You could use that to create a PostScript program that prints out the stages in a quicksort. Then you could create an animation from the output. That’s nearly useful.
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I did my calculus homework in postscript a couple times. The most powerful processor I had access to was in the printer.
I do not miss those days.
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I thought it was useful, but then I remembered that I have a bubble jet printer.
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I have this database project I’m working on, where I (or my colleague Larry) transcribes Admiralty documents from the 17th Century into a database, and then researchers are able to use something built onto the side of a wordpress site to view the documents, or look up all references to a single ship, officer, or location (at least, where they are mentioned in the documents that have been transcribed).
At the moment, I’m putting the finishing touches on the newest version of the transcription interface- I’m having one… really annoying issue and I’ve spent several days trying to sort it out. The problem is a sort and it’s very annoying and I’m trying to sort it out and anyways bashing my head against PHP is … frustrating sometimes.
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The “run it on the GPU” of its day. 
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Unit tests. I’ve been writing so many unit tests.
We have a big change in one of the main classes of our underlying model and we need to make sure it all behaves and as such unit tests just help to act as a specification to program against.
I really like a feature of testng (java lib) that I only encountered for the first time in this project. The “dataprovider” annotation allows me to hand an iterator to a unit test method and it uses those to parametrize and execute each test case as an actual unit even if it is just one method being filled with different datapoints. I love that. So my test cases become more or less a table of value combinations. This helps me define enough of them easily and not overlook certain combinations of possible inputs and we found our first bug within the first 16 test cases.
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Same. We’re trying to improve our code coverage across the board at the start of the year so I’m trying to fill in some gaps. It’s been OK, though the workflow for getting the figures is awful so I’ve got someone looking at moving us to GTest in the meantime.
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Yay for comprehensive test coverage! One of our software teams is doing an “upgrade” (read: nuke it from orbit) of an old, clunky piece of software which currently has… Almost no tests. Strangely enough people keep finding bugs!
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Anyone who wants to add more tests to the forum dice roller, feel free! (It had none when I forked it.)
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I hate working with timeseries…
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Reminds me of when I installed Linux on a bunch of old iMacs (the original PPC ones that were funky colours) for a uni project and discovered that if you didn’t immediately set the time on first boot, any subsequent boot would fail because they thought it was 01/01/1900.
I’m also a big fan of the different epoch dates various systems use. Particularly where Lotus fucked it up and then Excel kept the fuck-up.
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That Lotus/Excel oddity caused me no small amount of headaches during my PhD…
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Dates and times are a nightmare, yes!
That one is a relatively reasonable error.
I protest their definition of “programmer” at this point. After all, I can throw some paint at a canvas, but that doesn’t make me a painter.
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I was expecting, after “a leap year happens every four years”, to see “except for years ending with 00”. (Yes, I did Y2K work.)
Every now and then I hear someone suggesting that, because nothing terrible happened, Y2K was just a lot of fuss over nothing. As if people hadn’t spent considerable effort to achieve that outcome.
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Today I learned that some climate models assume that every month has 30 days (no I don’t know why). This is upsetting our Devs and amusing me enormously.
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Perhaps. But I do remember my friend in college freaking out about Y2K just before New Year’s, thinking everything was going to come crashing down, seeming to completely ignore the fact that companies had been working to prevent anything bad from happening for quite some time. My friend, who was going through the IT program with me.
I’ll give you two guesses as to who was right about the issue. 
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There were a bunch of real failures a few years (okay, often 20) later, when the people who decieded that a window was the right thing ran out of window.