Packetfury.net

Client satisfaction has always been a high priority for me. Every program, every embedded system, and every line of code has always been a nightmare for me, for a very simple reason. I'm the creator, and if I don't like it, how can I ever expect anyone else to like it? If it bugs for me, I sigh and go and insult myself, but if a client as an application that crashes, that is the worst thing possible. I spent way too much time once for that precise reason; the order was to create an embedded machine that couldn't put itself into a situation where it could crash, and die. Skip the old-time IDE drives with spinning platters that are just begging to die. A teacher at the army once said that there are only 2 types of drives; drives that are dead, and drives that aren't yet dead. So I skipped the mechanical drive and went for a solid-state drive. Read-only, naturally. Just in case. And a boot sector that could overwrite the work partition. Just in case. And an embedded catch that could predict a fault and overwrite the data partition. Just in case. After about 2 weeks spend on the project, my boss came in and told me that I wouldn't be able to create a machine that withstands a nuclear attack, so just make a machine that can survive an office. I learnt.

Even so, what I have done today is, well... A maybe-future-employer sent me something to do - create an application that can add files to a ZIP file. Any choice of language, any choice of toolkit, any philosophy. I did. I chose C, GTK and my usual embedded philosophy. It is a simple frontend that can, literally, add files to a zip. Open your zip or create a new one, add files, close the zip and quit, but that's it. No fancy bells, no whistles, and especially, NO error checking. I am ashamed of this application, as I wouldn't actually use it myself in a production environment, how could I ever expect someone to appreciate my code? Well, he wanted to see what I could to, so I sent an honest email back, telling him how I did it, the philosophy I chose, and especially, all the black marks in the program. I'm too honest for my own good, I think. I also sent some code I did for Odixion, so he might be able to see what I can do.