User friendly and deletes your data

Apparently there are circumstances where Apple's Time Machine backup product will delete all of your old backups to make room for some new data, like after an upgrade or when attaching a new drive to the system.

This is exactly why I use tapes. See the following dialog:

OS X - "Please insert week 3 user data backup tape, I need to wipe it so that I can replace your backups with copies of OS X binaries though you already have those on DVD"

Me - "No"

Password PSA

Just a reminder (I am guilty of this as well) that it's a bad bad idea to use the same password on multiple sites, as many sites do scary things like store passwords as plaintext. Yikes!!!

Link is to a discussion of the issues and some software which might be able to help you out with password generation/management.

Decimal formatting in .Net

One day I was having problems with decimal numbers showing up as strings with lots of zeros after the decimal point. Since they were whole numbers, I had naively expected that they would always be displayed without any zeros, at least with the format string I was using.

Alas, the documentation disagreed with me.

Apparently the precision of the decimal will show up when calling ToString in the manner in which I was calling it. So my unit tests all passed because I was constructing a decimal 42, rather than a decimal 42.00000.

Microsoft 1, me 0.

Best programming joke ever

Recursion is a whole topic in its own right and the source of the only good computer science joke I know – dictionary definition of recursion “Recursion – see recursion”.

Hercules goes commercial