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Quick-fixing legacy code

August 16, 2007 | In Development | No Comments

Today I had to make some changes to a piece of legacy code that I did not develop, written in .NET 1 C#. It made me think about where to draw the line between quick-fix-get-it-working and implementing a proper fix in someone else’s code.

This doesn’t really make much sense, so let me explain. The code is not particularly well written, it uses many hard-coded values and makes thinks more complicated than they need to be. The fix required me to edit a couple of functions to enable some front end changes. Now I know the code is badly written, so I instantly start to think about how I ought to rewrite it.

However, the problems that arise from this are:

I don’t actually have the time to make these changes, never mind get involved in anything else.
Where do you stop? This function, class, module…….
Is it cost effective and efficient.

This last point, I suppose, is really the clincher here. Ultimately, no it is not cost effective or efficient to start refactoring someone else’s code where that is not the brief. The code functions on a live website, so there is always that danger of causing something else to stop working, particular as this code (as mentioned) is not great.

So I implemented the quick-fix-get-it-working solution. Which I think was totally appropriate here.

Norton Internet - Why so slow?

August 8, 2007 | In My Life | No Comments

Like the cobbler whose children never have shoes, I’ve taken around 6 months to fix my laptop. It has been running so slowly on boot, or when waking from hibernation, that it becomes unusable for a good 5 minutes.

My suspicions finally came to rest on Norton Internet Security. I’ve been using it for years now as both firewall and anti-virus, and have never had any issues with it. Except for now.

I’ve uninstalled it completely and replaced it with freeware version of AVG Anti-Virus and PC Tools Firewall Plus. It now boots and awakens in seconds.

What more can I say.