OMG WTF II

Someone, called Sven for convenience, was driving home from a party, very drunk.

A police patrol passed him its way on some assignment or other, but seeing the way he was driving across two lanes, the police decided to take him off the road and u-turned.

Sven, noticing this, promptly turned into a half-full parking lot and shut off his engine and lights.

The cops would not have found him had he not made a fatal mistake. He kept his foot on the brake, and they found his car by the lit brake lights.

Death

Everyone is talking about death those past few weeks, it seems.

The last encounter I had with the topic was inspired by the murder of Rudolph Mooshammer, who was a member of the Munich "Schickeria", the rich and famous. A friend of mine speculated that he might not have left a last will, since that would have been "the first step towards the grave".

This is slowly but surely getting to me. In the media as well. I recall an interview where the interviewee (I have no recollection who) talked at length about the way he wanted to die.

Is it just me, or is the topic of death getting more and more ... (dare I say it) popular?

While we're on the topic of death, I have one piece of advice for anyone willing to pass moral judgement on the Iraq war. Take a look at Crisis Pictures, aka "Fallujah in Pictures" and "Iraq in Pictures". Be advised that the pictures are not for the faint of heart. They include very graphic content, although they seem to have mellowed recently.

This is not a political statement. Neither is it a moral one. Except that, if you are willing to pass judgement, either for or against the Iraq war, you should really take a good hard look at the ugly reality thousand of miles from your home.

Gaze upon the face of war.

While we're on the topic of death, Gangs of New York is great movie about death, and how the value of life was totally different in the time it is set in.

Collective Code Ownership - There's No Such Thing

Certain software development methods, like XP, advocate collective code ownership.

In my opinion, the idea is nice in theory, but unrealistic in practice. You always take a certain pride in what you create, especially in cases where the work was difficult, tricky, or just something you tried for the first time.

Yesterday, I talked to a colleague, who took over my subsystem recently, and he told me "Yeah, your drag and drop code worked, after we fixed the [other part of system]". This was something I'd tried for the firts time, so I was very pleased.

Yes, code ownership can be a problem, like the XP people say. Bottlenecks and all that. But I think the problem simply comes down to courtesy, when you think about it. When code you wrote gets changed, you want to know about it. In a lot of cases, it's clear from the context who does what on what code, like in my example. But when it's unclear, it doesn't hurt anyone to give a short notice to the guy who wrote the code in the first place.

Code ownership is not the problem, deficient communication is.