Monday, May 5, 2003

TiVo 0, Nature 1 A few weeks ago, a thunder storm rolled thru SF. At one point, a HUGE friggin thunder clap scared the daylights outta me, and when I ran to Jackson's room, I found him standing straight up in his crib with a slightly worried look on his face. I swore that thunder clap was right over our house! The storm subsided, but then I discovered that our phone lines were knocked out, and then our DSL never came back online. A week later, a Covad tech came out and determined that the DSL modem had been zapped. Then I realized that, if the storm zapped the DSL modem, it probably also zapped the modem in our TiVo, too! Sure enough, the TiVo hadn't been able to complete a call since the morning before the storm. The Covad guy didn't indicate that there had been widespread problems, so now I'm convinced that thunder clap was right over our house. For a few days after that, I actually thought about simply upgrading to the Series 2 and getting the Home Network option (hmm, delicious). Time was running out, too, because a TiVo only stores about two weeks worth of program data. After that, it would have turned into a funky VCR. But, we got a lifetime subscription on the first box, and I couldn't justify upwards of $700 for a new setup. Luckily, I found weakness.com, which offers a replacement modem for $99. Apparently, lots of people have had their TiVo modems zapped by electrical storms, and I bet weakness is doing just fine :-). Anyway, to wrap this story up, the replacement modem showed up today. The serial connection on the back side of the TiVo box is a *stereo* jack, and TiVo included a special Stereo-to-9-pin serial cable with the original box. Luckily I keep such random things and found it in my "well organized" cable stash. Now, the replacement modem is working like a charm, and we should have our beloved TiVo back any minute now! 9:54:55 PM

Cringley: Refactoring is bad? In Robert Cringley's second of two columns on open source, he makes this statement: "Cleaning up code" is a terrible thing. Redesigning WORKING code into different WORKING code (also known as refactoring) is terrible. The reason is that once you touch WORKING code, it becomes NON-WORKING code, and the changes you make (once you get it working again) will never be known. It is basically a programmer’s ego trip and nothing else. Cleaning up code, which generally does not occur in nature, is a prime example of amateur Open Source software. I don't understand what he means here. I'm trying not to take this out of context, but I think he is really saying that refactoring is bad, and that programmers should get the design right the first time or else... Unfortunately, that just doesn't happen. Refactoring is a good thing. We don't build programs like we build houses, where the design is completed long before the construction. Programming is an iterative process, where there are small rapid iterations during development, and larger iterations between releases. I bet he gets lots of responses like mine. 10:13:05 AM