon "Sticks"

So you have your Visual Basic 2008 Express project. When you created it, you assigned some placeholder icon to serve as the project's icon. The icon shows up alongside the compiled executable in Windows Explorer, and everything's fine. Or is it?

The Dynamic Allocation Of Sandcastles

Today I came across this excellent analogy by a gentleman named "DavidWolfire" describing the initialisation, use and discarding of dynamically-allocated memory in C-like languages.

Unsticking a Bristan Matrix Mixer Tap

The tap in my bathroom sink had been getting rather "sticky" of late. I don't mean sticky to the touch on the exterior, but as a mixer tap its vertical movements were no longer smooth and thus controlling water flow had become difficult. This condition had been deteriorating over the last year or so, and I decided that now would be a great time to do something about it.

My Funny Valentine

The world fell; the ash fell faster. As thick as the leaves on which it was supposed to be landing, except those had gone. Creating a pleasant sludge to trudge through, neatly balancing out the destruction that had fell almost as completely.

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