If you are a developer with any real-world experience to speak of, you have undoubtedly come across the following situation: you made a change which was not meant to be committed, (for instance, some debug statement or some mock-up of functionality meant to be filled-in later,) and then you forgot about it and went ahead and committed all of your code. This mishap can be a cause of severe frustration for your fellow co-workers, and the source for memorable "WTF moments" for the QA department.

Solon's original phrase was "Gerasko D' Aei Polla Didaskomenos", but here in Greece we use the shorter form, "Gerasko Aei Didaskomenos". I grow older forever learning new things.

It is never too late to learn something new. For example, just a few months ago I learned of the existence of the "??" operator in C#, after several years of using the language. Of course I had come across that operator in the reference, but it had not occurred to me how useful it would be in real-life scenarios. Then, one day I chanced upon someone else's code making use of it. There was a big 'aha!'.

So, for some time now, whenever I try to 'batch build' from within Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, I get the following error:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets(2868,9): error MSB3021: Unable to copy file "x\Intermediate\y.dll" to "x\y.dll". Could not find file 'x\Intermediate\y.dll'.

Indeed, there is no file 'x\Intermediate\y.dll'. But when I switch configurations and try to build the regular (non-batch) way, it builds fine.

Amused, and since I can live without the batch-build functionality, I have just let it be all this time, writing it off as one more of those weird wonders of Microsoft.

Java 7 introduced the AutoCloseable interface, which is roughly equivalent to the IDisposable interface of C#, to be used in synergy with the new try-with-resources statement, which is equivalent to the using-disposable construct of C#.

In the movie "Sunshine" by Danny Boyle (IMDB) there is a scene which is impossible to comprehend unless you have some knowledge of physics. The protagonist Robert Capa (Cillian Murphy) finds himself trapped in an airlock from which he must escape at any cost. The airlock contains a space suit, and has one outer hatch towards space, and one inner hatch towards the interior of the spaceship, which is locked.

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Yesterday I did maintenance on my web site and I re-organized lots of things. I also decided to post a recent picture of me, which happens to be pretty good; I know I still owe it to everyone to post pictures from past vacations, and from my recent wedding, but that will take some time to put together, while this picture can be posted now, so, here you go.