Robots slacking off

Dear readers,
this is very likely my last cartoon for 2019 and I am already looking forward to drawing and publishing the next ones in 2020.
14 cartoons in a year is not bad, considering the fact, I have hardly any time to settle back after work and after having helped kids for school.

For those who want to know, I have a quite consistent hit-count on my blog (1600 pageviews p. month). In my world this is a lot. Well, not enough to become famous but still a lot of reasons to continue drawing in 2020.  I wish you very XMAS (even though I am kind of late) and a happy New Year 2020.
Torsten J. Zelger

False Positives

When developers want to quickly demonstrate that in principle it works, they tend to hard-code things with the intention to replace that piece of code later. But, once it works, the focus is shifted to other tasks. It is likely that one forgets about these rotten code pieces.

 When Switzerland changed their tax rate from 7.6 per cent to 8 per cent, we were quite surprised that 7.6 was hard coded rather than read from a configuration file. As a result, we had to redeploy a new fix. In another example we found a code statement that made the program wait for 200 seconds. No wonder the application was slow. The developer had a good explanation why he added a wait-statement, but he mixed seconds with milliseconds.

 The term "false positives" has its roots in medical testing. A false positive is an error in which a test result improperly indicates the presence of a disease (the result is positive), when - in reality - it is not present, while a false negative is an error in which a test result improperly indicates no presence of the disease when in reality it is present.

Simply said, never trust any success messages. If the program claims it worked, the program may be wrong. Vice versa is also true. When the system throws an exception, the operation may still have worked correctly, regardless of the error.