Aggregator

The clue the fans think they spotted was in a photo from a recent post where the reality TV siren was wishing her rock star husband Travis Barker a happy 50th birthday.

One of the things that makes legacy code legacy is that code, over time, rots. Some of that rot comes from the gradual accumulation of fixes, hacks, and kruft. But much of the rot also comes from the tooling going unsupported or entirely out of support.

For example, many years ago, I worked in a Visual Basic 6 shop. The VB6 IDE went out of support in April, 2008, but we continued to use it well into the next decade. This made it challenging to support the existing software, as the IDE frequently broke in response to OS updates. Even when we started running it inside of a VM running an antique version of Windows 2000, we kept running into endless issues getting projects to compile and build.

A fun side effect of that: the VB6 runtime remains supported. So you can run VB6 software on modern Windows. You just can't modify that software.

Greta has inherited an even more antique tech stack. She writes, "I often wonder if I'm the last person on Earth encumbered with this particular stack." She adds, "The IDE is long-deprecated from a vendor that no longer exists- since 2002." Given the project started in the mid 2010s, it may have been a bad choice to use that tech-stack.

It's not as bad as it sounds- while the technology and tooling is crumbling ruins, the team culture is healthy and the C-suite has given Greta wide leeway to solve problems. But that doesn't mean that the tooling isn't a cause of anguish, and even worse than the tooling- the code itself.

"Some things," Greta writes, "are 'typical bad'" and some things "are 'delightfully unique' bad."

For example, the IDE has a concept of "designer" files, for the UI, and "code behind" files, for the logic powering the UI. The IDE frequently corrupts its own internal state, and loses the ability to properly update the designer files. When this happens, if you attempt to open, save, or close a designer file, the IDE pops up a modal dialog box complaining about the corruption, with a "Yes" and "No" option. If you click "No", the modal box goes away- and then reappears because you're seeing this message because you're on a broken designer file. If you click "Yes", the IDE "helpfully" deletes pretty much everything in your designer file.

Nothing about the error message indicates that this might happen.

The language used is a dialect of C++. I say "dialect" because the vendor-supplied compiler implements some cursed feature set between C++98 and C++11 standards, but doesn't fully conform to either. It's only capable of outputting 32-bit x86 code up to a Pentium Pro. Using certain C++ classes, like std::fstream, causes the resulting executable to throw a memory protection fault on exit.

Worse, the vendor supplied class library is C++ wrappers on top of an even more antique Pascal library. The "class" library is less an object-oriented wrapper and more a collection of macros and weird syntax hacks. No source for the Pascal library exists, so forget about ever updating that.

Because the last release of the IDE was circa 2002, running it on any vaguely modern environment is prone to failures, but it also doesn't play nicely inside of a VM. At this point, the IDE works for one session. If you exit it, reboot your computer, or try to close and re-open the project, it breaks. The only fix is to reinstall it. But the reinstall requires you to know which set of magic options actually lets the install proceed. If you make a mistake and accidentally install, say, CORBA support, attempting to open the project in the IDE leads to a cascade of modal error boxes, including one that simply says, "ABSTRACT ERROR" ("My favourite", writes Greta). And these errors don't limit themselves to the IDE; attempting to run the compiler directly also fails.

But, if anything, it's the code that makes the whole thing really challenging to work with. While the UI is made up of many forms, the "main" form is 18,000 lines of code, with absolutely no separation of concerns. Actually, the individual forms don't have a lot of separation of concerns; data is shared between forms via global variables declared in one master file, and then externed into other places. Even better, the various sub-forms are never destroyed, just hidden and shown, which means they remember their state whether you want that or not. And since much of the state is global, you have to be cautious about which parts of the state you reset.

Greta adds:

There are two files called main.cpp, a Station.cpp, and a Station1.cpp. If you were to guess which one owns the software's entry point, you would probably be wrong.

But, as stated, it's not all as bad as it sounds. Greta writes: "I'm genuinely happy to be here, which is perhaps odd given how terrible the software is." It's honestly not that odd; a good culture can go a long way to making wrangling a difficult tech stack happy work.

Finally, Greta has this to say:

We are actively working on a .NET replacement. A nostalgic, perhaps masochistic part of me will miss the old stack and its daily delights.

[Advertisement] Picking up NuGet is easy. Getting good at it takes time. Download our guide to learn the best practice of NuGet for the Enterprise.

One part of the line will be closed for a full day this weekend

Researchers think SpaceX needs to revisit its resilience regime

Researchers have found Starlink’s efforts to mitigate the effects of solar storms can create degraded performance that persists for a day or more after geomagnetic conditions ease.…

One of the cases involves the discovery of a woman's bones on an Essex island

National Grid previously announced plans for a 180kilometre electricity transmission connection between Norwich and Tilbury in 2022.

A local government service responsible for parking enforcement in public areas has drawn a positive balance as new spending figures have been published.

This summer, a study suggested Vitamin D could slow the ageing of cells, while another study found that supplements may reduce hair loss.

Yet Chinese giant wants users to ‘ask any question, big or small, anytime, anywhere!’

Chinese tech giant Alibaba yesterday launched a new chatbot that reported errors soon after launch and is very touchy about some subjects Beijing doesn’t like to discuss.…

At the White House on Monday, Trump and FIFA president Gianni Infantino announced major news for ticket holders attending matches at next year's tournament.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline. The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies. Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice. Researchers are tracking more than 400 tagged monarch butterflies as they fly toward winter colonies in central Mexico. The maps [in the article] follow six butterflies. [...] Tracking the world's most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways. "There's nothing that's not amazing about this," said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. "Now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nigel Farage branded the broadcaster 'rotten to the core', claiming it has become a 'byword for sleaze, hypocrisy, arrogance, anti-Semitism and worse' as it fights for its future.

A YouGov survey of 2,100 people found 23 per cent think the party leader should quit now and elect someone else.

Cybersecurity experts are urging everyone to change their passwords after finding massive collection of 1.3 billion passwords alongside nearly two billion email addresses exposed online.

Nigel Farage will demand that Rachel Reeves avoid increasing taxes at the Budget by imposing major spending cuts to prioritise British citizens instead.

Jeremy Rainbird's whirlwind romance with actress Sharon Horgan inspired her hit Channel 4 comedy Catastrophe. Today, the businessman is reeling from tragedy.

The woman had gone to Said Business School dean Professor Soumitra Dutta, 62, to ask for help after she had accused another male colleague of raping her.

Brittany Miller seemed to have it all - a successful TikTok platform, two beautiful children and a doting partner. Little did her followers know there was a skeleton in the closet.

The Queens Own Highlanders Regimental Association, based at Cameron Barracks in Inverness, will be moved from the site as part of the Home Office's proposal.

The Home Secretary told MPs that radical reforms were needed to restore public confidence in Britain's 'broken' asylum system, saying it 'feels out of control and unfair'.