Another entry made Olympus Bioscapes 2014

Olympus Bioscapes 2014

Accidental or Ignorance?

Modern IDEs help developers write code much quicker than ever before, autocompleting and auto-sensing a lot of what we want to do. Sometimes it generates code that needs to be changed due to the intent of the programmer that differs from the assumptions made by the IDE.

That said, when I see code like this I cannot help but ponder for a brief moment whether the developer just forgot to clean up the code generated by the IDE, or whether the developer intentionally placed the cookies on the table - ummm - I meant the break after the return:

switch (someType)
{
  case A:
  case B:
  case C:
  case D:
     return false;
     break; // <- WTF?
}

Why why repeat repeat yourself yourself??

It is retarded. Why do people insist on writing:

boolean overwrite = check();
if (overwrite == true) {
  doSomething();
}

when this does the same, requires less typing and is more natural to read:

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Musing #1: But Charles, WHY?

When Charles Darwin came up with his incredible theory of evolution, he managed to explain a lot about where we came from and how we became the species we are now. So he answered the WHERE and HOW pretty darn well.

However there is one thing that he did not answer, and to the best of my knowledge has never been answered before. That is the WHY. In specific:

Why do cells want to survive and reproduce? What drives this need?

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How to Restore System Image under Windows 8.1

I have just spend the better part of a day trying to do something seemingly very simple - to restore a System Image I made of my Windows 8.1 system. In the end I finally managed to get the system restored, but it was not without more pain than I can bare at this advanced stage of my life.

A couple of things complicate the restore, so let me give a brief history of what led up to this.

  1. I built a system based on a modern Asus Z97M-Plus motherboard (UEFI), with an Adaptec RAID 6405 card with two 1TB WD Caviar Black SATA drives in RAID1.
  2. Windows 8.1 Pro was installed and configured (this was installed under UEFI mode).
  3. The RAID card behaved badly, so I had to remove it, and try a single 1TB drive connected to the motherboard's SATA port. It is from this configuration that I made a System Image. Take note that I did not reinstall the OS - the disk worked as is.
  4. I then played with onboard RAID and reinstalled the OS.
  5. At this point I wanted to restore the backup I made to a single 1TB disk connected to the motherboard's SATA port.
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