REM State

… I really don’t count this blog. ;)
My article on using source control systems is available over at linux.com. And for the curious/speculative, yes — this is my late Sunday post. :)

A customer calls up having a horrible problem with your software in a live environment. They aren’t privy to the internals of your application, and don’t really want to be — they just want the problem fixed. You can’t send over a dev with a debugger, or have them try several different versions to see […]

You have a consistent repro, and a general idea of where in your software system the bug might be. However, you don’t know why on earth the repro steps cause the software to break the way it does. You’ve never seen the code before, and don’t have a ton of time to troubleshoot — you […]

You just synced your source tree with the repository — and lo and behold, the application fails to start once the build is complete. Naturally, your first response is to do a complete, fresh checkout in a new directory to verify that it is something in the repository that is broken, as opposed to some […]

Introduction
So, you have encountered erroneous behavior in some system — but you just can’t seem to fix it. You have stared at your code until your eyes are dry and itchy, and just cannot see what could possibly be going wrong in that algorithm. Or maybe a configuration file clearly indicates that things should be […]