Friday, November 16, 2007

If only the truth was a base class...

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine and, as fate would have it, we managed a brief stint over the theory of truth and lies...
"Lie" is such a strong word - to alleviate this burden some think it's better phrased as "extending the truth". Now if only there was some technical implementation of this.... hmmmm....

Fear not! I have done it. Here it is in all its glory...

The truth as a base class.

(in C#)

   1: public class ExtenedTruth : Truth
   2: {      
   3:     public override string TellTheTruth()      
   4:     {          
   5:         StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(base.TellTheTruth());          
   6:         sb.AppendLine(" and we extend over here... ");           
   7:         return sb.ToString();      
   8:     }
   9: }


Done! All this without any lies involved. What a pleasure... :D


P.S. please notice the use of the StringBuilder so that we can append loads onto the "truth" with as little of a performance hit as possible.
P.P.S. I am pretty sure this would compile on the Mono framework.
P.P.P.S I think I need to patent this.


Monday, November 5, 2007

I hate those Permanent Temporary Failures...

This is one of those things that make you laugh on your Monday morning...

Let me set the scene for you. A few days back, I was attempting to send a file via email (gmail) to various recipients. It would send, but never reach its destination. Frustrating to say the least, especially when you take into account that 12 previous attempts had already been made.

Now the more technically savvy among you may say: "Why not just use FTP? Email is notoriously bad for reliably sending files, especially when its important..."

Bottom line - I couldn't. Lets just leave it at that and be done with it. Below is a snippet of the delivery failure I got from Google (obviously I changed the email address and bolded the important parts...).

*snip*
...
subject:
Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
names.changed.to@protect.the.guilty
Technical details of permanent failure:
TEMP_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 16): 451 qq temporary problem (#4.3.0)
  ----- Original message -----
Received: by
10.100.212.14 with SMTP id k14mr997577ang.1193785829292;
...
*snip*

Well, I thought it was funny... a permanent failure with a temporary problem. Sweet.

P.S. what is also quite interesting that Google marks those failure notifications, from itself, as SPAM. I'm not complaining, just an interesting side note.