So, I just bought a new phone, a Samsung Note 4, (Android,) and boy, was it a lousy experience!

Too complicated bundling options

To start off, the experience was becoming a bit lousy even before the purchase, with all the incredibly complicated options on offer, which make selecting a plan quite an ordeal. Frankly, I think bundling services (mobile connectivity) with products (the phone) should be prohibited.

Unwanted applications

Anyhow, so I bought the phone. Upon booting, it went through a lengthy process of installing applications I never asked for.. Finally, I arrived at the first interactive screen, which promptly went blank.

So, I bought a brand new Samsung Android phone, and it was a huge disappointment due to all the distracting, annoying, and completely useless crapware from Google, Samsung, Vodafone, and even Yahoo, which came pre-loaded with the phone and which I am not allowed to uninstall. I mean, never mind that a certain application is useless; suppose it is in fact very useful; and yet, suppose that despite it being so awesomely useful, I for some reason still want to uninstall it. It is my phone, I should be able to do it, right? But no, the powers that be have decided that I am not allowed to uninstall apps from my own phone. Even when they are not only useless, but actually harmful, since some of them are always running, thus consuming memory, CPU cycles, battery, and communications bandwidth. Some apps can be uninstalled, but many others cannot be uninstalled. They have to stay on the phone. Whether I like them or not.

After this horrible experience I am very seriously considering the possibility that next time I buy a phone it will be an iPhone. But for now, I am stuck with Android, so I am now learning how to root my phone so that I can be somewhat in control of the situation. I am experimenting with my old phone first, a Samsung Galaxy S2. Here are my notes.

Summary

This is a story about the most elusive and sinister software bug I ever came across in my decades-long career as a programmer.

The setting

At some point early in my career I was working for a company that was developing a hand-held computer for the area of Home Health Care. It was called InfoTouch™. The job involved daily interaction with the guys in the hardware department, which was actually quite a joy, despite the incessant "It's a software problem!" -- "No, it's a hardware problem!" arguments, because these arguments were being made by well-meant engineers from both camps, who were all in search of the truth, without egoisms, vested interests, or illusions of infallibility. That is, in true engineering tradition.

The manifestations

Back in 1999-2000 the state of the art in computer telephony was called Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Nowadays when we speak of "voice" we usually mean voice recognition, but back then all that those early telephony systems could do was to playback recorded messages and wait for the caller to press digits on their phone.

The hardware had special filters to recognize the DTMF digits, probably because the CPU was thought of as too wimpy to do it by itself. I experimented writing WAV-file processing filters on my own, and discovered that it took less than 10% of CPU time per phone line to run such filters in software, so it could certainly be done, but then again there existed systems out there in configurations of 30 or even 100 lines per computer, and of course the CPU was not enough for those. So, I used the filters that were built-in to the hardware for the work project, and I only experimented with the software filters at home, for fun.

My employer at that time managed to secure a number of computer telephony contracts for a couple of big clients; he gave me a rough description of what the projects were supposed to do, and he had my coworkers slide pizza under my office door for as long as it took me to complete them. He probably charged his clients the equivalent of a dozen programmers for this, and it was all done by me. The only external help that went into these projects was messages recorded by a professional at a recording studio.

What follows is some screenshots of the telephony application that I created to run these projects, in Microsoft Visual C++ using MFC and the Dialogic Telephony API.

![[media/crossword-compiler-screenshot.png]]

This is old-style artificial intelligence in action, solving within seconds a problem that would normally take eons to complete.

You give it a crossword grid, and a long list of words, and it finds ways to mesh words into the grid so as to form a complete crossword puzzle. The final working version was done in 2003 using C# version 1.2 with a minimalistic UI in WinForms.

The following 30-second video shows the crossword compiler in action, filling multiple successive crosswords using a word list taken from actual crosswords that have been published on the interwebz by various sources through the years. The video is in real time, showing that the crossword compiler is, in most cases, extremely fast.

This question was asked on Programmers SE on Jun 12, 2015. I answered it, but after a few days the question was closed as primarily opinion-based and then deleted, along with all answers. Since I now have sufficient reputation to view deleted questions, I was able to find it, so I am posting the question and my answer here for posterity.

The Question

Original link: https://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/286508/is-my-mentors-concern-for-code-quality-excessive

Is my mentor's concern for code quality excessive? \[closed\]

Score: 75 (79 upvotes, 4 downvotes) Favorites: 28

To tell you a little about myself: I'm a newbie programmer working internships and learning a lot from experienced programmers. I can't believe I used to think I was good in college.

The one I'm doing right now is pretty great due to the amount of time and resources that the company is putting into helping and mentoring me and another intern. I'm learning a whole lot and for the first time, I feel like I get close to being competent.

The only "problem" are the massive code quality concerns of one of my mentors. It's to the point that anything takes a whole lot of time because I have to find the best way to do it or else it's a waste of time. It also feels like my creativity doesn't matter because there is only one right way to do everything. I don't mind any of this at all but I wonder, and this is mainly what I'm asking, if it's normal in the industry.

Also, when I get assigned a little feature and this guy reviews my code, he actually reviews the whole codebase I'm working on, pointing out loads of mistakes, most of them from before I was even hired. I have spent this whole week fixing code (that worked) written by their full-time programmers, even some things that are best practice according to other mentors.

Tags: [javascript] [web-development] [programming-practices] [object-oriented-design]

asked Jun 11 2015 at 18:51 by CyborgFish

My Answer: