Simnel cake

One Easter treat I love is Simnel cake: a kind of marzipan-topped fruit cake with plenty of citrus. It amuses me that it effectively comes predivided into slices via, How many apostles would you like tonight?, the apostles being a circle of marzipan balls around the top of the cake.

Tricky code and concentration

( at work I write code that operates on graphs of model objects )

( I found a bug in my subgraph duplication code )

Unfortunately, the change that I think might fix the problem involves refactoring the trickiest part of my duplication code to complicate it further. This morning I'd cleared the decks sufficiently to dare to face it. I had valid reason to attend an interesting digital pathology seminar at noon but I nobly skipped that as too good an excuse to avoid what actually needing doing.

This brings me to the actual point of this entry. I was quite conscious of that, to understand my code well enough to see how to refactor it, I would more or less have to fill my head with it. It hurts and takes a while and, knowing this in advance, I was reluctant. A trick with which I get myself started is to make code changes that I am confident are close to what I will need even if I am not yet sure what will work for other parts. Once I again understood my duplication code well enough I was thankful that I had bothered to comment it well the first time around. Then, I had a good afternoon refactoring, in which I lost track of time and turned enough of the hard thinking into new code that tomorrow morning I can continue to work on without understanding as much, as clearly, all at once.

It is interesting how that happens. It's far easier when I am working from home (or in a private office) on the kind of project for which people can just have me surface a fortnight later with a new chunk largely done. Then, it can all more or less stay in my mind and I can live and breathe it. Whereas, in an open-plan workspace with myriad distractions, including today a brief meeting after lunch, a question from someone using my code where it turned out their code was buggy, a question about use of our command-line interface, and another question about test data, it's a rare treat to really be able to concentrate on anything for a few hours.

In the end, in view of the further complexity I added, I broke out the code into more methods and another helper object. Tomorrow I'll tidy, document and test it, and see if my blood and sweat sufficed to placate the Hibernate gods.

OpenBSD and security

The OpenBSD security page tells us that,

OpenBSD believes in strong security. Our aspiration is to be NUMBER ONE in the industry for security (if we are not already there).

The OpenBSD FAQ warns us that,

The ports tree is meant for advanced users. Everyone is encouraged to use the pre-compiled binary packages.

It also warns that,

When serious bugs or security flaws are discovered in third party software, they are fixed in the -stable branch of the ports tree. Note that binary packages for -release and -stable are not updated.

Am I somehow missing the obvious?

Update: M:Tier's offering looks relevant.